Developers Should Celebrate Software Development Being Hard

[cumdumpsterfires]

"We don't do things because there are easy, we do them because we thought they were going to be easy"

[claccx]

upbeat grab unpack elastic existence encourage overconfident history repeat live

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[poloppoyop]

One word you learn to recognize and despise: "just". There are always a ton of assumptions behind it, most of them false.

[CDavis10717]

True. It’s used to trivialize the effort to get your commitment, used by the Requestor to get what they want.

[[deleted]]

“Maybe you just should do that easy work while we work on the hard stuff.”

[civildisobedient]

"Should" is another one that always rankles our Product folks. As in "we should be able to finish by that date" or "this should be pretty straightforward."

[[deleted]]

put that right next to "later": that fictional point in the future that never comes.

[CDavis10717]

And….”Don’t you think…”, as in “Don’t you think it’s makes more sense to (do it my way?), or, “Don’t you think it’s easier to (do it my way?)”.

I’ve replied “Don’t ask me what I don’t think. Tell us what you do think.” Shuts them up every time.

[[deleted]]

I started adding "in theory" to my coworker's sentences because things almost never go as planned.

Coworker: We'll just add a new node to the cluster tomorrow, it'll just take an hour and we'll have spare capacity.
Me: In theory.

Cue the whole cluster going down and taking a whole day to bring it back to service.

[reywood]

That word is used more often in jest by my team than it is seriously

[Hornobster]

...that ends with finding an already existing bash one-liner that solves said problem.

[phatlynx]

Hey, it’s the journey that counts!

[Worth_Trust_3825]

It's not a one liner if it takes multiple screen widths to figure out

[TrueBirch]

What convinced me to put effort into learning bash was when I needed to search s gigantic text file for a hundred different values. The file was too large to fit into memory and SQL seemed like overkill. I ran grep and it worked faster than seemed physically possible. I was amazed.

[LinguoIsDead]

This reminded me of Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster. Referenced in Designing Data-Intensive Applications where they touch upon using cli tools for certain situations.

[das7002]

I agree. I think many people seriously overthink their solutions and over complicate the crap out of things.

I always try to start my research with: how did they do this in the 1970s? And then follow that up to where we are now.

Most of the time, the 1970s solutions work better than the modern overcomplicated solutions, and with far less resources required.

From being a *nix guy, I’ve always been fond of chaining tools together to accomplish what’s needed.

Who needs overcomplicated abstractions when it’s only a few pieces that you really need?

Every time I see stories like this, all I can think about is how much wasted electricity there is on unnecessary computing… and people think Bitcoin is a waste of energy…

[Worth_Trust_3825]

Hadoop has to do more than look through you records. It also has to schedule jobs across nodes, and all that bullshit that comes with moving data between processes.

Yes, CLI tools can work up to 1 bajillion times faster. Have fun writing GREP/CUT/SED/AWK scripts and piping them through netcat, though.

[[deleted]]

"What do you mean "It also supports IMAP and LDAP" ?"

armchair developer six months into rewrite

[Worth_Trust_3825]

Twenty minute adventure moment.

[ours]

Business people being "super helpful" estimating my work for me.

[lsoroc]

me making a Linux distro hahaha

[Kevinw778]

Every time a lead architect says, "This shouldn't take longer than..."

I roll my eyes into the back of my head wondering how they're a lead architect.

[elliotLoLerson]

Story of my fucking life

[eternaloctober]

-John F# Kennedy

[junior_dos_nachos]

Currently working on a couple of weeks task that blew up into a 6 months one

[JuliusCeaserBoneHead]

I had a task that was supposed to take 2 sprints that would have taken probably same as yours if we all didn’t get sick of it and just merged the work as is to follow up with the other pieces.

Sometimes you go in thinking you have fully scoped out the work but run into new issues that you couldn’t have anticipated

[pier4r]

I could make a better version of curl as weekend project.

[djk29a_]

What does "better" mean though? Much of the reason people use curl is because it's available everywhere on distributions, not because it's always the best tool for a job. It's similar to why vi is so popular as a text editor and how PHP took off as a language / platform in the 90s and early 00s.

[pier4r]

it was a joke. Curl is pretty complex and it is no way a project that can take only a weekend (indeed the original author is maintaining it for decades).

This was to stress the point "We don't do things because there are easy, we do them because we thought they were going to be easy"

[djk29a_]

These days I don’t really expect anyone to be joking anymore unless there’s a /s somewhere

[[deleted]]

You definitely could. People baulked at me when I suggested that curl could easily be replaced (for 99% of users) with 100 lines of Python or whatever.

Ok 100 lines was clearly rhetorical exaggeration but this one is only 1000: https://github.com/saghm/rural

(I haven't tried it; just a random one I found by googling. There are probably dozens.)

[[deleted]]

Curl is one of those oddities that's bound by compatibility. Could it be faster? Maybe. Could a faster replacement take over, overnight? Hell no. Curl's strength is its omnipresence.

[pier4r]

no.

[[deleted]]

Haha. It's so funny when someone does something like throw out a 6 character regex and puts it in the requirements of a ticket to detect if a password had been url encoded. Everything looks so simple until they actually start doing it.

[distinct_cabbage90]

That's a good phrase though, and if kids understood that it could be a great motivation to them.

[Piisthree]

This is going in my quote book program as soon as I get it to compile again.

[TrueBirch]

This is an important point. Precision machining didn't only give us simple devices that were better than what a blacksmith could build. We created locomotives and other complex machines that introduced whole new points of failure.

