No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.
I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born).
I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here
but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today.
Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year).
Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice.
I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work.
That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
I think the answer is that it depends. Software engineering is incredibly hard if you are a perfectionist who wants to make efficient, secure and maintainable software. But most probably it is not even possible to be that perfectionist and stay within any given budget. And the requirements are most often not your own.
The thing is, it's a job that needs creativity, spontaneous decision making as well as personal responsibility for those decisions. It's a real easy job if you don't need to take this responsibility (e.g. those who come after me when I am long gone have to deal with the consequences). It becomes a hard job the instant that you have some passion or ethical concerns that drive you to create software that holds up to your own high standards and requirements.
I think that's what makes it so hard for many. We are incredibly passionate (why would we be on this forum in our free time otherwise) but we constantly have to betray our own principles to make it work or stay employed.
> It becomes a hard job the instant that you have some passion or ethical concerns that drive you to create software that holds up to your own high standards and requirements.
This is the hardest lesson to learn for a lot of software engineers. By nature, computers are unforgiving, so a lot(most?) of us are wired to do things 'right'. The apparent fundamental incompatibility of that mindset with modern corporate environments is a pretty painful lesson to learn.
This is not to say that any one of the approaches is the one true approach. To a company software is a means to its ultimate goal of more profits.
To an engineer though it's often both, a means of livelihood and a source of joy. Reconciling the second with the first is easy in theory and hard in practice.
couldn't agree more! these people who are not that passionate and build software for a living tend to care less, and when we care less we do more. also rarely they come up with crappy solutions, that might not be good but work. making things even harder for the passionate perfectionists.
I started it as a dance instructor (after competing since I was 13 years old) then I saw that the dance studio director still shared a room (!!) with somebody else in a really crappy part of New York City, so I got a job on the airport from a classified ad my husband clipped from NY Times and I got really interested and passionate about aviation. Took a few lessons and went through a course for my dispatcher license.
I loved it and got hired internally the second try. If I tell you we were called 'flight dispatch officers' you might be able to figure out which airline that was.
In about 12 years the airlines headquarter and ops center moved to the Midwest so I opted to stay in NY and go to school for retraining. I choose WAN admin because there were no coding schools. Here I got my A+, MCSE, MCSD,CCNA,CCNP,CCIE. But in the meantime I got heavily involved in scripting and coding. So my first job was perl, PHP and SQL developer and I've been doing it for quite some time now. I must say this is the most liberal and appreciative career I've seen. As long as your work is done, you can be anywhere. Besides the great salaries, benefits, (,ok no travel) these jobs are fun. Good choice.
In my long carrier I've seen many devs. Those who came for money really suffer the whole life. I started programming as a kid and can't stop even now ;)
I’ll be honest I would have left by now if I could have, but I don’t regret my career in the slightest. I still code for fun, but our jobs are rarely about just coding, and the money has brought in a lot of toxicity.
Yes, in big projects you don't see the result. it becomes a boring routine. But when your hobby robot makes first steps it's a completely different feeling.
Very inspiring comment. I suppose that software development was a much more impactful job back in the days.
I do get pleasure when building software, but like many others I also dream about starting a farm to diversify my income and get some physical work regularly.
I wonder if that conviction would actually survive you being dependent on the income of that garden (and the ability for crops to survive, grow and be sold at a good price to sustain you) or if you're just dreaming of vacation where you poke at the land a bit.
I worked on a farm and I find this romanticising outright ridiculous because I don't think a lot of you understand just how hard is it to actually make a living from the land.
Yes was talking about the grounds crew, no one was harvesting trees for money, it was my favorite job and would happily do it again if I didn’t have family obligations (I had mentioned this in the post).
That said the farm I worked I knew the farmer and his dad pretty well and I worked there year round for a couple of years with breaks in the summer. Harvest time was insane and not all the years were good, but the family were comfortable and most of the time the workload was reasonable. It maybe different now but I lived in farm states then and I personally knew several well to do farmers that were living very well with more assets than I currently have. So I’m not sure I’m fully on board with your view of farming. It depends a lot on time and place I’m sure though, I’ll fully admit that I’m no expert.
