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Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple, because they truly enjoy it and, many times, have learnt it as a hobby. Thei

Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple, because they truly enjoy it and, many times, have learnt it as a hobby. Their career choice have never been a masterplan on winning big, but it just happened to be so, so they feel like they're fraud. Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. We're talking weekends and night of trying out stuff, hacking stuff, reading, learning, etc. It's often an invisible investment, because it's a hobby and it doesn't feel like work. In the end, programmers don't really need to dig that far to reach a point where they're good at building stuff using enough layers of knowledge to make what they do absolutely obscure to others. Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property; but programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options, HTTP status codes, API interfaces, etc. It seems like highly advanced knowledge to be able to solve a health problem from a set of symptoms, but from the point of view of the layman, solving a computer problem from an error message is about as magic as it gets.

pixl97 7y ago
>Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property You're making a lot of assumptions on the hobbies people have based upon your environment. About the only thing the two fields you listed differ from programming is actual legal barriers of entry.
- kgran 7y ago
  s/nobody/insignificant minority/
  - jhpankow 7y ago
    "programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options" ha. case in point.
rayhendricks 7y ago
Most people do not have a habit of reading the law, however this is a path to becoming a lawyer in a few states, including California. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_costs_of_law_school_these_students_try_reading_law_path_t http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_cos...
_bxg1 7y ago
> Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple In my experience it's exactly the opposite. People who do nothing but write glue code between major services think they're hot stuff. One of my personal career goals is to stay as far away from simple glue code as I can. Unfortunately it makes up most of our field right now. But it seems like an especially precarious place to be.
- NeverFade 7y ago
  Welcome to the wonderful world of Dunning-Kruger. Folks in the middle of the curve are blissfully unaware how much there is to know and how many difficult problems must be solved to put together those backend services they are gluing.
- amelius 7y ago
  I think, therefore, we should try to use different labels for different kinds of developers as much as we can. E.g. "software engineer", and "programmer" should be labels for different roles/capabilities, as should be "computer scientist". Using the terminology incorrectly should be frowned upon, similarly to how this goes in other disciplines.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    I'm not sure the field is mature enough yet for us to be splitting things up like that. I've worked in performance critical code, research science code, website optimization, ads infrastructure, browser testing, experimentation frameworks, dumbphone mobile payments, and other things, in C, C++, Python, JS, Bash, and Java. Most of my coworkers have a similarly wide range of experience. These have a lot of core skills in common, both hard and soft, but it's such a mishmash of things that trying to impose precision via labels doesn't seem helpful to me.
    - deadmutex 7y ago
      Perhaps this is due to the location where you work.
agumonkey 7y ago
This is true, I had neighbor cringe hard when I didn't know how much to charge for assistance. The only way for me to somehow value what I do is to compare how much usual jobs charge even. I dont like this because it causes inflation and unworthy motives (and probably harms society). But it's how I manage to not die giving time for free. One other way would be to demonstrate true mastery, but with the breadth of computing and its ever changing nature it's borderline not possible.
ikeboy 7y ago
I happen to have a hobby of reading law cases on intellectual property that was sparked by my business being affected by IP issues. I used to read all kinds of cases as a hobby even before that, for fun. I remember reading through much of Ross Ulbricht's trial documents and comparing it to what his advocates were claiming, which was enlightening.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Yep. The SCO UNIX trial and the ongoing oracle v google cases are exceptionally fun reads. Other notable public narrative vs reality cases included OJ Simpson, the Zimmerman guy, and what’s happening right now with Trump (the treason word gets thrown around so often yet no one actually know what that means legally)
  - wbl 7y ago
    Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, providing aid and comfort. It's in the Constitution.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
      undefined in that sentence: almost every word. "Levying"? "War" ? "Enemies"? This is why we have both a Constitution and a body of law. The Constitution uses words, the law defines what they mean.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        Those words are not difficult to define or understand. Only a nihilist claims nothing is inherently knowable. It's possible to understand what treason is, just as it's possible for something to skirt the edge of it and require more nuance and thought.
        o-__-o 7y ago
        The words Paul Davis used are defined in the constitution, it’s a legal document. Everything has a legal definition. Legal texts are interpreted by the judicial branch which sets the limits of nuance and thought. As Paul Davis showed, however, not everyone reads legal texts as a hobby.. so one should really delegate that work to someone who does (just like I won’t ask my plumber to create some ML models for me)
