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Wow. I sympathize with this very, very strongly. I think this captures the root of the career frustration that I experience 70% of the time. I seem to spend wa

Wow. I sympathize with this very, very strongly. I think this captures the root of the career frustration that I experience 70% of the time. I seem to spend way too much time on what I call "guessing the magic password" - tracking down that one bit of punctuation in some obscure value in some xml configuration file that makes my whole system fail silently in one environment. I might spend 5 hours beating my head against a wall, only to finally figure out that this brittle system over here needed me to put some proprietary prefix on some host name in this one context. And at the end of it, I don't feel accomplished. I feel like I'm wasting my life! Figuring out which parameters to pass to which APIs in what order is a step above "guessing the magic password" - but it's not that big a step. A few things come to mind. You can try to make sure you are one of the people writing the libraries. You can implement the next platform and use all the aesthetic sense you have in you to try to make it a joy for others to use. Put yourself in the position of the programmers who write the systems that make the rest of us age faster, and try to do a better job. Or content yourself with getting your programming joy from your elegant side-projects.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I seem to spend way too much time on what I call "guessing the magic password" It's always been this way, but lately it's gotten worse and worse. You need to fix a problem. Your friends tell you about technology X which seems exactly what you need. So you pick it up, take a quick look at the samples, and wham! Within minutes the thing is working exactly like it is supposed to! Well almost. There's this little part that's broken that ruins the whole thing and then you spend hours or days (yes, perhaps weeks) digging up obscure configuration documentation and tweaking APIs in ancient Klingon, sacrificing turtles to Ba'al or whatever else it takes to get the damn thing working like it's supposed to. Then it's on to something new. The funny part of this whole story is -- when your friends ask you about how programming in X was, you are more than likely to brag about how easy it was to solve your problem. After all, the bulk of the problem was fixed almost instantly. Don't want to look like a dweeb. And so the cycle of pain continues.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I seem to spend way too much time on what I call "guessing the magic password" It's always been this way, but lately it's gotten worse and worse. You need to fix a problem. Your friends tell you about technology X which seems exactly what you need. So you pick it up, take a quick look at the samples, and wham! Within minutes the thing is working exactly like it is supposed to! Well almost. There's this little part that's broken that ruins the whole thing and then you spend hours or days (yes, perhaps weeks) digging up obscure configuration documentation and tweaking APIs in ancient Klingon, sacrificing turtles to Ba'al or whatever else it takes to get the damn thing working like it's supposed to. Then it's on to something new. The funny part of this whole story is -- when your friends ask you about how programming in X was, you are more than likely to brag about how easy it was to solve your problem. After all, the bulk of the problem was fixed almost instantly. Don't want to look like a dweeb. And so the cycle of pain continues.