I’m sorry this caused such a negative reaction but I think you stopped reading too soon, we agree more than disagree. Listen, I’ve paid my taxes on those jobs that I miss, so I know what it is I’m saying.
Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.
Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.
My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.
Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.
Thanks I appreciate it, re safety violations, yeah some of it was those laws were just badly applied across the board, and it was hard to find a place without some degree of violating the letter of the law, so I think they just got flippant.
Re “source of sanity” I’ve caught myself doing the same with extra work, but sometimes it backfires when the little fun tool you wrote solves the purpose so well that it becomes the company standard and then the politics comes in, I don’t mean the “oh we need this feature super badly that breaks a bunch of other things can you do it for us” that’s just having a successful project. I mean when it starts figuring into political finger pointing and you’re forced to be involved in it all since you are the creator of a tool tangentially involved in some inter office politics. I’ve not figured out how to avoid that yet.
It seems insane sometimes that politics makes everything take so long that a decent engineer could’ve written all 3 solutions and validated them in 3 days, but no we want to discuss in this ticket over 3 weeks whose responsibility it is depending on which approach it is or what hypothetical scenarios this will bring (no one really knows anyways so we should’ve just tested it).
Unfortunately that has also pushed lots of good engineers to either disengage or work extra hard to push things through despite organizational problems (I seem to alternate between both but I feel too responsible to really disengage).
>My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.
Why do you have to fight if it's extra time? And couldn't you avoid the fighting by just doing it on regular time?
As someone who only delivered newspapers and worked in a video store as a kid, before landing my first developer job, I’ve always had this impression.
And I could never convince myself to go work on a farm, or in a nursery, or at a gas station, because working on my computer, often from home, always paid better.
I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.
> I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.
It’s funny, I feel the same but come to the opposite conclusion. I don’t want to look back on my life thinking that I spent all my time chasing fake problems. The calculus is different for everyone though.
>I don’t want to look back on my life thinking that I spent all my time chasing fake problems
Neo-liberal capitalist economies are full of fake problems.
Take flash trading for example. I know why it exists, and I know why it works. I don't fault people for getting involved in it, because they (and we) exist in the system we have.
Yet, think of all the money that has gotten both pumped into that industry and the industry has made in profits, and all for...being able to algorithmically trade penny differences in value at a profit due to volume.
Is that a problem that is worth solving? Well, in our current economic system, it is, but should it be?
I don't know whats better per se (I'm not arguing for communism or some other clearly failed economic political system) but I sure feel like I can identify problems that could quite easily fall into the made up category.
Doesn’t flash trading basically contribute compute to force prices to settle at equilibrium faster thereby improving pricing efficiency?
I’m not sure it’s worth the required effort input at a system level vs other places the effort could be applied, but there is at least some abstract benefit to it, I think.
A study by the SEC in 2014 stated that very high trading frequency is "unnecessary" (below 0.2s), but failed to identify clear downsides or damages to the markets.
I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough.
Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
Software engineering can also be incredibly satisfying regardless of money. It depends on what you're working on and who you're working with. There's a great feeling when you get into flow while writing interesting software or tackling a puzzling problem.
I find it super satisfying, and would probably be some sort of computer programmer even if it paid a lot less and was generally looked down upon as mundane clerical work by most people. I am thankful to live in a time where it is a high paying job.
Writing software underneath MBAs who are clueless about engineering, driven by sales and marketing teams who are clueless about engineering, constantly "sprinting" to get stuff out the door...
There's a lot of stuff in the industry to suck any joy out of writing software
True, all the crap that we have to deal with does make you question why you're doing it - thought of another one, often, you're working on some very small piece of a feature you don't care about, working for months on end.
Still, for me, at some level always enjoy the act of building something that needs to function in the demanding environment of the digital world (especially, high-volume applications). Yeah, it requires you to use your experience and training to solve difficult problems and produce a real result. For me at least, this typically enough to keep me going:)
In America. If you work in other markets the salary is much lower. The only engineers I know who make above 100k euro are either lead or founder level.
