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Comment by eludwig | Hacker News Reader

Totally agreed. Actors and artists have to develop a thick skin or else they would whimper daily. :D

Any job where you are sort of putting yourself out there in the form of your work can be quite demoralizing, especially with the wrong people in charge. Programmers can be just as touchy about their work as artists--I've seen it personally. Some of this may have to do with cultural diffs. Some cultures seem (at least to me, with limited exposure) to be more or less amenable to "being nice" about criticism.

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To a degree, the same goes for scientists. Having anonymous peer reviewers telling you the past six months of your professional life has been a waste, because this was done by a Czhechoslovakian in '73 (paper never translated) and turns out to be uninteresting, can be quite demoralising.

Or like one of my first papers, when sending it to a very good journal, having one reviewer say "this is all wrong" and the other saying "this is a well known result in the field, nothing new" and the editor just saying "reject".

Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago?

Somehow, this industry thrives in reinventing the wheel in slightly different ways - once a process is implemented mathematically (in code), it has to be reimplemented again, in slightly different terms (another programming language). We bikeshed in that it's cognitively easier to manually reimplement the function, instead of mathematically determining how to "rephrase" the math in the other terms. When you want 2 wheels, making a slightly different wheel is mentally easier than copying the existing wheel - in terms of coding.

> Don't professional software developers feel the same way about crafting a masterful function, only to find their feature had already been implemented years ago?

Although I find it weird to call myself a professional, I don't really feel the same way because I usually enjoy the process of doing it and figuring it out for myself. I suspect that I might feel differently if my compensation were directly tied to coming up with new things though.

No. We don't. There's nothing in the world like standing up on stage in front of thousands of people and having a mistake creep into your work and having people write about it in every newspaper there is.

Code review is absolutely nothing compared to what it takes to put yourself out there as a musician or a scientist and have it shot down. Absolutely not even close.

And scientists have the safety rail of peer-review prior to a public mistake. Musicians have the same thing in studio, but not live.

I'm not sure why software developers should care about originality at the function level? If it's been implemented before, that just makes it easier to implement it again. (I assume there's a reason you can't just reuse or copy-and-paste the code - if you can, just do that.)

There is plenty of work to be done that's essentially translating an idea from one situation to another. The satisfaction is from solving the user's problem.

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