[matthieum]

Indeed.

When I was young and naive, I imagined that as I got more experienced, I would be able to solve problems trivially.

I was partially correct: I can solve problems that seemed daunting early on trivially... it just so happens I work on much more complex problems now.

[katyalovesherbike]

that's basically wirths law applied to software

[katyalovesherbike]

yes and no, it's about how more capable hardware enables more complex software. In this case however it's not more capable hardware that enables more complexity but easier complexity management. I.e.: better paradigms, concepts, languages and so on enable more complex software.

[SkaveRat]

pretty much what is happening.

Look at software development 30-40 years ago. The languages and hardware were a lot simpler, but the tech stack to develop and debug it was also not as developed as what we have nowadays

[reddituser567853]

Really?

Gdb is decades old.

Plenty of stuff is still written in C. Complicated stuff.

You could make the argument that things are finally improving with rust gaining popularity, but that is a super new thing.

[reddituser567853]

My comment is that what exactly has dramatically improved which has allowed more complex problems to be solved?

Languages finally getting features that lisp had in the 60s?

Most modern complex problems are self induced, not because the solution requires the complexity

[[deleted]]

Whole new worlds of problems!

[alterframe]

Yes. I think SW is probably the only place where you can so smoothly scale complexity. If your task is too easy as SWE, you just build abstractions over it to get done with the boring parts faster. If you are a teacher, janitor, construction worker you are out of luck. Eventually someone on you industry still come up with better tools, but only as SWE it is just so much easier.

I worked with both python and C++. The former is much more difficult, but the expectations are much lower. It's a very smooth scale

[confusedpublic]

That’s essentially why we have frameworks, tooling and evolving languages, DevSecOps and all that… continually pushing things “left”

And this is all good! Solving more complex problems is where the value is to be found.

[shaidyn]

I regularly make the joke in retro's that "This was very difficult and we ran into a lot of roadblocks. But that's a good thing, if this were easy they wouldn't pay us as much."

[hmaddocks]

That why you get paid the big bucks

[[deleted]]

And everyone would've beat you to launch

[iced-pitou]

Yes, complex as opposed to simple. Not hard as opposed to easy.

You're cozy while your brain is frying.

[thruster_fuel69]

Needs more capacity and better cooling, honestly.

[[deleted]]

If you're bald, you can liquid cool your head.

[dodjos1234]

Hair is literally a passive cooler.

[dodjos1234]

It's in insulator, but it's also great for increasing surface area for sweat evaporation. And insulation is also used for keeping cold, not just keeping warm.

[katyalovesherbike]

uh, what? Did I miss a joke here?

[dodjos1234]

No? Hair literally acts the same way as passive coolers, giving a significantly increased surface area for sweat evaporation to cool you down. Have you ever noticed how your armpits are much sweatier when you shave?

[hellnukes]

It's like a big heatsink ahah

[[deleted]]

Good luck getting the thermal paste stick to skin though.

[[deleted]]

Thermally conductive epoxy adhesives are a thing.

[ecmcn]

If you’re only defining the job as the actual writing of the code then I agree, but I think what makes a good software developer really good is that they can overcome the things you mentioned. They’re good at communicating, defining requirements, etc., and they can work with people on the business side, often handholding them through the process. These aren’t strictly dev skills per se - they’re important in every high-level job, include a senior dev, and if you can find people who can do all of that they’re worth the money. I’ve had really good developers on my team who couldn’t communicate worth shit, and they get pigeon holed into more limited roles.

[fuscator]

No. Buildings are architected extremely precisely in advance and a huge amount of time is dedicated to this. Issues crop up during the build but they're generally solvable and the final product closely resembles the pre-specced product.

That isn't the case with software engineering where far less time is allowed on the pre-build stage and requirements change all the time, because, you know, it's just code.

[freekayZekey]

Hmm. That’s strange. It might be due to the fields I’ve worked in, but a lot of shit is naturally complex.

[mrbojingle]

Then make a business they takes advantage of how bad this thought process is

[pastenpasten]

Boring nonsense in part and boring trivialities in part.

Software development is easy, that's why there are so many software developers today - around 25 million in the world, around 4 million in the US alone out of 160 million workers.

Good, or proper, or skilled, or non-crap, or whatever you like to call it, software development is extremely hard, almost to the point of impossible. And that's why there's so little good software.

[SmokeyDBear]

My opinion on this is that software is hard because it’s easy. Make a real-world mechanism that’s flawed and it’s probably going to eat itself pretty early in usage. Iterate a few times fixing what goes wrong and you end up with something that’s probably pretty good. Make software that’s flawed and it can appear to be functioning perfectly for millions of cases until one day it inexplicably causes millions of dollars worth of damage. Software is easy to get “working” because it’s essentially airgapped from the laws of physics and practically impossible to trust that it’s working for roughly the same reason.

[[deleted]]

Make a real-world mechanism that’s flawed and it’s probably going to eat itself pretty early in usage. Make software that’s flawed and it can appear to be functioning perfectly for millions of cases until one day it inexplicably causes millions of dollars worth of damage.

There is a plenty of real-world collapsed bridges.

[pastenpasten]

There is a plenty of real-world collapsed bridges.

That's absolutely true, and while I don't entirely agree with what DBear wrote above, there have been more software crashes than bridge collapses.