100k USD is about 90k EUR (and 77k GBP), which you may say doesn't change your point materially, but I'm not splitting hairs, that's more than a 10% difference.
I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
It is possibly to earn over £100k as a software engineer employee in the UK, however those tend to be very specialised fields. (Not all of them are finance related).
I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k.
That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.
Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job.
Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
Not everyone works in big tech. A lot of devs worldwide work in mom and pop shops, legacy businesses, or various consultancy/body shops. Big-tech workers are the exception, not the rule, except maybe for the US workers.
Nope, so called 'dark matter' developers are the majority in the US too. HN is such a small sliver of the developer community, those who work for big tech even more so
That’s a fair point, but I am not sure how it is relevant, unless devs at mom&pop shops/legacy businesses/etc. and those outside of the US work more than the US lawyers (or any other highly-paid white collar job) or have barriers to entry similar to those. From those I know working at those places (and from working at a legacy business myself at one point, a big bank), that didn’t seem to be the case at all. At startups, sure, but that’s just a high risk/high reward type of a deal, and they still don’t have almost any barriers to entry either.
Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
> they're good jobs for sure, pay-wise it would be around plumber range?
This has been my observation, software developer pays about the same as a plumber or electrician in places like England, outside of select industries
like high finance in London etc
>but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.
I respectfully disagree. I think there's alot of room for improvement in our industry, even in regards to pay we could do better. Think of the value delivered per engineer vs what they're paid, the ratio is typically very high, meaning engineers are paid a fraction of what value they provide.
Interesting sidenote, given you mentioned plumbers: being a plumber in the US has higher barriers to entry than being a dev (gotta have your apprenticeship program completed under a licensed master plumber and pass the journeyman plumber exam). On the flip side, they get paid pretty decently well.
Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of.
You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements.
Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs.
Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history.
I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case.
Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something.
It has its definite perks like work from home.
But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is.
There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy
> and probably the most competitive industry in the world
It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.
I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software!
This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows.
But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.
I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, and yeah, SWE was the easiest and cushiest job in the room by a mile.
One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
Maybe we should agree that all jobs can't be compared apples to apples. I have 3 good friends that fly for major airlines. I'm pretty familiar with the jobs.
-Those tests are no joke, but saying they are more intense than a 4 year CS degree is ridiculous. Also the major airlines you can compare to FAANG, and many people study for 6+ months to pass those interviews
- Airlines are union jobs. If you get them you aren't getting fired unless you try to do something really stupid.
- There isn't any wondering if you are doing a good job or not , and you don't take any work home.
- Regulations change or you can switch planes, but the career is leaps and bounds more static then SWE.
Net net is that they are very different jobs. SWE is a great gig overall but I take issues with people saying how much harder or easier it is than other jobs. "It depends" is the answer.
Yep. OP fell into the classic trap of making generalizations across two COMPLETELY different fields despite only having knowledge in one of them. I got my PPL nearly a decade ago (obv a far cry from ATP but still) and it's ludicrous to try to compare the skill sets of computer science to piloting.
That's it. Piloting isn't easy, and you do have to study a lot, but it is rote memorization for the most part.
That is a completely different kind of thing than the kind of thinking that we do in programming. One isn't better or easier than the other, just different.
> I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, .... One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner.
Frankly, trying to claim their jobs, which all require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than mine, aren't white collar would have been rude and insulting to everyone.
I find your definition of "insulting" really confusing, as pretty much all "white collar jobs" are "I sit on my butt all day and think lazily about things with very little pressure" jobs. They push paper and write reports on things, maybe doing some annoying math at times, but the entire concept of a "high pressure" job with "consequences for error" seems entirely at odds with white collar, and I'd personally have expected people who actually do something important on a daily basis (unlike, for example, me) might would find being categorized as "white collar" insulting?
It's equally insulting to insinuate that some blue collar jobs don't also require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than many white collar jobs.
There are many blue collar jobs that require a lot of education and the consequences of errors is loss of life.
Most of the people in that room had worked blue collar jobs, worked through school, and retrained in white collar professions.
I would have been incredibly rude to tell them "No, your job isn't _really_ white collar, and you haven't changed your social standing as much as you thought."
