A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day.
I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body.
It took me a whole month to fully recover!
I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means!
Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Don't say that to a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, or fast food employee.
> Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways!
Going home at the end of the day and not having to think about work is sure great, except that fast food employee is probably doing their second job. As for that farmer, in one respect or other they're almost certainly operating their own business. Not managing. Operating. They're going to have trouble setting aside the stress of the job at night as well. Construction workers, well, they will be all over the map. Some will be like farmers, operating their own business. Some may be doing heavy or dangerous labor. Day to day, their job may rank as tiring. Over extended periods, they are expending their body. Short of switching to a trade, their career is on a clock. Truck drivers have their own issues to deal with. Again, a lot of them are operating their own business (even when the work arrangements make it feel like they're employed by someone else). If they're working within an urban area, they're typically driving in less than ideal circumstances for hours on end and dealing with a system that tries to make the system's problems the trucker's problems. Some long-haul drivers may earn a decent paycheck, at the cost of being on the road for days on end and being pushed outside of the safety envelope.
So yeah, everyone has something to complain about. But if you want those people to think that SWE's are arrogant jerks, then just go on saying how much worse your job is than yours.
hmm, kind of feel like you're cherry-picking the most difficult versions of those jobs. No need to to into too much depth, but for instance, yeah, not all fast-food employees are working two jobs (many seem to be high-schoolers?). Not all farmers own their own business and are employees. I had a roommate who was a truck driver. He was simply an employee and worked a 9-5 and didn't own his own truck (many of them do, but this is becoming less common).
Although, I agree, there is a lot of blue-collar work that is tough, especially on the body - have done a few weeks of construction work myself, it can destroy your body quickly if you don't learn how to pace yourself and use your body correctly (it's not something I personally would ever want to do long term). But there is also a ton of cushy blue-collar work that are easy - my roommate works at an Amazon warehouse, and she says that her role is mindless work that anyone can do sorting items in boxes.
Yeah, I am probably somewhat biased, but saying that the average fast-food employee's job is more difficult that an average SWE's job (with its deadlines, stress and politics, not to mention all the years of studying), that seems like a stretch. I'm all for the blue-collar worker, but let's be reasonable. Yeah, at least from what I've seen, often, it's not their jobs that are tough, it's the circumstances of their life (many of course are low paying, which makes everything difficult) and lack of advantages they had growing up...
... although, I do admit there are a lot of devs that once they get over the learning curve just coast at their jobs, learning little that is new and working on the same system year after years. Hmm, interesting...
I wouldn't do much calling it cherry picking as looking at people who choose something as a career path. For example: a high school student, or even a university student, working in fast food aren't fully supporting themselves with the job (nevermind supporting a family). Farm labourers are also different from farmers. Truck driving is all over the map, but most variants have their own stressors.
I'm not going to pretend that software development is devoid of stress. That said, virtually every job has stress, deadlines, politics, and other such nonsense.
If we look at their lives outside of work, can see where you're coming from (as mentioned, a few of my current and past roommates worked blue-collar jobs, and couple of them really had a tough time financially, and one of them emotionally). But if we're talking about the job themselves, as mentioned, seems like most blue-collar jobs are less demanding, and is stable at many levels, and doesn't require much training.
Yeah, at least to me in this thread, seems like we were referring to jobs themselves, not their overall lives.
But, I do agree, if we look at their lives overall compared to white collar, it seems like it can be just as stressful, especially because of the lack advantages growing up (growing up in a stable financial household, education, resources...).
> A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits,
Its so weird that development that pays well over $200K uses about 5% of the brainpower I used for college, when I got paid about $9 an hour to clean plates for 40 hours a week.
Maybe it's time to switch to a new role/project?? :)
But, agree, many tech jobs require you to initially mount a difficult learning curve, then coast, doing the same thing over and over (although, for better and for worse, this was rarely what my jobs in tech were like. Was always jumping around having to learn new things).
It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers.
Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible.
But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time.
think this is more about that there is a variety of types of work in tech. As you probably have experienced yourself, if you join a fast moving startup, they'll work you to the bone, whereas a large, a wealthy corporation will let you just go to meetings 50% of the time.
Hmm, i guess in my opinion, think most devs would agree that startups in general are more work than the average corporate job. Maybe we don't have a basis to have a discussion if we don't hold common beliefs in our field. No worries I guess (shrug)
Just want to echo the person who already replied, but contracting is a different world. One might argue that when you're a contractor you're also an independent businessman — and thus you own the responsibility of win or die.
Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns).
And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
> And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it.
Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies.
You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing.
Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it.
Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
Sure. But people here are talking about frequenting chains in their hometown. If national chains are the best options in your local area, it's a sign you need to move to a better area.
People live in a given area for lots of reasons that may not include restaurant selection. I rarely eat out around my house—though there are a few restaurants that are better than national chains
I don't find commas at the end of line adding any more readability than avoiding them, except for the oneliner counter case.
JavaScript has optional separators (semicolons) with some rules to avoid ambiguity. Not everyone like it (I use semicolons in JS unnecessarily because I can't be bothered to learn the three edge cases they're not optional). I think there's something to be said for "commas are optional except in oneliners".
Languages like Go describe structs without commas. It took me some getting used to, but it's really not more or less readable in my opinion.
If readability was the only criteria perhaps YAML deserves to win. For some data XML is more readable, its complexity is the bigger problem.