michaelcampbell 7y ago
> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) Cite? Let me guess, you're a self-trained coder.
- ben174 7y ago
  There is a reason senior role hiring almost never cares about degrees on your resume. Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.
  - rch 7y ago
    This could be a temporary condition. The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends). However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.
    - Enginerrrd 7y ago
      Yes and no. One of the big problems with coursework at the undergrad level is you aren't typically actually practicing idea and model genesis. This is an important skill, and one that those hobbyists have practiced a lot.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Entirely temporary. I was rejected by google from 2006-2012 because I didn’t have a degree. Suddenly they need more programmers and they drop that requirement. Never mind I have formal CS training, they required a piece of paper. I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.
odyssey7 7y ago
Wondering if I'm a fraud because I can name about as many bones as bash commands. chmod's connected to, access permissions (Maybe I'll come up with the whole song if I ever teach CS in grade school.)
- schwartzworld 7y ago
  sudo !!
o-__-o 7y ago
> Nobody has a hobby of learning the law texts on intellectual property Speak for yourself buddy, i enjoy pulling up the Cornell law or my local jurisdictions legislative website to fully understand the laws around me. In college my hobby was reading the laws about public nuisances and noise violations (and none of our parties were ever shutdown!). I still do this today to fully educate myself. Along with other nonstandard hobbies like flying planes, studying neuroscience or genetics, and owning a server farm for fun.. > Many programmers have a bias in thinking I think the odds of finding hobbies outside of software and hardware on HN is probably lower than the general public, but the very reason we have specialists in other fields is because of their dedication to their hobbies!
- fragsworth 7y ago
  They were exaggerating, there are going to be counterexamples but their point still stands...
tlbsofware 7y ago
> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well. I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?
- ves 7y ago
  the amount of programming/hour you get at a job vs on a hobby project is very different, though, and tends to go down as you get more responsibility. Not that the other work you do instead of programming, like problem decomposition, spec authoring, review, etc., isn’t useful for improving your programming skills, but not having to coordinate with anyone means you can just write code on a hobby project. I recently lead a project and even with a tight schedule and trying to focus on implementing as much as possible I spent maybe 30% of my time programming. Note further that I don’t really do any programming outside of work and don’t think it’s necessary or even useful to spend that much extra time programming. Iterating implementation ideas like a scientist is the only way I’ve improved and that’s fairly independent of time spent.
yibg 7y ago
You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for most cases. I’ve worked at 2 of the FANG companies where compensations is on par or higher than doctors / lawyers / consultants etc. Sure we all pulled some nights and weekends and did some reading and experimentation on the side, but for the most part it was off to the pub / go home at 6. My evenings and weekends were mostly spent doing “normal” things like playing games, hanging out with friends etc. outside of startups I don’t know any programmers pulling 80 hour weeks regularly, including side projects and self learning.
- milankragujevic 7y ago
  I don't know any lawyers or doctors pulling 80 hour weeks regularly without billing extra for it.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    You don't know any doctors who have ever done a residency?
    - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
      I wouldn’t say that “Regularly” means “only during the first 3 years of your career”
      - sukilot 7y ago
        and 4 years of medical school. A programmer can earn enough to retire before a doctor finishes their training.
  - yibg 7y ago
    I know quite a few lawyers at the larger firms doing 70 - 80 hour weeks on a regular basis. The goal of course is making partner, but few will get there. Consultants and bankers ditto.
- 7y ago
piokoch 7y ago
"Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property;" I don't know anyone who likes learning about bones, but I have actually met a guy, who was really passionate about quirks of IP related laws (my company hired him as consultant to clarify some mundane and fuzzy issues we had with usage of fragments of published academic books). He could talk for hours about various cases he worked on and was citing paragraphs of some obscure laws, going with true passion into detailed analysis how a given case looks in view of local Polish, Romanian, EU and international regulations. I would compare him to Rust, Lisp advocates easily.

pixl97 7y ago

>Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property You're making a lot of assumptions on the hobbies people have based upon your environment. About the only thing the two fields you listed differ from programming is actual legal barriers of entry.

kgran 7y ago
s/nobody/insignificant minority/
- jhpankow 7y ago
  "programmers most likely know by heart a sizable bunch of Bash commands and their options" ha. case in point.

rayhendricks 7y ago

Most people do not have a habit of reading the law, however this is a path to becoming a lawyer in a few states, including California. http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_costs_of_law_school_these_students_try_reading_law_path_t http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/want_to_avoid_the_cos...

