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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

Good article, great points. The Knuth quote on lack of creativity is right on the money. It's why I've been drifting away from hands-on programming even though I'd rather not. I still love programming as much as I ever did as a teenager. Late at night when everyone is asleep and I can work on my own code, it's as much joy as it ever was. What's different is that at $DAYJOB back in the 90s and 00s it used to be just as fun all day.

Nowadays when it's just gluing frameworks together and configuring AWS services... it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets. Sure the pay is better but as a creative challenge they're pretty much on par.

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> Nowadays when it's just gluing frameworks together and configuring AWS services... it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets.

Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

> Comparing your six figure white collar job to basic janitorial work is pretty damn cringe and pretty objectively untrue.

I grew up doing hard farm/ranch labor outside in 95-105 degree TX heat and humidity. I agree with the ancestor comment that manual labor is a hell of a lot more satisfying and stimulating than gluing together AWS services with IAM/RAM snippets from stack overflow and updating some design doc about it. If it payed adequately I might do manual labor in the day and solve actually challenging and fulfilling technical problems at night. Programmers don't get to program much anymore :(

You're right. Cleaning toilets is at least a laborious task.

Your standard CRUD applications and web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together. It's immensely non-stimulating work when done properly.

This isn't an insult by any means. It's a testament to the triumphs of decades of engineering efforts to turn the process of orchestrating extremely complex electronic systems spanning continents into a largely trivial task for most projects.

> web services are largely just a rigamarole of reciting the right incantation and duct taping bits together

Not only this, but there'll always be an a**ole to say that we're doing that wrong, and add a few more steps in between just to make the process "better".

They're not saying the pay is the same. They're saying the intellectual aspect of the work is not terribly different.

OK, what if we say plumbing then? Same idea, and the pay is within an order of magnitude at the median.

Personally, I think it's pretty hard to make that kind of comparison accurately without having professional experience in both fields. One could also argue that it's as intellectually stimulating as being doctor, but how do we actually know that?

I've cleaned toilets professionally, and I'll say once and for all: writing software, no matter how monotonous or boring, is nothing like cleaning toilets. And I'd be willing to bet that someone trying to make such comparisons has ever had to do that kind of work.

Some developers even make more than plumbers.

> it doesn't really feel any different intellectually than cleaning toilets

There is a big difference. one is cleaning shit other more shit creating more shit :)

I find it strange to see this sentiment... how far down the stack do you go before it stops being "configuration" to you?

Let's imagine building a video chat:

Are you going to build an OS from scratch? Network protocols? Encryption? The rendering engine for it? Compression algos?

Just how much of this do you consider "not configuration"? I think this all sounds very much like "old man yells at cloud" pining for a past that never actually existed.

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