|
I very much want to come up with a coherent and inspirational repudiation of the OPs thesis. This is the second essay I've seen recently that seems to completely miss the magic of our trade, and I feel like we need some strong cheerleaders to counter this stuff. How does a programmer NOT wake up every morning with a head full of inspired, flaming joy at the thought of what we do for a living? I've been at this for 5 years now (putting me in the same generation as OP, and the other blogger I came across) and I'm still ragingly in love with this craft. And I (_just_, you might say) write web apps. Yes, there are tedious days (we are, as many have stated WORKING, after all). And yes, sometimes the nature of constantly shifting specs leads us into some ugly code - but that's the nature of writing and designing to meet the needs of customers; sometimes customers really just NEED something that isn't very pretty. But the root of what we do is this: we conjure ideas from memory and imagination, commit them into words and incantations in the terminal, and send out our instructions to be carried out by the machine. Making our will manifest through a medium that is almost completely malleable to our intentions. If there's another trade out there that's more nakedly similar to "wizard" I'd love to hear about it. What we do is barely-adulterated magic. And there is so much room for improvisation, art, and beauty in the crafting of our instructions, that even a simple CRUD interface can become a work of glory. I freely admit that, in my enthusiasm, I'm sounding a bit deranged. And I'm painting this in a bit more glowing light than most day-to-day coding deserves. But it pains me to see a programmer with such a negative outlook on programming. And when that view gets touted as a warning against being a coder, I feel those of us who really and truly enjoy our trade need to be standing up and making the counter-argument - with all the ardor and enthusiasm it deserves. Addendum: and OK, so the OP may not be making the claim that "programming" itself isn't what's bad, it's the JOB that's bad. It's writing the code that our clients need, day-in, day-out, that's bad. My counter-claim to that: writing bad code is a choice. You can look at every problem that comes to you as "just more toilet cleaning", or you can look for the aspects of the problem that separate it from all the code you've written before, and start writing the correct, clean, elegant response to it. And if you're solving the same problem a second time, well it ought to be that much easier than before, right? If you solved the problem PROPERLY the first time, there should be very little work in solving it a SECOND time. So now you find yourself getting paid to do less work, while - hopefully - leaving yourself room to more fully commoditize whatever process you've found yourself on, making it easier to KEEP getting paid while doing less and less work each time. With your remaining time, you solve OTHER problems, and continue filling the pipeline with magic and money. Seeing the job as tedious and boring starts as a choice you make yourself. Getting back the magic you felt in your youth is just a matter of remembering it; and choosing to see it in the next project that hits your inbox. |
I'm much newer to this (one year and still studying) but I really hope I can feel this way for the rest of my life.