People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to
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But I quickly find out that most other jobs involve a lot of tasks that could be automated.
Unless you're telling people what to do (imperative programming) or making high-level schematic drawings (declarative programming), I can't imagine not being a programmer in a classical sense and not get bored with repeating things that computers or robots could be doing, and I could be telling them how.
But for people like you, who already have a full skill-set and learn enough to automate it? That’s a super-power.
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
HyperCard was close, and I've been productive with its clones, and hope that something interesting happens w/ LiveCode Community Edition, but I wonder if the solution isn't just Domain Specific Languages wrapped up in nice applications.
I've been pretty successful w/ OpenSCAD, and its Customizer is _amazing_ and the new ability to run it in the browser is way cool:
https://seasick.github.io/openscad-web-gui/?https://raw.gith...
for a finished example see:
https://forum.makerforums.info/t/using-openscad-web-gui-to-m...
That said, its limitations are striking, and I have big hopes for:
That said, I'd really like to see some programming environment worked up which was:
- dynamic/interactive
- allowed drawing up an interface in an interactive/iterative fashion
- wasn't painfully sandboxed as Scratch or the LISPs seem to be
- allowed exporting a stand-alone application --- ideally cross-platform
I think sometimes it's just easier to think the grass is greener elsewhere. Hobbies are often not as fun when they become a job, a necessity.
You can burn out just as easily with a hobby-turned-job if you're overdoing it. IT was probably a hobby before it became a job for many of today's engineers. The solution is to avoid overdoing it rather than to jump from one hobby-job to the next, maybe ruining them all in the process.
Growing plants or building buildings or baking bread is the opposite; you can immediately see the product and get satisfaction from that. But given the economic realities, it's probably better if you can keep those as hobbies and slog through the day job.
At least for me personally I find it so very hard to be motivated to do something that doesn't matter for 40 hours a week. Which is easier than something that directly harms the world I guess..
For me, this helped me put what I was doing into perspective. It's easier to accept imperfection when the goal does not require perfection.
What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
Truly Sisyphean. “Hurry, roll that boulder! It’s important!” And then the boulder rolls back down the hill and everyone shrugs and starts back over. “Go, go! Important!”
And everything you have to use is probably broken and/or terrible. Even, and perhaps especially, software from major vendors staffed with “geniuses”. So very much time wasted to our tools and libraries being shit. It’s frustrating, and it’s day, after day, without end.
It grinds you down. At this point if pay were equal for all careers, programming would be pretty far down my list of preferred occupations.
It’s easy to start dreaming of throwing the fucking laptop in the trash and starting a Christmas tree farm or becoming a carpenter or some shit.
- carpal tunnel; have already had the surgery 1x on left arm and 2x on right with some persistent issues that some PT is tackling
- eye strain; have been messing with blue light glasses alongside some monitor changes and using trying to use more saline (I forget to blink all day), not perfect but it's manageable for the time being
A good friend is a mail carrier and I'm actually super jealous of her job; I went from walking several miles a day as a server in undergrad to 5hrs standing/3hrs sitting while working with an AM/PM walk to bridge the gap but it's just not the same as being active all day. Have been considering making a move into something else...but it's unlikely to actually happen tbh
You're envious of the side effects of the job, more physical activity. Bet she's jealous of the side effects of your job, more money. Probably neither of the jobs themselves are intrinsically attractive to the other.
They don't just want to do something else but something very different, everything IT/computer work is missing. The common theme is "less tech" or "outdoors". People dream about what they're missing. Farming is not at all easier on the body but all of a sudden it becomes attractive by being different.
IT work usually brings you enough money and safety which let you think about any dreams and that you'd be successful with them too. But it's also just stressful enough that the dreams look like a good alternative. Your mind melds the financial success from your current job with the spiritual happiness of the dream.
Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people.
E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
Nobody does this. We don't even try. As you said, everyone in programming is insane: so much so, that proposing "hey, why don't we try writing computer programs we actually understand" elicits laughter and scorn.
In every other engineering discipline, proposing a solution that you do not understand will get you fired. In software engineering, it's a Tuesday.
That freedom has advantages and disadvantages, but almost everything you do will become immediately productive.