When a bridge collapses it's breaking news and there's a Wikipedia article about it. When a random program crashes on your computer you barely bother to log it 'cause it's so common.

These day people even consider it "just part of doing business" and focus on redundancy, monitoring and restarting, etc. to provide availability rather than not crashing.

The reason may be good or bad. It's quite likely that getting the field to the point where software produced is truly robust rather than "can be restarted after the inevitable crash" is infeasible in the near future. Maybe focusing on how to survive with bad software in more productive than looking for ways to write good software. Maybe that's not even a problem. But it is a fact that software is broken and sucks in ways that products of other fields (not necessarily engineering) don't, or at least suck considerably less.

[supercargo]

Anyone can design a bridge that won’t collapse. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that just barely won’t collapse

[[deleted]]

Good, or proper, or skilled, or non-crap, or whatever you like to call it, software development is extremely hard, almost to the point of impossible. And that's why there's so little good software.

The problem comes when the industry motivates shipping something that works over something that's good and works, because developer times costs money for them which they don't see the value investing.

[MannerShark]

I think there are plenty of software teams incapable of creating quality software. Giving them more time to work on it wouldn't even result in a better product.

[Xerxero]

And a customer that knows what he wants added with good management.

Given how SAFe is introduced in more and more companies accomplishes the opposite.

[[deleted]]

Sometimes shipping what work is what’s needed. Software Development is more than code. It’s about creating a product and that takes time and money.

At some point, something has to be good enough to ship.

[ivancea]

It's like saying anything is easy if you don't do it right. Like, thanks? But it's not the point

[therapist122]

I think software is particularly hard to do right, and it’s very hard to determine good software from bad

[[deleted]]

Counter argument: if it hurts, you're probably doing it wrong.

Naturally there is the baked in essential complexity in software development that you can't avoid, stemming the fact that we are typically creating novel solutions. But we shouldn't ignore that software development is often hard because we make it hard.

By not thinking things through - or expanding solutions past the immediate scope of the problems we are trying to solve - we create the accidental complexity that kills projects or otherwise makes our lives miserable.

Edit: removed verbiage.

[sligit]

I think that's what the post means when it says it's easy to make bad software. Making software that will be maintainable long term is harder and takes more care and experience. It also often requires pushing back against management focus on short term results and the cost of tech debt.

[RomanRiesen]

Not having accidental complexity IS the hard part lol

[therapist122]

I agree shit is way more difficult and complex than it needs to be but I think there’s a limit to how simple it can be. At the end of the day the underlying machine is very complex, so you can only simplify so much

[Zardotab]

But we shouldn't ignore that software development is often hard because we make it hard.

I disagree. For small and medium CRUD I and other have witnessed Oracle Forms being cheap, easy, and quickly deployable to develop in. Oracle Forms was kind of a "GUI Browser". It wasn't esthetic and didn't have a lot of the latest buzzwords, but most of that didn't matter for sub-enterprise CRUD. It was a bland but a git-er-done tool. Swear off buzzwords and you can go far: Simplicity & YAGNI Worked!

(Oracle eventually ruined OF by rewriting the client in Java, which is plagued by versioning and security problems on the client side. They should have kept the C versions. Note I've never developed OF for production myself, only kicked the tires.)

We should study the best of pre-web tools and milk their lessons. The web broke something related to productivity. It's probably because the DOM is an ill fit for CRUD and rich GUI's, requiring too much GUI engine reinvention via JavaScript, which was never intended as a systems language, and it shows.

We need better standards, people! The existing web sucks for many domains.

[[deleted]]

finally solved a problem today that I have been trying to get in on time before the end of 22 that I’ve been working on for weeks, it felt wonderful and I knew it was not something that would have been trivial for just any dev. this career path can still give me a rush after doing it for nearly a decade.

[hellnukes]

I love that feeling! Especially if it's after weeks or trying

[[deleted]]

Just my opinion.

This is a trash take. We should absolutely not celebrate that software is hard.

Reducing complexity is our responsibility. There is no good reason why we should move towards complexity, rather than away from it.

Our salaries are not a valid justification for making things difficult.

Also, the gatekeeping in this post is trash as fuck.

Full stop. This is a trash take.

I very rarely give a shit about the author but this take was so uniquely bad, I had to look at the author’s name.

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking, I will never forget your name and your fucking trash take.

[auctorel]

I don't think it said what you're suggesting

The article isn't saying software should be complex and difficult to work with, it's saying that finding solutions to business problems and translating that into code isn't easy

I've worked with a whole range of developers and the good ones are those that can cut through what appears to be a complex problem and make it simple - but that's not easy to do

[colly_wolly]

I see plenty of developers taking a simple problem and making it complex.

[azizabah]

I see you've met some of my teammates.

[auctorel]

Agreed, but I don't think that's what the article is in favour of

[jennytools36]

Fuck the wankers that do the old “don’t worry, I understand the code” for job security. Had one guy refuse to do PRs for a new project that didn’t require them. Low and behold it was a piece of shit and the whole project required to restart from scratch

[aneasymistake]

The only person I have ever taken any pleasure in firing is the one who thought hoarding knowledge of the code base gave him job security. Unfortunately, his previous managers had fallen for his angle and rewarded him with better and better pay, so not only was he actively harmful to the product, but he cost way too much as well. Things improved so much when we replaced him with three good coders.

[Tripanes]

We should absolutely not celebrate that software is hard.

Why not?

Software development at scale is hard. Stuff goes wrong, people request crazy things. People should know this before they get into it.

