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There's a moral, but the author couldn't find it. The moral is not "don't distract programmers" but: Programmers need to grow up. If you program just to progr

There's a moral, but the author couldn't find it. The moral is not "don't distract programmers" but: Programmers need to grow up. If you program just to program, or "solve problems" as so many put it, then of course, you will be miserable when your pure programming is disrupted. But work on something bigger - something you believe in - which gives you a big-picture outlook, you'll look at programming as the means to your end. And you will suffer a lot less. Even with no technical change. Because the pleasure you experience will be mostly to do with achieving your bigger goal, rather than (just) crafting the most beautiful line of code. So many of the programmers I know set themselves up to be used as tools by people with ideas, because they claim they only care about "solving problems." So they get themselves hired by people with "interesting problems." And then, because they end up miserable, they quit in short order (1 year, 2 years, or less)... and repeat the cycle again. It's not that jobs are inherently terrible, but that the way certain groups of very smart and capable people LOOK at jobs. Granted, lots of people who want to "do a startup" do the same thing. They look for an interesting problem, not a bigger thing they want to achieve in the world. Their work is all about "the problem," and so they get stuck... and work on it for 1 year or 2, before they quit and look for another, more interesting problem.

cool-RR 16y ago
"But work on something bigger - something you believe in - which gives you a big-picture outlook" What is this "something bigger" and how is it any better than the goal of "living a nice, comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life"?
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  That's something bigger. And if having to (e.g.) constantly code HTML in IE6 interferes with that goal... you need to stop constantly coding HTML in IE6. The underlying fallacy of the original essay is that the life of a programmer consists of a semi-infinite series of programming tasks that only stop when you die. Well, yeah, if you think like an assembly-line worker this is true, but you need not do so. In real-world projects, you do have to deal with HTML, but you don't have to do so to an infinite extent. You only have to write enough HTML to make all the web pages you need to fuel the rest of your comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life. (For some, this is "near zero": PG wrote all the HTML for this site five years ago, probably in less than two hours, and it's working out just fine.) HN has been over this many times. If you don't enjoy ritual grunt work, get out of the piecework business and solve a problem. [1] Nobody really knows how much work, say, the folks behind the scenes at 37signals do. We don't pay them by the hour, or by the line of code. We pay them for their product. If they can produce the product in half the time, they get the other half of the time to invest in other things. They don't have to spend that extra time programming in systems they hate. --- [1] This ties into my Programmer Aging Hypothesis: Old "programmers" are hard to find not because their brains wither and die, or whatever, but because most of them have learned enough to brand their work as something other than "programming".
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- frostbytten 16y ago
  I was a "pure programmer", programming for the sake of programming for a long time. Then I started pushing my boundaries by learning new languages for every new project, not necessarily because it was best suited but because pure programming can become dull if there isn't a real impact behind it. Now, I've moved positions and am programming in one of the first languages I learned (PHP) and although I feel the limitations of the language, the project is something I believe has potential to impact a lot of people in a beneficial way and am sold out behind the idea. It is my "something bigger." And, unfortunately, I don't necessarily have the "nice, comfortable" part of life down.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  Nobody is ever satisfied with being "satisfied." That's why "satisfied" people complain about all the minor annoyances they bear, such as the whole point of the original article. If you think hard about it, you'll realize that you'd rather be engaged than "satisfied."

cool-RR 16y ago

"But work on something bigger - something you believe in - which gives you a big-picture outlook" What is this "something bigger" and how is it any better than the goal of "living a nice, comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life"?

mechanical_fish 16y ago
That's something bigger. And if having to (e.g.) constantly code HTML in IE6 interferes with that goal... you need to stop constantly coding HTML in IE6. The underlying fallacy of the original essay is that the life of a programmer consists of a semi-infinite series of programming tasks that only stop when you die. Well, yeah, if you think like an assembly-line worker this is true, but you need not do so. In real-world projects, you do have to deal with HTML, but you don't have to do so to an infinite extent. You only have to write enough HTML to make all the web pages you need to fuel the rest of your comfortable, intellectually-satisfying life. (For some, this is "near zero": PG wrote all the HTML for this site five years ago, probably in less than two hours, and it's working out just fine.) HN has been over this many times. If you don't enjoy ritual grunt work, get out of the piecework business and solve a problem. [1] Nobody really knows how much work, say, the folks behind the scenes at 37signals do. We don't pay them by the hour, or by the line of code. We pay them for their product. If they can produce the product in half the time, they get the other half of the time to invest in other things. They don't have to spend that extra time programming in systems they hate. --- [1] This ties into my Programmer Aging Hypothesis: Old "programmers" are hard to find not because their brains wither and die, or whatever, but because most of them have learned enough to brand their work as something other than "programming".
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
frostbytten 16y ago
I was a "pure programmer", programming for the sake of programming for a long time. Then I started pushing my boundaries by learning new languages for every new project, not necessarily because it was best suited but because pure programming can become dull if there isn't a real impact behind it. Now, I've moved positions and am programming in one of the first languages I learned (PHP) and although I feel the limitations of the language, the project is something I believe has potential to impact a lot of people in a beneficial way and am sold out behind the idea. It is my "something bigger." And, unfortunately, I don't necessarily have the "nice, comfortable" part of life down.
ahoyhere 16y ago
Nobody is ever satisfied with being "satisfied." That's why "satisfied" people complain about all the minor annoyances they bear, such as the whole point of the original article. If you think hard about it, you'll realize that you'd rather be engaged than "satisfied."