I don't know what country you live in, but social standing in the US typically has more to do with wealth, not the color of your collar, so to speak. It is not hard to find wealthy blue collar workers who have high social standing in their communities and beyond. Take for example a master plumber who owns their own business, or a general contractor who's grown their business in a large city. I suppose you could argue their roles tend to transform more into white collar roles of managing the business, but it's blue collar work and work that they did and probably still do themselves.
On the contrary you can absolutely be a white collar worker with low social standing in the US. It's not hard, I'd even argue most white collar workers fit that description. Think of a customer support representative working in a call center for wages. Their job is definitely white collar but it does not pay well and is the type of job you typically associate with someone struggling financially. Not someone of high "social standing".
In the US blue collar/white collar does not directly correlate to low/high social status. While it is probably true that white collar work is correlated with higher wages or salaries, it's the money that drives social status, not the color of your collar.
White/Blue collar, while correlated with income, has nothing to do with social standing.
A friend of mine is a construction foreman. He lives in a mansion in a suburb of a suburb, is a member of a highly regarded country club and makes more money than me. He’s blue collar.
A person cannot be proud of their individual achievements, self improvements, working at a job they wanted, or providing for their families? Simply because many others have done the same?
Did you read the Wikipedia article? Grey collar is work that takes both intellectual and physical skill. It even includes surgery as grey collar. Thinking white collar indicates more education and pressure is the issue. There's white collar jobs that can be done by high school graduates, and blue collar jobs where life and death are literally a split second away most of the time.
I get that people want to Categorize All The Things, but this doesn't seem like a particularly useful category. If you look at the list in the Wikipedia article, it includes "skilled tradespeople/technicians". That alone represents a pretty big chunk of work traditionally considered "blue collar."
The Wikipedia article that comment linked to in a later edit says it's a controversial definition and says that such professions are typically described as white collar. That seems to support my statement?
I feel like I've experienced the opposite honestly. I'm a mechanical engineer, and my wife's old college friends consist of a bunch of silicon valley techies.
Out of 10 people off the top of my head, most of them have been laid off in the past 5 years. For the ones that found new jobs (that I know) they are not satisfied with their pay.
I've talked my pay vs theirs and am shocked. Almost a decade worth of experience, making what I was making 4 years into engineering, in non management positions, and worse job security.
I could be mixing up programmer vs SWE. I just call them techies.
> by the time you finish your 3 months course the tech is considered obsolete.
This is a meme that’s just not true. Nobody outside of the most junior applicant or most transient contractor is paid for the skills they learned this year.
The most important skills last forever. Getting a good CS or EE degree is still the best way to get started.
Exactly. In the past ten years the main differences in my professional tech stack are that I write Go instead of Java and my software runs in containers on Kubernetes instead of JAR files on CentOS. My friends have all had much more significant changes and retraining in their careers.
Yep even within internet technology this is ridiculous. Imagine we time machined a Perl old-head from 1995 only knowing http, Unix, networking, etc. They could be invaluable at any company in a month.
>They could be invaluable at any company in a month.
That's a made up fantasy. They wouldn't get hired at all in real life. Ask me how I know. Where I live recruiters only check that your recent experience and stack match the ones on the job, otherwise your resume goes in the bin.
Like Ygg2 said below, employers don't want generalists with generic CS knowledge, they want people they can immediately slot in and start crushing Jira tickets.
Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?
I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux, mostly systemd. (I did have to use initscripts early on and do not miss them at all. systemd's way easier.) The entire networking stack has changed only minimally, with only early versions of SSL/TLS becoming obsolete. All the software I use to do my job is the same (A terminal, Vim, Firefox, GNU coreutils, and a smattering of other tools). I still use the same cloud services and databases. The skills I learned in school are equally as useful today as they were then, especially math and CS theory.
The only major shift during my career has been migrating from Linux VMs to containers on clusters (first on Mesos, then Kubernetes). Having administered both at scale, Kubernetes is a lot easier.