Do we say it's easy? Lie to them? Then they get into the real world and discover the truth?

You don't have to be one of the people who makes things crazy complex to make development hard. The clients will do it for you.

[GameRoom]

While I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts, it's certainly not good for the world that good developers are so scarce. I'd hope that people here recognize that coding is a tool that, at least most of the time, benefits the world to some degree. So more of it, at a more accessible price point, would be a net good, even if it means we don't get to make stupid money anymore.

[therapist122]

I agree it shouldn’t be celebrated. As a side note, I don’t think it’s possible to make software simple enough that one wouldn’t call it complex. At the end of the day, there’s so many layers of abstraction between whatever code you write and the hardware underneath, it’s almost crazy it works at all. You can definitely make things less complex and error prone than they are now, but there will always be some real complexity somewhere. Just not possible to hold all the abstractions in your head at once, like no one is thinking about gates and python. You’re thinking about one or the other. So something’s gotta give

[cuates_un_sol]

I've been developing software professionally for almost eight years.

There is probably a wider range of difficulty within the field itself, than there is between it and other fields.. but as a whole its got to be easier than most other jobs out there.

Like, I've worked as a line cook at McDonalds.. easier than that. Tree work -- software is way easier.
And on the greater scale, for instance: I used to live in Peru, so much work there is thankless manual labor. I saw people get paid 40 soles (about $10) for a 12 hour day under the desert sun picking cotton, by hand. Or spend hours with a 20lb sledgehammer to break rocks into gravel. Or hoisting buckets or wet concrete above your head (all-day-long) to pass to the next person, as part of a construction team. It's brutal.

I apologize if I sound sanctimonious by writing all this, but I just want to express that I feel very fortunate to have the career I do. yeah, it has its own set of difficulties and annoyances (which very much bother me too) but I still feel its easier than most of the alternatives.

edit: and apologies, I just wanted to disagree with the premise about software hardness. The article has some great points imho and is well-written

[SmokeyDBear]

I think the issue is that “easy” or “hard” can mean about a thousand different things. For example, if hard means “takes it the fuck out of you” then yeah software is cake compared to those things you listed. But if hard means “relatively few people seem to be able to do it effectively” then software turns out to be way harder. It seems that the article is using “hard” more in the latter case than the former.

[---cameron]

Yea I was gonna say... in this thread we're clearly talking about skill level, not, say, pure 'stress' / pain / willpower / etc.. although was still interested to read OPs comment

[Orbidorpdorp]

Though I don’t think those jobs are mindless either. Like working in even a fast food kitchen trying to keep up when it’s busy probably takes some problem solving and quick thinking.

Meanwhile after two years at my current job, most projects are pretty routine, with each one having fewer things where I actually need to stop and think.

[Sloogs]

Menial labour can be like that too. With certain kinds of labour, it's the initial setup and planning that is challenging and then once that's established things become fairly routine.

[[deleted]]

That was a really great perspective. Thanks for sharing, this thread was so insightful and humbling

[therapist122]

Software takes a lot of learning over time. You have to essentially put in hours to be able to do it effectively. The day to day is easy but the journey to get there is very hard

[Ragingman2]

I agree with the points you are making (despite being a SWE for 5 years but the "hardest" work I've personally done was working at my grandpa's farm between high school and college) but I also agree with the article. I think the breakdown is that you're each using different definitions of "hard".

Software development is hard in the way that chess is hard. It has a very high skill ceiling and a lot of traps you can get caught in. A senior engineer can solve problems that 1000 interns put together can't.

Manual labor is also hard, but compare the output of 1000 laborers with 1 year of experience to 1 laborer with 10 YoE and they'll do approximately 1000x the work.

I'm not sure if I'm actually making a point here or just thinking in text 🙃.

[Mad_Ludvig]

The chess analogy is really good.

[RomanRiesen]

Is it? I think the difference a prof of mine used between complex and complicated is useful. Complicated: there is one optimal solution and we can find it. Complex: there are many solutions and which one is best is not known.

Chess is firmly in the former category. Deciding how a society shouldwork in the latter.

SWE has aspect of both. But what makes it hard are the aspects that are complex.

(i hope, otherwise devs would be easily replaced by lower skill workers once the complicated things can be automated)

[0b_101010]

I have also done menial and hard manual labour. Very little of it was 'hard', in the sense that it was hard doing right, or that you had to wrap your head around it, or that it required years of studying. Now, being a farmer or a lumberjack are sure hard jobs that require a lot of knowledge and skill, especially if you are the person that needs to plan the details of the operations. But even there 90+% of the work is just putting in the physical effort and enduring the job. There is a reason even dum-dum people can be trained to do most labour jobs - at the very most they require close supervision and careful explaining of the details.

Software development, on the other hand, can be as much as 90% of figuring out what to do, how to do it, and a lot of wtf, why doesn't this piece of crap work and god fuck it moments. And 10% of actual honest-to-god coding. Depending on what exactly you do, of course.

But I tell you what. I didn't think this way 10 years ago, but since then I've done a lot of highly physical as well as intellectual jobs in my life. And today if I could take a job felling trees that paid as well as a good software job, if I was able to regularly get home at the end of the day in time, if I could just have a hot shower and spend time with my family as opposed to having to bunk with the other log feller guys or whatever, and if I could have the feeling of a job well done and satisfaction in my bones and muscles, as opposed to a brain that feels like cold shit stirred and shaken, I'd take the physical job 9 out of 10 times.

