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Comment by far33d | Hacker News Reader

I love the "I like using tools like this because they are hard and it makes me feel smarter than everyone else" attitude. I understand everything on the little laundry list, including things I wish I'd never had to do (UML diagrams, for instance), but choose to work on the web. Why? Because I prefer my "hard problems" to be customer problems, not technical ones. I'm happy to work on hard technical problems when products require it, but there's plenty of difficulty just figuring out what people want and how to get it to them quickly. There's no glory in doing hard things for the sake of it. I don't need to purposely handicap myself just to prove that I'm smarter than other people.

I'm fully confident in my intelligence without playing stupid games.

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Doing hard things for the sake of it, or for no other reason than to find out if you can do it, is the very essence of hacking. It is also precisely that attitude which fuels research, discovery and invention. So while I can respect your preference for solving customer issues rather than technical ones, I don't think you should diss people who prefer working on technical ones either. Are you saying there's no glory for the people who wrote the JS engines running in your customers' browsers? What about the people who wrote the operating systems on which the web server pushing out your code runs? What about the people who wrote that web server? What about the people who wrote interpreters for whichever language you're using to code your web apps?

Those people deserve more respect than being dismissed as playing "stupid games", I'm sure. Lastly, I think if you're not feeling stupid 90% of the time, you're probably not working hard enough.

You are right - doing things just because is a big part of the essence of hacking.

I fully respect all the work of people who work on "hard problems" - I even believe that I have and continue to work on "hard problems" every day. The list of things the OP used were basically "skills" not problems (virtual destruction semantics, references, pointers, etc). It's the attitude I dislike, not the desire to do hard things. The attitude that "these things are hard to understand and therefore more interesting and more worthy" is ridiculous, and shows that the writer doesn't actually understand any of the things he hasn't worked on.

I don't diss people working on hard things - I diss people who call everyone who doesn't work on what they work on weenies.

also, don't get me wrong - I'm a technical guy. 90% of each of my days is spent messing around with complicated and complex problems in code. That's what I do, and I respect everyone else who does that. That's WHY I believe the original sentiment is so flawed. Just because you use C and have to deal with tricky memory issues doesn't actually make the problems you solve any more interesting or useful. There's plenty of useless code in any language.

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