> I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux
All of those listed things have changed. Python went from 2 to 3, number of shells has multiplied like rabbits. Linux changed in leaps and bounds. It got async, BPF, different tech stacks, and window environments.
> Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?
Sure basic principles have remained the same, but huge chunks of ecosystem have been transformed. Perhaps we are looking at it from different perspectives.
It's kinda like ecosystems. Amazon tropical rainforest looks the same now as it did 1000 years ago from birds eye view. But on the ground entire species came and went, and the species living there changed dramatically, in quality and quantity.
My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
Python 3 is not that different from Python 2. Yes, if you're a mindless interpreter designed to specifically parse and evaluate Python 2 code, you're going to have a hard time with Python 3. Thankfully, software developers are humans and should not have this issue.
The number of shells that are relevant to any workplace I have worked in have been two, possibly three if you're working somewhere heavily Apple-based. All three of these shells are POSIX-compatible. Other shells exist, but are entirely optional and rarely used (I say this as someone using one of those other shells).
Linux has changed more, and is probably the biggest source of change in the list that the previous poster described, but as they point out, most of these changes make managing Linux systems simpler, and shouldn't really cause significant problems.
I think you're strongly exaggerating the scale of changes here.
> My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
I'm a frontend developer. Every job I've had, I was not familiar with the specific framework they were using when I went in for that job. In every case, that's not been a problem at all, because I've been able to clearly demonstrate that I understand the foundation of frontend development, which is far more important than the precise technologies used in the company's framework of choice. My experiences in general are the complete opposite of what you describe here: every single employer that I've worked for has wanted primarily deeper general knowledge rather than specific knowledge of their specific stack.
Maybe this is a market thing — maybe things really are that different here in Europe — but your descriptions do not ring true at all for me.
> Kafka is out. It's all about Iggy! What do you mean it's different language? Learn it!
Are people really using Iggy/hyping it already? TIL it's now an Apache project[0], that's awesome, it looks impressive!
Sure, most reasonable people are definitely not ripping out Kafka for Iggy yet, but I'm certainly happy to hear it getting more usage/at least being considered.
How old are you? You get to your forties as a software engineer, and you'd realize how taxing this occupation is. Your eyesight may deteriorate; your neck and spine may experience chronic pain; you could develop digestive and kidney problems from prolonged immobility; you might get hemorrhoids and carpal tunnel syndrome; your immune system could weaken from constant stress and may cause depression. The number of different "solutions" for solving ergonomics alone is evidence of how difficult a career as a software engineer is, both - mentally and physically.
Realistically, 30 minutes of walking a day is not enough to offset the long hours of sitting (no matter how great the chair is); standing desks aren't necessarily a better solution here either. Gym and healthy eating are a must, but not everyone can afford them (in terms of time).
Anyhow, unlike my non-programmer friends, I can never leave my work - whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc.
Yes, I still love my job and wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sure, I'm very happy that I don't have to leave the house at 2AM to risk my life, but still, it isn't really one of "the easiest careers" - I am easily disposable, I don't ever receive a pension, whenever I need to find another gig - I have to go through seven circles of hell, and it never is the same hell to go through, I have too many bosses, I constantly have to keep learning new skills, routinely prove my worth, and defend my opinions, because even after twenty years of building expertise in various areas, in our field of work, one can never confidently call themselves an expert.
I've been battling RSI and stuff for the past two years and am starting to make progress although it's required me to get both of my wrists fixed and potentially both of my elbows in the future.
It's easy to just say "Oh, do this workout" but it can be very difficult to do that if you either lack the time or have other health issues that prevent you from doing them.
For me, I have rods in my legs and fused ankles so even though I try to hit the treadmill regularly, doing so means I wind up in a lot of pain.
None of this has got in the way of my passion for building software, although for me there is a distinction between what I do (or want to do) in my own time vs. what I have to do for work.
It's a good day when I can really apply myself to a problem at work.
It's less great when for whatever reason, I'm prevented from being able to do a good job.
And the sad thing is that often, you're not prevented from doing a good job because of any technical or time constraint, it's usually all political.