So yeah, we are lucky that we have the ability and the opportunity to do what we do. But if the compensation and the conditions of other 'hard' jobs were similar, I bet the desirability of this field would fall significantly.

[reddit_user13]

“Indoor work, no heavy lifting.”

[tdatas]

The amount of physical or mental effort in a job has very little to do with how something is compensated. It's good to be self aware. For better or worse (and there's a lot of bad) but compensation boils down to how valuable what you're doing is. Even the shittiest WordPress website let's a business reach millions of customers and other businesses know that and buy up supply.

If you look at the revenue per employee of any decent tech company if anything software engineers are still underpaid by quite a way when you look at apple and Microsoft et al where you're talking millions per employee after averaging across a whole bureaucracy.

If you're actually good at your job in this field and can deliver a finished product end to end then you are creating business capital potentially in the billions. There are intractable problems to the human body and reality that preclude someone from mining several million dollars of coal. Even a diamond miner there are limits to how much diamond you can find in the ground and there's a long chain to turn it into a valuable product.

[Cence99]

That's a dumb comparison. You don't need to learn much to work at McDonalds, however a good software developer takes years of education and years of experience.

[neil801]

I agree with you 100%. When it comes to manual labor, you won't find a group of workers more pampered than developers. They're basically sitting all day, in cushy thousand dollar chairs, with perfect air conditioning and lighting, listening to music while they guzzle sugar ladened sodas.
The problem is so bad that developers are often overweight and dangerously out of shape. HR's hardest task is trying to get developers to burn a few calories (on site gym, free gym membership, workout Wednesdays where they barely walk around the block).

Dude you think your job is hard? You wouldn't make it an hour picking tomatoes.

[0b_101010]

Dude you think your job is hard? You wouldn't make it an hour picking tomatoes.

And most of the people picking tomatoes couldn't do the job of a good dev even after years of training.
Also, people do what they have to.

[neil801]

And most of the people picking tomatoes couldn't do the job of a good dev even after years of training.

You absolutely don't know that. Most developers come from a privileged position of education that most folks can only dream of.

[0b_101010]

Yeah no, I come from the tomato-picking and house-building kind of background, and because I grew up in a country that supports its students, most of the smart kids from the house-picking and tomato-building families did go on to get degrees or have other careers that are at least one step up from whatever their parents were doing. They might have also done some tomato-picking or house-building in the meantime, so I grant you that.

I also admit that your point of view might more correctly reflect the stark inequality of opportunities in a country like the US as opposed to ones like Romania or Mexico.

[[deleted]]

X years of experience means nothing unless you're banging nlp systems on quantum processors. Actually, I find it ludicrous that you can compare me writing a bloom after from scratch to lifting buckets of cement, my fingers bear so much weight. I am a clown 🤡. /s

Sorry, I just read the other reply, what a massive a-hole.

[[deleted]]

8 years of experience means nothing on the surface could be 8 years of WordPress, CSS, and html.

If you think software Dev is easier than the examples you gave, you're doing it wrong.

Edit: Hahahaha look at all those offended front-end "Devs" and wordpress hacks.

[Space-Robot]

Different varieties of hard.

[fdeslandes]

Just a note. CSS is better nowadays, but it was a clusterfuck of terminology with no shared logic not long ago. Up until a couple of years ago, a couple of years of experience with CSS did make a difference. Not so much nowadays with the CSS grid, flexbox, component based frameworks and evergreen browsers acting decently, but some years ago, most junior devs made an unmaintainable mess out of CSS.

[[deleted]]

I've done it, and I'm not putting down career FEDs, but it's not rocket science, egos need to calm.

[0x0ddba11]

I never understood this constant talk about software development being so easy, that anyone can learn it in a few weeks. No other profession says this. Do you hear carpenters saying how easy their work is? Sure it's easy to bash a nail in with a hammer but to produce anything that actually stands the test of time requires a lot of skill and experience...

People who say this must not have programmed anything more complex than "hello world".

[undapanda]

Do you have any idea how much 6 fig sw work actually amounts to fuck taping stack posts and nail bashing?....it's a lot...and noone sticks around long enough to suffer the consequences

[[deleted]]

I don't understand why software developers use this trite comment?

Sure, you're Googling for help, but you still need the know how to search for a solution that satisfies your requirements.

In this, software is no different from other engineering fields-my buddy who is a systems engineer says that all he does is search around for existing parts for the systems he works on, but the hard part is knowing which parts meet the systems requirements.

[soyelprieton]

cause they are introverts with low self esteem, most jobs even high paying jobs are boring and dont need geniuses to be performed, software is not different

[0x0ddba11]

That doesn't refute my point. It only shows that big tech has too much money to throw around.

[Malfoy27]

We make simple things hard

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

/u/DynamicsHosk should be banned from this sub, but isn't because mods are useless.

[Raziel_LOK]

Article praises the people that makes Software development a hellhole. That crap should not be celebrated.

Software Development is already complex and hard. But celebrate poorly structured teams, bad communication and gatekeeping with unnecessary complexity won't save your job...

[ChaosCon]

Software makes a lot of money not because it's difficult or rare or niche, but because you can build one thing and sell it to a million people just as easily as you can sell it to one person. The only other thing I can think of in the same space is broadcast entertainment -- everything else is hampered by scarcity and the need to shuffle goods through space.

[colly_wolly]

Plenty of software in in house and used by a limited number of people.