People went all in with things like XSLT and namespaces, Java became the "language that transforms XML into stack traces" for no good reason and complex XML monstrosities were considered normal so when something simple came along it was a much needed breath of fresh air (we were even prepared to overlook its lack of comments). If it wasn't JSON it would have been something else, I'm sure.
YAML seems easier to read, but for me it's much harder to actually read properly since so many things are ambiguous. JSON is very explicit - you always know the data type you're looking at. YAML has a bunch of special cases that you have to remember, and these frequently lead to bugs.
The best example are boolean values. With JSON, you have `true` or `false`. With YAML you have all of these: y|Y|yes|Yes|YES|n|N|no|No|NO|true|True|TRUE|false|False|FALSE|on|On|ON|off|Off|OFF
We are trained from a very young age, as a rule, to see the comma. The semicolon, not so much. Semicolons are unusual: they are not part of story telling; they are from a forgotten grammar which is hardly used.
Pooh had wandered into the Hundred Acre Wood, and was standing in front of what had once been Owl's House. It didn't look at all like a house now; it looked like a tree which had been blown down; and as soon as a house looks like that, it is time you tried to find another one.
What do you mean, not part of story telling? There are 64 semicolons in The House at Pooh Corner; and by the way, nearly all of them are followed by conjunctions.
I get the argument, but I can't imagine a double-blind study of children or adults of any age that would find they see a semicolon versus a comma at a different rate. If anything, the reverse argument works; the semicolon is more obvious because it's so unusual.
I used it a bit at University - most notably it had an Occam system on it that wasn't available on the Sun workstations.
I'm curious about running a VMS system although the admin side looks a bit daunting. The thing I'd really like to do is run X-Windows on an emulator on my home lab, just to see it run.
I've never heard it either. Immigrants migrate overwhelmingly to escape terrible economic circumstances, wars, or simply to escape whatever oppression or danger is making their lives much worse than they could be.
However, you must remember the bit about limiting who is allowed in the country. If you were a German with a hypothetical burning desire to flip burgers at In-N-Out Burger, what are the chances of you getting a work visa? I would say effectively nil. So you're not going to see those people even if they would arrive in a world without borders.
> If you were a German with a hypothetical burning desire to flip burgers at In-N-Out Burger, what are the chances of you getting a work visa? I would say effectively nil. So you're not going to see those people even if they would arrive in a world without borders.
That's a great point. Legal immigration (to somewhere desireable) is not an option for much of the population. What interest do they have in preserving it?
Late reply but I did test this and I think the results show at least some originality when explicitly directed to not copy existing characters such as Indiana Jones[1] and the Predator[2]. Some elements of the original characters creep in, the archaeologist is wearing a fedora and the distinctly more skeletal bounty hunter appears to have a few dreads despite otherwise being bald, but they are distinct.
The article is typical Guardian rage bait hit piece. It took the opinions of a handful of engineers and tried to paint a picture of an industry wide trend in an effort to show moral superiority. It was patently false. There was no industry trend like this, as was obvious to anyone in the industry a the time. And as we all know today, Facebook had no problem growing by leaps and bounds since.
No, it isn’t. Compared to any of the Murdoch news sources it’s even handed and thorough. If anybody feels rage reading it perhaps some introspection is required.
Full disclosure: I spent a lot of my life making excuses for the Chrysler products I owned over the years when they failed to proceed. I currently drive a 2007 300C SRT8 which is wonderful and frustrating in equal measure, a perfect example of the DaimlerChrysler collision: Mercedes "we can make this good" and Chrysler "we can make it cheap" from which Mercedes never really recovered.
Chrysler might be the most frustrating manufacturers that continues to exist. Their corporate approach seems to have been "how can we make this thing so marginal it barely functions so we save some money". The awful wiring looms, nastiest plastics, shoddily engineered engines, stupid choices in fasteners.
I think you can take every brand Stellantis now owns and point to the Chrysler-isation of them resulting in the poor reliability scores each and every one of them now has. Chrysler is like a slow, creeping disease that infects every sister company.
This quote is the best though:
"One is “this is invention.” This, usually said in a negative manner, literally meant “nobody else is doing this. Why the hell are we gonna be the first?” (Yes, that says a lot about Chrysler’s overall philosophy, but we won’t get into that)."
Out of all the Chrysler products I've owned, the best ones were not engineered by Chrysler. The XJ Jeep Cherokee we bought new in 1996 was the last thing AMC engineered and they are wonderful. The ZJ (which was the first Jeep to have Chrysler engineering input) was terrible. You could tell the amount of cheaping out Chrysler did on that car and it shows. The electrics alone would send you mad.
I actually had a ZJ and liked it. I bought it heavily used in 2016, I think 250K miles or so? The heater was anemic, and it didn’t really like to go into or out of 4WD. I flushed the heater core and radiator, changed every fluid, adjusted the transmission kickdown, and replaced most of the suspension. It worked great, and gave me zero trouble. All of the electrics worked, including the various fluid sensors, like wiper fluid level.
Maybe I had a unicorn and didn’t know it. It was my first and only Jeep.
Maybe I just bought a bad ZJ. My daughter used it for a few years as her first car and despite it trying to set itself on fire she did have a certain affection for it.
I’d still crawl over 50 ZJ to get to one good XJ though.
No I suppose not. They will continue to make unreliable cars and if they put the Hemi back in I’ll probably line up to be a sucker in the second hand market again.