Right. I'm not even old, I'm in my prime; I exercise and eat healthily. My working deadlift weight is about 350 pounds. I keep a dumbbell next to my chair, and I use tools like Pomodoro. Whenever I need to take a bathroom break, I also try doing some squats or push-ups.
But younger kids seem oblivious to what kind of damage this line of work does to your body, and it's pretty much unavoidable. They'd be "Ah, so what that I've been typing for fourteen hours straight? My knees are fine; I can just walk it off...". Yeah, well, try figuring out your Python dependency conflicts or broken GitHub Actions, or focus on some concurrency bug when your sciatic nerve is pinching or your neck hurts like you received a bullet straight under your shoulder blade.
I'll see how they sing their "the easiest job ever" song when they get to experience chronic pain and become nearly incapable of sitting in front of the screen, not even for forty minutes, let alone hours.
> whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc.
This isn't an axiomatic quality of software engineering though. For every developer with your level of dedication (obsession? anxiety?), how many developers log off at 5 and compartmentalize their work away from their personal life?
That being said, your other paragraphs are pretty agreeable to me.
Programming is an act of creation. Any creative worker - artists, sculptors, novelists, potters will agree, you cannot timebox your creation - it creeps back into your life even when you're away from your studio, from your desk.
I have worked in several different countries. With diverse teams of programmers of different levels of expertise. Different stacks, various types of industries. Most programmers are creators. Those who log off at 5, don't think about it and keep it separate from their lives are "office workers" at best - maybe not even programmers, I'm not sure what to call them. I met that kind of people only twice (with some stretching, maybe three times) during my work life. Both of them ended up switching to different roles later. So, yes, to a certain degree it is perhaps "an axiomatic quality" after all.
Thank you captain obvious, but that's not what I'm saying. If your vocation involves sitting long hours you already "not taking care of your body" - humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, engaging in regular physical activity - walking, running, and foraging, not sitting all day long. Think about it - we are among a few species with horses, wolves, ostriches and dogs that can run for many miles in a single event - because we evolved to do that. Yet our ability to sit for extremely long durations is very unusual and not evolutionary advantageous. Imagine forcing a wolf to stay motionless and keep the eyes on the artificially lit up screen? The wolf will likely gets depression and dies within a year or two, if not sooner.
The human body is designed for movement, and sedentary behavior disrupts metabolic processes, affects posture, and almost unavoidably results in weakened muscles and bones.
Staring at screens for extended periods leads to digital eye strain - dryness, irritation, blurred vision, headaches. Prolonged screen time can also disrupt sleep patterns which affects melatonin production. Additionally, it too, contributes to poor posture and musculoskeletal issues, particularly in the neck and shoulders.
Typing for long hours leads to repetitive strain injuries - carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, and muscle fatigue in the hands, wrists, and arms.
If you think you can undo decades of harm to your body by occasional exercise, well, I have bad news for you. If you think you can just hop around like a butterfly when you need to do something like setting up a Kafka cluster from scratch, which requires you to have a combination of technical skills and extended periods of sedentary work, screen time, and typing - something that can't be done "very quickly and only once," you're thinking of some other profession, not this. Extend that to five days a week, for many years - that's what's required - you'll find yourself primarily sitting, staring at the screen, and typing during most of your waking hours. This is a typical facet of a programmer's life.
Software development career WILL harm your body, and there are only limited things you can do about it, and only to the effect of mitigation - there's no magical cure, remedy, or escape.
My comment wasn't self-referential, I'm not complaining, I do exercise. Have you noticed the use of terms of possibility and not certainty in my prior comment? I'm just stating the general facts on long-term career of a software engineer.
Dont listen to those kids. Ive seen a lot of youngsters coming as Software Engineers. They have no skill, no motivation to learn, they just spend a lot of time in coffe talks and get nice paycheck. If they fail, they are being pet and said: no worry, we will find you easier task to do. And then they come to some "oldfart" engineer and ask him to do the thing.
I have first hand story where my colegue had a cow-worker like this and wanted to get rid of him.. Took whole year to do so, but NO.. he wasnt fired.. he was promoted!!! But my colegue said: At least, we get rid of him :)
I think you're shifting the focus to an entirely different matter, and honestly, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly agree with you. I've seen many young, motivated beginners who performed exceptionally well, even teaching veterans with their fresh perspectives.
