alt Hacker NewsWhy is programming so captivating, yet so agonizing?
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Programming doesn't cause me pain or feel like work. I build projects in my free time because I enjoy solving problems.
One thing I love about programming is that it forces me to understand ideas at a much deeper level than simply reading about them. Writing code requires both step by step reasoning and high-level abstraction. That combination often leads to better solutions and a clearer understanding of the problem.
I often ask myself, "Would I still do this if I weren't getting paid?" The answer is usually yes. That's why many of my projects are completely free, with no ads or subscriptions.
Aside from the human side of it which is often nothing to do with programming itself, I'd say anything that is captivating is only so because its agonizing. If you have a problem to solve and instantly know the solution, there was no problem, just manual labour left not done (using that in the most technical sense). Solving problems is captivating, but it has to be hard or there'd be no problem at all.
I think what is agonizing is either the process imposed by the company or the architecture you are working with. Both can lead to immense frustration. When you have good architecture and a good development process, things become much less frustrating. I wanted to add one more thing: if you work on any idea you don't like, it doesn't matter the language, the platform, the architecture or the process. In the end you will feel the pain and frustration.
> Your goals are set by others; information and resources are provided by others. The programmer rarely controls his working conditions, sometimes not even his objectives. In management terms, "one's authority is not commensurate with his responsibility."
This is the real reason hackers start start ups.
This is one of my favorite quotes from Brooks:
"In practice, actual (as opposed to formal) authority is acquired from the very momentum of accomplishment."
"In practice, real authority comes not from titles but from influence built through consistently delivering results."
Full book: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2018-481/readings/mythic...
The only things I find agonizing about programming:
1. unrealistic time frames and expectations from non-technical managers, and
2. leetcode
Everything else is awesome.
Because you get to solve real problems people have. But you have to work with real people.
One answer - Other People's Code
I know my code, I don't know your code. I don't know what you were thinking, why it's in the shape it's in. What assumptions you made that you might not have documented or who's documentation I have not found. Also, if you're the person who has to review it I have no idea what you'll accept which means I have to gamble wasting my time to make a PR on the off chance that you might not approve.
With my own code, all that goes away.
The other big one is yak shaving. Being forced to do things B, C, D, E, F before I can do the thing I wanted to do. I've lost projects to this where like say, some library has a bug, there's a fix in the new version, but the new version depends on newer things, and pulling those things in is not compatible with the project. I spent 30 to 60 - 120 minutes trying to get it to all work so I can get work, getting more and more pissed off, because this isn't what I planned to spend my time doing. And, I often fail and give up. Progress stopped on at least one personal project for ~4 years where once every 6 months or so I'd try to update dependencies and fail and never actually made any progress on the app.
Fortunately, this year, AI was able deal with it. It fixed the deps, removed most of them, and implemented most of the features on my TODO list from years ago.
Through words and patterns you can change the operation of the machine, and thus alter the physical world. Your programs are wizardry! The part that sucks is trying to make magic happen within an organization run by boring accounting people. The only room for magic is begrudging.
For me the agonizing part are all the arbitrary things you have to memorize or lookup, that do not follow from the flow of the code or the principles on which the system is built. Struggling to find the right keywords to find which particular frob needs to be foozled for the program to start working, which may or may not be documented anywhere or written up by someone who already somehow stumbled across the answer.
One of the problems - people are promoted more due to social relations so in a such environment technology becomes second class citizen. It incentivizes other qualities than being good at what you are doing.
What a lovely message!
It's agonizing because it's hard. It's captivating because it's possible.
The same reason gambling is. No, I'm serious. Theres a psychological phenomenon where things which are reliably positive are less enjoyable (or addictive) than something that is disappointing sometimes and positive other times. Writing software is like that in that things don't work, then they don't work, then they still don't work, then suddenly they do.
It’s not agonizing or difficult at all, you just need like 20 years of obsession lmao
But seriously it’s easy after that. The hard part becomes:
- what do people want
- how should it look and feel
- how does it generate revenue
There’s a concept and execution phase to each of these that are difficult in their own way.
But yeah I have not stressed out about which for loop to use or if it should be monolithic or services etc in a long time. We have so many language options and you can even have a bot write it for you to the latest style and standard
I only find it to be painful when done for the corporate world... when I go home, even after 7 hours at the office, I find it therapeutic to push to main, not have a CI, not write tests, test in production, commit with one-liners like I'm asking someone if they want a beer, and overall just code any random idea that crosses my mind... even more so now with AI, because now I can get my ideas out there faster, and believe me, this is serious crapware, but who cares? I don't...