My experience by pure software companies was the same. Insane is pretty accurate.
The problem isn’t the programming part.
That is age cohort doesn't refer to your generation, other than "millennials" are entering those years now. Generation X is mostly done with it.
(Note: not a dig at you per se, more the "I'm going to become a farmer" people because they can keep a monsterra alive)
I always hope the story is just far fetched enough nobody thinks it's an actual plan, but I'm not sure.
I have no intention of spending the rest of my life chopping firewood and hunting whatever I can find in these woods. It's an amazing fantasy (because it's short term) after dealing with a bunch of BS all week though.
We are not there yet, but if we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code. I think many people, who would want to learn how to code today, wouldn't want to learn how to write code in this reality.
I've always saw programming as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Sure there are people who enjoy coding and see it as therapeutic for them, but I don't think this is most of programmers...
Wouldn't be surprised if something like 60-80% of programmers got started because they either wanted to make a website about something or they wanted to make a video game/video game mod. After all, nothing drives you to learn more than having a clear goal in mind and needing to find solutions for how to achieve it.
Also that said thing is actually interesting to me. That's a problem with a lot of teaching, the example problems they give are so utterly boring that it saps your motivation to work on them. Like the reminder/notes/shopping list apps that seem to be the default course/tutorial subject for every language and framework now.
it will not happen unless we reach AGI. You need to know programming (please don't call it coding, I hate it) to verify the generated program works as you expect and won't fail at 12am on a Saturday in production because the AI added a buggy code block that only get triggered in specific conditions. It's like making a plane without QA. Not gonna happen. And the very low risk programs already have alternatives today that don't require technical skill
I do admit we're rare, though.
Is Paul's statement much different from the statement "talk is cheap"?
(B has never said he wants to learn to code)
A: Do you have any plans to learn to code? It seems to be useful.
B: No.... (thinking) Well, AIs.
(And B doesn't learn to code in the real world)
Actually, this comments doesn't matter at all, but I leave it in for fun
If you are asking for advice: nobody knows what the future will bring. AI sometimes looks really useful and sometimes horrible. There may be things coming I'm not aware of. You have to make your best guess, and if it turns out wrong adjust. That said, programming has been a useful thing for the past few decades and looks to continue to be. However medical jobs have also been good for even longer and that too looks to continue. Music and art can be good for a few, but most people who go into them have to do something else to survive.
Nothing stops you from mastering more than one thing. There is nothing wrong with being a master programmer for 8 boring hours at an insurance company, and then going home to create music with your friends. (I picked this example because I work with programmers who took a substantial pay cut to work where I do instead of the insurance company they worked with before)
However, I am optimistic that with AI automation happening "everywhere" (wherever it can generate profit), we'll see culture shift to appreciating more human-only things. Singing can be AI generated, but we're still impressed by someone being able to harmonize and hit notes; Physical sports are still too chaotic for AI to effectively compete at human levels, so audiences will flock to watch humans.
This line of reasoning actually warmed me up to people that are live-streaming as a career. They opened their lives to be experienced by others, another element that AI (I believe) will struggle to genuinely replicate because the audience will want living people. Similar to the popularity (and profitability) of reality shows (even dramatized ones) - you see highlights of someone "living".
There already exist very popular AI-generated live streamers.
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/twitch-ai-streamer-so-...
Right now you can make a lot of money as a programmer. AI currently isn't good enough to replace us and nothing else is even showing promise, meanwhile there is more and more ideas people come up with that need a computer programmer. Of course who knows - I've seen a lot of technology take over, meanwhile flying cars have been just around the corner for 70+ years. My best guess is AI won't take over - but that is a pure guess and could be wrong.
Similar for doctors. There is a lot of efforts in using AI, but so far nothing takes over from a well trained humans. Will that change - I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
Make your own bets.
[I purposely didn't mark that as a quote. Seeing the entirety as if it was written by a different Paul shows its emptiness.]
It's not if you don't.
I see no reason at all for anyone to learn to do something that they don't care about. There are many ways to make a living, and people like Paul know this well.
Not everybody needs to learn about SIMD and cache line widths. But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer:
Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
I personally feel that way too. But everyone has their poison. What you like is not what I like.