Experience in our field is a double-edged sword - at times it can feel like a burden that pushes intuition away from the objectives. After all - we're all junior SEs - whenever we need to start a new project - we have to learn or at least refresh our knowledge. Just because a kid fresh from college doesn't know how to use Makefiles, can't write C without memory leaks, or hasn't used Vim keybindings and panics when seeing Emacs, doesn't mean they lack programming talent.
I agree partially. I worked w/ youngsters that had talent and motivation to learn. Unfortunately, I saw it less and less in places where I worked.. Hence my comment here..
Industry shifted into weird direction here.. Youngsters are pet while old engineers that had knowledge and experience where squeezed more and more... It really makes you demotivated..
Thank you. If I complained for one second about my short houred, high paying, long vacationing, low-education requiring job around any of my family I'd get laughed out of the house.
I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers.
I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment
I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains
I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver.
Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
Apparently this is an EU/US thing, because here overtime and on-call is always paid extra (as is essentially anything beyond your usual 40 hrs/week, or whatever you've got in your contract).
That said, I also see very few jobs that involve on-call. Maybe that's because companies know they have to pay extra for it and therefore don't hand it out willy-nilly, but typically there'll be an ops team who do have on-call, and whose job is to triage and fix anything they can, otherwise just minimise the damage, and then maybe the most business-relevant couple of teams will also have an on-call rotation in case the problem can't be solved by ops alone.
Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".
This. I've worked plenty of places that have awful work/life balances, friends that work in the trades are getting 1.5x to 2x on overtime while I'm working 12-16 hour days and weekends for nothing extra except the possibility of getting fired for performance if I didn't.
I've worked construction when I was younger and wouldn't want to be still doing it at my age, it was physically harder but I wouldn't say it was tough work and at the end of the day I'd leave and not think about it again until I showed up the next day.
Being a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to other engineering disciplines. Sure wrangling complexity and a shitton of knowledge is a lot of work, but most other engineering disciplines have much higher stakes, require you to put yourself out there and can land you in jail if you don't do your craft as you should.
Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change.
Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild.
If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering..
I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.
It irks me to no end how much software engineers love to self-flagellate. If I had never met a software engineer before and just read HN my takeaway would be that all software engineers are privileged assholes who live in a bubble, get paid way too much, on top of that cheat on their hours, and provide functionally no value to society. In real life this is obviously not true.
Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)
This “debate” has come up a few times in the streaming community.
Viewer: “Streaming is so easy, you’re basically not even working, streamers are so privileged.”
Streamer: “Can you act?”
Viewer: “No, but what -“
Streamer: “Ok so you can’t act. Have you ever tried acting out a play, but it’s 6 hours long and also hundreds of people get to shout obscenities at you, and also you’re sometimes obligated to respond to their disturbing comments completely ad-lib without breaking character, and also you have to be juggling at the same time?”
Viewer: “… well I still think <INSERT JOB> is harder”
It doesn’t take a genius to realize there a different dimensions of difficulty and yet somehow many people can’t
“Appreciate how good you have it” doesn’t help the exploited be any less exploited. Instead it serves to nudge the comparatively-less-exploited to feel guilty enough to stay quiet.
I've had quite a few jobs. I've been a computer engineer now I'm a software engineer. These are the only jobs I've had where I felt I could be fired for performance.
A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.
I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.
It took me a whole month to fully recover!
I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!
Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, or fast food employee.
> Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Going home at the end of the day and not having to think about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one respect or other they're almost certainly operating their own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are operating their own business (even when the work arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone else). If they're working within an urban area, they're typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside of the safety envelope.
So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is than yours.
hmm, kind of feel like you're cherry-picking the most difficult versions of those jobs. No need to to into too much depth, but for instance, yeah, not all fast-food employees are working two jobs (many seem to be high-schoolers?). Not all farmers own their own business and are employees. I had a roommate who was a truck driver. He was simply an employee and worked a 9-5 and didn't own his own truck (many of them do, but this is becoming less common).
