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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

> software engineer is one of the hardest jobs.

I chuckled. How can someone write this with a straight face?

If you think it is easy, it is because you have a talent for it and have years of experiance. People who are mental health professionals, teachers, doctors, CEOs, all have what I consider harder jobs, but do you think they would want to switch places and be a software developer 40 hours a week? They would think it is too hard.

Yep, everyone I know who isn't already involved in creating software, including a number of people I know who do jobs that I think of as being actually-hard, thinks it seems really hard and magical. Like, not the job aspect of it that we're mostly discussing here, but the "writing the code that makes computers do all this stuff" part, that probably strikes 95% of the people reading this thread as pretty easy at this point. It's just that it's easy to do things you already know how to do.

There is a medium between "easy" and "hardest job in the world".

People really live in a bubble. Try being a nurse working in cancer kid unit for a few years like my wife. Try being a trucker who sees their kids every other week. Don't you think these people would love seating in their chair from 9 to 5 and make 6 figures?

Maybe I misunderstood what the OP meant by "hardest". I sincerely hope so.

There are just different kinds of "hard". I have lots of nurses in my family who have worked in ERs and ICUs, some of whom nonetheless have told me "I could never do what you do". I think they could! What I do seems way easier to me! But that's not how they see it.

Agreed. Hardest is a high bar. Maybe OP was referring to those roles on a software team: developer, tester, business analyst, PM, client manager, etc.

Of course, it is difficult to compare jobs with respect how hard they are. One could easily argue that every job is hard. Jobs can be demanding in various areas, such as: physical, emotional, psychological, mental and intellectual.

Some thins, I think, make software engineering hard, is because it is not very visible from the outside. Another reason is also that it is different from other forms of engineering, where the product of the engineering is outside the engineering and where it is often easy to add a margin. With software, a very small bug can have big consequences.

I also think that software developement is a very creative profession, while often not viewed as such, where you are often judged on the basis of your creative output. In a sense software developers struggle with similar problems as artists, where there is often not an objective good or bad. Discussions about coding styles are frequently found here on Hacker News.

Don't think it's necessarily wrong though. I can't think of many professions where a large amount of professionals are pretty bad at their jobs.

OP means mentally/intellectually hard, not physically hard.

So?

As I said in another post, is it harder than working with cancerous kids? Or being on the road for days to only see your family every other weekend?

Are you really claiming that it's easier than bickering with the PM during standup?

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