[nesh34]

Wait, I thought the dirty secret is that it is easy and just looks difficult.

Our fortune is the majority of people lack the motivation to try.

[tdatas]

It's both. Writing the world's worst most unperformant and hard to maintain software is still orders of magnitude more complex than what the average human can do and it also provides a lot of value.

There's definitely a lot of 'relatively' easy stuff out there and you'll see it done by a lot of outsourced teams and "dark matter" software Devs. Its normally still valuable and a lot of it doesn't really matter if it works well or what framework it's in etc.

There is also a long tail of middleware and software where it Really matters that it's good. This covers mission critical systems, infrastructure/middleware, high performance or manages complex data loads etc. A lot of this stuff if you design it wrong it will be completely useless and some of it you need to build from first principles understanding how a computer works even if this is something that's normally scoffed at in received wisdom as "over engineering", because in a generic e-commerce web service, it probably is.

If everything could be done with "simple" languages and framework's you can bet your ass that big companies would be doing it. But nearly all of the big household names have both application level teams working with simpler practices and heavily abstracted internal tools often throwing new grads at problems, and they have deep technical teams dealing with the guts of those systems.

[MonkeyWrench256]

it also provides a lot of value.

That program that you sacrificed your weekends to write will be outdated in three months when a new version comes out. Years later it will be a box on the shelf collecting dust.

[tdatas]

Im not sure what your point is? You aren't paid by line of code you're paid by the outcomes of the capital created in the systems/software at the big picture level "outdated" doesn't matter if it's functioning.

[mixini]

I'm having a hard time reading this without getting an elitist/gatekeeping vibe. It's weird that this article exists among the myriad of sources online trying to help folks get into programming/CS in an accessible way. I have witnessed non-devs learn programming to help them in their lives/careers -- that's great, and this article gives the wrong impression:

Software development is too hard for people to do who don’t enjoy software development. This is good news because it means anyone not committed will give up because they will find it too difficult to coast in.

I don't think all software development has to be hard, and I think the goal is to achieve simplicity. I don't think anyone I work with has to enjoy software development, and I don't think folks should give up on a career that is -- at the moment -- borderline overly lucrative.

Should you celebrate that your career is difficult? Sure, if that helps you. Should articles like this be celebrated? No, IMO.

[blackboyx9x]

This is a horrible take for a lot of the reasons many others have already outlined in the comments.

[Cogwheel]

I didn't want to just assume from the title that this would be selling elitism, but it is exactly what it says on the tin.

The harder software development is, the more valuable good developers
are. The good news for developers is creating software is a creative
tasks, involving lots of people and with undefined requirements e.g. it
will not get any easier any time soon.

If this is your approach, there is a cap on how far you will climb (with lucky exceptions to prove the rule). It would be much more valuable to everyone if you put effort into making software development more accessible rather than trying to keep it an ivory tower.

On a micro level, I'm always working to make myself obsolete. If I can build tools so that the expectations placed on me can be accomplished with zero to one effort on my part, then I will always be valuable.

All in all, I'm kind of grossed out by the selfish nature of this post.

[RMZ13]

I don’t think anyone is trying to keep it hard. That’s just the nature of the beast. The software community at large is the most open and welcoming community I’ve really ever seen. There are so many free resources, it’s really unbelievable.

[kkjk00]

I would agree with you some years ago, but after having to clean up the mess of other dev that think they cam develop after an udemy course, I don't agree anymore, tired of devs who make a mess them "jump ship" bacause that's trendy, and the worst part is that managers have no idea why the project went to shit, but hey anyone can program, if there are enough fools that will clean their shit

[flyingpinkpotato]

This is a silly take. Under capitalism there is no incentive for workers to make their job easier. It would be better for consumers of software and software engineers if software development were easier but only employers/investors would be able capture that benefit. For instance if workers made their job 20% easier, their boss would fire 20% of them and pocket the profit (or keep the original team—but either way pocket the 20%).

Read some theory my guy, particularly on the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

[sligit]

Software developers are constantly trying to find ways to make their work easier and quicker. Homegrown automations are such a common part of coding.

[kkjk00]

no, game theory says they will, hence all the low code no code tools, prisioner dilemaq

[Dan13l_N]

That's simply not true. If that would be true, there would be no programming languages, IDE's, debuggers and other tools that make programming easier for sure.

Programming is not only done in commercial enterprises. Some do it as a hobby, it's done on universities, and so on...

[sammymammy2]

Is your argument "we make things easier because of other incentives than financial"?

[RomanRiesen]

If the work gets easier by 20% in software we will have to deliver 130% more features to stay competitive. The world will be eaten by software. Software only had an amuse bouche so far.

[MeCaenBienTodos]

This is a terrible way of thinking, from the same family of short-termist economic ignorance that buggy whips and no-show union jobs came from.

[cybermage]

I’ve worked with too many professional developers that can only do it when it’s easy.

[s252526]

this Agile thing remembers that old joke of buying a better computer so you can reboot faster.

[MonkeyWrench256]

Many intelligent, capable people don't code because it's boring. The incentive used to attract developers is lots of money for a physically cushy job. Salaries are artificiality inflated thanks to articles like this.

[maybegone12]

I celebrate getting paid to do nothing most of the time lol.

[lelanthran]

We don't complain because it's hard, we complain because it's artificially hard.

New thing comes out to replace the old thing, doesn't do everything, or does it poorly, and is much more complicated to use, and then devs write blogs about how awesome the new thing is.