Although, I agree, there is a lot of blue-collar work that is tough, especially on the body - have done a few weeks of construction work myself, it can destroy your body quickly if you don't learn how to pace yourself and use your body correctly (it's not something I personally would ever want to do long term). But there is also a ton of cushy blue-collar work that are easy - my roommate works at an Amazon warehouse, and she says that her role is mindless work that anyone can do sorting items in boxes.
Yeah, I am probably somewhat biased, but saying that the average fast-food employee's job is more difficult that an average SWE's job (with its deadlines, stress and politics, not to mention all the years of studying), that seems like a stretch. I'm all for the blue-collar worker, but let's be reasonable. Yeah, at least from what I've seen, often, it's not their jobs that are tough, it's the circumstances of their life (many of course are low paying, which makes everything difficult) and lack of advantages they had growing up...
... although, I do admit there are a lot of devs that once they get over the learning curve just coast at their jobs, learning little that is new and working on the same system year after years. Hmm, interesting...
I wouldn't do much calling it cherry picking as looking at people who choose something as a career path. For example: a high school student, or even a university student, working in fast food aren't fully supporting themselves with the job (nevermind supporting a family). Farm labourers are also different from farmers. Truck driving is all over the map, but most variants have their own stressors.
I'm not going to pretend that software development is devoid of stress. That said, virtually every job has stress, deadlines, politics, and other such nonsense.
If we look at their lives outside of work, can see where you're coming from (as mentioned, a few of my current and past roommates worked blue-collar jobs, and couple of them really had a tough time financially, and one of them emotionally). But if we're talking about the job themselves, as mentioned, seems like most blue-collar jobs are less demanding, and is stable at many levels, and doesn't require much training.
Yeah, at least to me in this thread, seems like we were referring to jobs themselves, not their overall lives.
But, I do agree, if we look at their lives overall compared to white collar, it seems like it can be just as stressful, especially because of the lack advantages growing up (growing up in a stable financial household, education, resources...).
> A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits,
Its so weird that development that pays well over $200K uses about 5% of the brainpower I used for college, when I got paid about $9 an hour to clean plates for 40 hours a week.
Maybe it's time to switch to a new role/project?? :)
But, agree, many tech jobs require you to initially mount a difficult learning curve, then coast, doing the same thing over and over (although, for better and for worse, this was rarely what my jobs in tech were like. Was always jumping around having to learn new things).
It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers.
Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible.
But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time.
think this is more about that there is a variety of types of work in tech. As you probably have experienced yourself, if you join a fast moving startup, they'll work you to the bone, whereas a large, a wealthy corporation will let you just go to meetings 50% of the time.
Hmm, i guess in my opinion, think most devs would agree that startups in general are more work than the average corporate job. Maybe we don't have a basis to have a discussion if we don't hold common beliefs in our field. No worries I guess (shrug)
Just want to echo the person who already replied, but contracting is a different world. One might argue that when you're a contractor you're also an independent businessman — and thus you own the responsibility of win or die.
Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns).
And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
> And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it.
Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies.
You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing.
Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it.
Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
That's not true at all because an eight hour shift of real coding work easily wears out the brain, making the entire evening useless. It is a sedentary job requiring excessive caffeine, with the result being that health deteriorates slowly but surely due to the job.
A bridge engineer would need to know how to design a structure based on first principles of physics, nationally recognized reference documents, state agency published standards, state agency unpublished standards, agency project manager preferences, internal management preferences, and do so within a complicated project delivery protocol. These don’t all agree. Oh, and you can be sued and lose license to practice if you’re wrong.
A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails.
Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.
I think there is something to be said to how many people dislike doing what we do as software engineers. Forget about the people who like this job, there are so many looking at me sideways every time I describe what I do.
True that the other jobs are usually treated very poorly, though.
At least software engineers can do something to not make a mess or change it. Once you get to real physical world that might not even be realistically done...
Yes it is. I can name a number of careers that are easier. Start with accounting or tax prep or mechanic or welder or barber or nail salon anything, on and on. Ridiculous.
No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.