I don’t think everyone should learn how to build a computer. Most people should be able to, like, replace a cabinet hinge though. Maybe not everyone but it is a common enough skill that we don’t talk about whether or not people should learn it.
The reality is that there are things that are beneficial to us that we should all be doing but we don't. Sometimes we get lucky and some of the things we like are things that we should be doing so we get on our high horse and begin preaching without realising that we are literally in the same position as everybody else.
> Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
One day soon the office worker will be able to tell the computer that, literally and verbatim, and it will do it.
Was it Karpathy who said plain English is the programming language of the future?
As of AGI, if it comes, everyone apart from the owner class is equally doomed, so you are not missing anything if you learn profession you like, including if it is programming.
I don't particularly like making things for myself as I don't really have a need for much, I prefer to make things for other people, but finding those people (with good ideas), is very difficult.
The goal would be to get better with your tools and keep the creativity flowing, even if it’s not going to turn into your next unicorn startup.
The statement "People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to" is clearly designed to shame those who are looking for a better future.
Dont be a slave!
Take an adventure. You only live once!!!
Spread yourself about. expand your mind and knowledge. LIVE!!!
I have had 4 main jobs in my life:
I left school in 1972 aged 16:
At 16 years old I trained as a baker for 2 years.
At 18 years old I began an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic for Jaguar and Daimler.
At 28 years old I set up my own company designing and installing high end bathrooms.
At 36 Years old I went into higher education, college and university to train as a psychotherapist.
At 40 years old I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor.
At 42 years old I qualifed as a Psychotherapist
I Retired in 2012
The actual hard job as an ordinary person is trying to not elevate these people beyond their field. If you are successful at X that doesn't make you authoritative about Y and Z or actually anything else. But you can see this in the tech world a lot, all the time.
And more to the point, we probably don't need this many programmers. The industry just shed several hundred thousand of us over the last 2 or 3 years. It seemed like an inevitable correction to the overhiring of the covid boom.
If paulg is Paul Graham, well, presumably he's a VC and investor, and cheap programmer labor is good for people in his class. Commoditized coders + AI supplementation = rich investors at the top.
It's not so good for existing programmers who already have trouble finding work, and not so good for the new programmers who are just signing up to become part of an ever larger bureaucracy.
Shrug. If I were young, I'd definitely choose another career.
Tech was certainly not over after the dotcom bubble burst, which is what he's talking about.
People have lost jobs to offshoring, but the growth in software engineering demand in the US vastly outpaced the losses to offshoring. If anything, offshoring helped deal with the fact that demand vastly outpaced supply over the last few decades.
As for "we probably don't need this many programmers"... maybe? Or more accurately, we probably don't need this many programmers making as much money as they were making for the past few years. Corrections happen in every sector now and then.
If someone's not interested in programming, they shouldn't feel obligated to learn it just because someone with outside economic interests wants them to. These folks don't necessarily have their best interests at heart (like VCs, CEOs, presidents, or other people who would benefit from the fruits of programmer labor more than the programmers themselves would).
As a class, programmers are some of the least happy people I know, and burnout seems to be increasingly common. Sure, we make more money on average (even then, not always, compared to mid-managers and such) but you make a lot of health and social sacrifices in choosing this career path. It's a lonely, often dreary path full of debugging often-pointless code that will largely be discarded in a few years anyway.
I'd still stand by the overall gist of my comment, that the overall economic conditions have changed since the 90s and 2000s, when tech easily made a whole class of zillionnaires. These days, for most of us in the industry, it's just another middle-class job.
To be fair, though, there aren't many middle class jobs left :( IMO that's the bigger problem, not a lack of run-of-the-mill programmers.
Anyway, personally, I am particularly interested in civil infrastructure engineering. I never made all that much as a software person anyway (capped out at $100k after 10+ years of full-time work, 20 years of experience), and I don't have kids or a mortgage. I just want the opportunity to do something more meaningful and contribute to society more.
Q: Can you help me troubleshoot this issue?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Product Support department.
Q: Can you explain how this obscure feature works?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Documentation team.
Q: Can you make this interface less janky to navigate?
Programmer: Not my job. Ask the UX Team.
But remember, guys, the real key to a successful product is making sure that everyone in the company knows how to program...