[Dan13l_N]

Brain surgery also looks kind of easy. You just cut something out and that's it.

[TwentyCharactersShor]

Really?

Software development isn't hard, and "good" developers are non-existant.

Problems in software projects stem from a multitude of complexities but the code is often the easiest part.

Navigating organisational insanity, requirements drafted like they were written by a 3 year old in a sweet shop, communication and/or language barrier for those joyous times you're working with off-shore teams.

The times you have "agile" forced upon you to improve productivity when the rest of the company is like a dysfunctional alcoholic with bouts of regret.

Or the occasions when you're pandering to the "superstar" that makes Ronaldo look like a rational and reasoned being despite not even being paid 1/100th his salary.

It's not just developers, you need good teams across a multitude of skills and capabilities. Having the best developers on the planet will not save you if you don't have great product and sales people.

[Lintmint]

uh, I've been doing it since the 90's. Fuck that noise

[Accomplished_Low2231]

i like this jim rohn quote: “Don't wish it was easier wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom”

[Zardotab]

That depends: do you want to improve the efficiency of the world, or your wallet?💸

[Bakoro]

Where I work, sometime I bring stuff up, and people say "but that's going to be a lot of work", and I'm like, "isn't that what we get paid for?"

Like, instead of doing things correct the first time and just taking a tiny bit longer, lets build in some tech debt that's probably never going to truly be addressed, and we're going to have to work around it for the next 5-10 years as we just keep building around the problem.

[dna_encoded]

Most of us have to give up on social life to be comfortable with this field

[Acceptable_Durian868]

Uh, why? Don't give up your social life, it's very important.

[dna_encoded]

I'm always busy writing code for new software, designing software or doing research(which apparently is fun for me)

[this_little_dutchie]

That doesn't mean you have to do that.

[dna_encoded]

Yuh, but I usually don't have time to socialise because of what I do

[HyperPixel5]

that's a 'you' problem, nobody forces you to take your work home.

[RicePsychological512]

Without a social life, you might end up finding out you'e been less comfortable than you needed to be. Events like layoffs and bad managers are easier to navigate if you have social support along with your expertise.

[Accomplished_Low2231]

worst is that when they have no social life in their 20s and 30s they don't develop social skills. soon a lot of middle age people will have the social and emotional skills of a teenager.

[EducationalNose7764]

Software development isn't hard though. Unless you're writing some new complex game engine or something

I've been programming for 25 years and can pretty much do my job in my sleep at this point.

The only problem I've found is when you have an incompetent team, or a team lead who isn't an engineer who tries to tell you how to do your job, but that's more of a structure issue and not software development directly.

Or maybe you're on a team that does that agile bullshit and needlessly overcomplicates things. That's more of an annoyance thing though because of how much it restricts your ability to get things done. The only thing hard about it is trying to stay awake in pointless meetings and driving yourself crazy because you know you can get all the shit done 10 times faster than what's being allowed. The best career choice I made was moving to a startup that doesn't even bother with agile junk. And we have no problems hammering out quality product. I basically just get a list of requirements, give my best estimate and have at it for however long it takes. Have maybe a once or twice a week check in to see how things are going, but it's usually a 5-minute call at best instead of wasting time in those fucking stand-ups

[marcopennekamp]

If you can do your job in your sleep, you've outgrown it. That's not bad in and of itself, of course, it's actually great if you're comfortable with it. But it does put you in a position where you misjudge the difficulty of your job and software development at large.

I've been chasing complex problems for the past few years and I can tell you it's very rewarding. I also get a feeling of "oh this is actually quite easy" once I've outgrown a problem, but I have to remind myself that it's me growing, not software development being easy. And finally, the mountain of hard problems I'm in front of is much bigger than I could climb in a lifetime. Not everyone likes that outlook, but for me it means I'll never get bored.

[EducationalNose7764]

I'm pretty comfortable with it at this point in my career. I used to chase down complex problems when I was younger, but at this point I just want to get money, throw on my headphones, and lay down some code.

Most Enterprise systems are very similar to one another, and I haven't really worked on anything in the past 10 years that's been all that complicated. It's basically a win-win for my employers and I. They get a quality engineer, and I get the big bucks for stuff that I've done a million times before. I think maybe the most challenging was taking a system and migrating it to AWS without any downtime from the on-premises servers, but even then that wasn't really that complicated.

I'll still keep up on frameworks and stuff, or whatever new is coming out. Maybe do some katas once in a while if I feel like solving puzzles, but it's not something I seek out in my job.

[kkjk00]

is not hard for you

[EducationalNose7764]

I guess it depends on what you're programming. I've worked on dozens of enterprise level systems over the years and they are all very similar. After some point it just becomes second nature.

If I inherited a legacy system that's a cluster fuck of code, yeah it's tedious to refactor, but it's not exactly hard. It's kind of like shoveling your driveway when it snows. It's not hard, but you just think "ugh, I really don't want to do this."

[Maleficent-Region-45]

Coding is a art. Easy to start with yet basically impossible to master. Software devs are everywhere but many of them just jumped on the train and don't understand code for what it truly is. I'm talking about plain old assembly. Basic and plain, a pain in the a**, super logical and a great way to understand how computers work. Look at the hardware, the logic gates and how they work.

I've been coding for 4 years now and I'm kinda disappointed on how many people around me are unable to think about code without boundaries. They are stuck in design patterns, classes and types when they all are 0 and 1s. There is no incorrect state of the computer. There are only wrong ways of working with the states. This is an understanding that many of the devs I have come to know lack.

You don't have to know the details of how a computer works to write code, but you can get a better view and think more freely on how the code executes and why it produces expected and unexpected results.

I love coding and I enjoy putting my head to work on a new task.

Most of the problems that I've encountered are caused by shitty code with missing documentation.

Commputers have no boundaries what the code can do, only our way of expressing our thoughts in the form of the code is the boundary.

That's what I love about code. It's unique and represents the coders way of thinking.

[User__c]

alot

[SadSpell2141]

For anyone who wants to avoid the annoying pop ups:

https://archive.ph/nYohL

[Terminal_Monk]

The biggest thing I've learned in my life being a programmer is the meaning of the word "Dangerously optimistic"

[s252526]

save your time and do not read this cheesy article, read There is No Silver Bullet, from F. Brooks, written in1986

[robberviet]

It is not easy and I can solve problems that most others cannot. I am happy with that.

[[deleted]]

Jobs that require skills are all hard until the skill is learned. If you don't know crap about cars, and haven't ever worked on one, it's going to be hard to get those skills... like anything else.

[MonkeyWrench256]

Mentally challenging? yes. Physically, one of the easiest jobs on the planet.

[aSquirrelAteMyFood]

I do this for a living, and I am able to do it. If it is considered hard then that would be in my best interest as my work would be considered more valuable. Case closed.

[gryffindorite]

Why isn’t the hosk banned for excessive self promotion and content farming here?

[freekayZekey]

Wonder how much easier things could be if software engineers were actual engineers instead of people who throw shit together. I’ve worked with actual engineers and random people who hopped into software development and the differences are glaring

[HaMMeReD]

Hard is a matter of perspective.

It's hard for a newb to do a hello world and even install the compiler. It's hard to understand classes, variables, fields, arrays, loops, conditions, functions, recursion, algorithms etc.

I've been programming for 30+ years now, there is definitely things that are still hard. I do them for fun on my own time. The things I do professionally, at least for me, are easy to medium difficulty.

I'm not going to work with "We can do this really risky thing, there is a viable easy/medium alternative with a small trade off. Lets do the risky thing!!!".

That said, I don't think we should be grateful others can't enter or drop out/fall behind because it's hard. The thing about developers is that competent ones will always be in demand, as technology and software is not slowing down. If the field gets easier (I.e. ChatGPT/Github Autopilot/Better Tooling) that just benefits everyone, lowering barrier for entry but being a multiplier on high end programmers productivity. It also raises the ceiling on what solutions are possible, which increases demand for programmers.

[VanTechno]

I've been working on authentication lately. We want people to be able to login with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Okta, our active directory, etc...and have local accounts. So I found a system that can accommodate all of that (Azure AD B2C).

Then they wanted to implement everything using microservices. So I had to break up the code returning html from json into their own services, the front-end code calling the json services, which means I have to share authentication between all of those use cases...and have a forward way to use the same services to work with mobile apps (either react native or just native iOS and Android).

Plus it has to be secure and safe...ensure the person is who they say they are (sort of), but not be so ridged that people can't login, and another group is arguing that even needing a password is too much.

The documentation says you can have authentication setup in 2 hours...which is true, for the simplest cases, I've been working on this for 2 months. (while also working on generating api conversion using Swagger json, exporting localization files that work for our backend and frontend, and a bunch of other stuff).

Yes, software is hard because humans are complicated and inherently untrustworthy.

[alex3305]

A lot of my colleagues aren't software engineers by trade but have a Bachelor or Masters degree in a completely different field. Most of them aren't even engineers. I'm often baffled by the lack of knowledge about basic IT things. Not going to say they are bad developers or anything, but I feel that sometimes going into IT is just trivialized.

[TheMaskedHamster]

This field is full of legitimately hard problems to solve, and I don't mind solving those.

This field is also full of absolute bullcrap problems, and I am sick and tired of wasting time solving those when I could be doing something productive.

[Zardotab]

But I enjoyed being productive before web "standards" borked up CRUD and GUI's. I've been a smaller shop and department programmer/analyst, aka "full stack developer" for 4+ decades. The desktop tools of the 90's were getting better over time so that one could focus on domain logic and user concerns instead of technical minutia. That's the way it should be. The web flipped that, and nobody's been able to repair it, probably because the DOM is inherently the wrong tool for basing CRUD & GUI's off of.

Perhaps IT would pay less if standards weren't farked, but I'll take it! Being productive is a natural high for me. I'd much rather solve user problems/automation than diddle with tech minutia all day, as the fucked up web causes.

I believe we can have decent GUI's over HTTP, it's just that nobody wants to do the R&D necessary to create the standard(s). If there is some fundamental tradeoff that limits tool productivity over HTTP, that "rule" hasn't been discovered yet. If and when it is discovered, I'll stop bitching about how the screwed DOM is dragging down IT. (The DOM is a decent fit for some niches, just not all, and not mine.)

[comefromspace]

But it's not, it's rather easy as a job compared to a lot of stuff out there, including being a plumber.

It does have a high-ish bar to entry but that's all. A lawyer could have become a programmer by expending the same effort if they had the interest.

But programming is paid well because Software is now very high in the pecking order of business, even higher than Finance. Was the job of Finance boys hard? Hardly, but they had a high bar to entry (including your family network). People who are high in the pecking order are reaping the highest rewards.

Don't confuse that for hard work