_bxg1 7y ago

> Many programmers have a bias in thinking that what they're doing is easy or simple In my experience it's exactly the opposite. People who do nothing but write glue code between major services think they're hot stuff. One of my personal career goals is to stay as far away from simple glue code as I can. Unfortunately it makes up most of our field right now. But it seems like an especially precarious place to be.

NeverFade 7y ago
Welcome to the wonderful world of Dunning-Kruger. Folks in the middle of the curve are blissfully unaware how much there is to know and how many difficult problems must be solved to put together those backend services they are gluing.
amelius 7y ago
I think, therefore, we should try to use different labels for different kinds of developers as much as we can. E.g. "software engineer", and "programmer" should be labels for different roles/capabilities, as should be "computer scientist". Using the terminology incorrectly should be frowned upon, similarly to how this goes in other disciplines.
- jefftk 7y ago
  I'm not sure the field is mature enough yet for us to be splitting things up like that. I've worked in performance critical code, research science code, website optimization, ads infrastructure, browser testing, experimentation frameworks, dumbphone mobile payments, and other things, in C, C++, Python, JS, Bash, and Java. Most of my coworkers have a similarly wide range of experience. These have a lot of core skills in common, both hard and soft, but it's such a mishmash of things that trying to impose precision via labels doesn't seem helpful to me.
  - deadmutex 7y ago
    Perhaps this is due to the location where you work.

agumonkey 7y ago

This is true, I had neighbor cringe hard when I didn't know how much to charge for assistance. The only way for me to somehow value what I do is to compare how much usual jobs charge even. I dont like this because it causes inflation and unworthy motives (and probably harms society). But it's how I manage to not die giving time for free. One other way would be to demonstrate true mastery, but with the breadth of computing and its ever changing nature it's borderline not possible.

ikeboy 7y ago

I happen to have a hobby of reading law cases on intellectual property that was sparked by my business being affected by IP issues. I used to read all kinds of cases as a hobby even before that, for fun. I remember reading through much of Ross Ulbricht's trial documents and comparing it to what his advocates were claiming, which was enlightening.

o-__-o 7y ago
Yep. The SCO UNIX trial and the ongoing oracle v google cases are exceptionally fun reads. Other notable public narrative vs reality cases included OJ Simpson, the Zimmerman guy, and what’s happening right now with Trump (the treason word gets thrown around so often yet no one actually know what that means legally)
- wbl 7y ago
  Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them or in adhering to their enemies, providing aid and comfort. It's in the Constitution.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    undefined in that sentence: almost every word. "Levying"? "War" ? "Enemies"? This is why we have both a Constitution and a body of law. The Constitution uses words, the law defines what they mean.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      Those words are not difficult to define or understand. Only a nihilist claims nothing is inherently knowable. It's possible to understand what treason is, just as it's possible for something to skirt the edge of it and require more nuance and thought.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        The words Paul Davis used are defined in the constitution, it’s a legal document. Everything has a legal definition. Legal texts are interpreted by the judicial branch which sets the limits of nuance and thought. As Paul Davis showed, however, not everyone reads legal texts as a hobby.. so one should really delegate that work to someone who does (just like I won’t ask my plumber to create some ML models for me)

michaelcampbell 7y ago

> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) Cite? Let me guess, you're a self-trained coder.

ben174 7y ago
There is a reason senior role hiring almost never cares about degrees on your resume. Instead they’re looking at your community contributions and work experience.
- rch 7y ago
  This could be a temporary condition. The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends). However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.
  - Enginerrrd 7y ago
    Yes and no. One of the big problems with coursework at the undergrad level is you aren't typically actually practicing idea and model genesis. This is an important skill, and one that those hobbyists have practiced a lot.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Entirely temporary. I was rejected by google from 2006-2012 because I didn’t have a degree. Suddenly they need more programmers and they drop that requirement. Never mind I have formal CS training, they required a piece of paper. I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.

odyssey7 7y ago

Wondering if I'm a fraud because I can name about as many bones as bash commands. chmod's connected to, access permissions (Maybe I'll come up with the whole song if I ever teach CS in grade school.)

schwartzworld 7y ago
sudo !!

o-__-o 7y ago

> Nobody has a hobby of learning the law texts on intellectual property Speak for yourself buddy, i enjoy pulling up the Cornell law or my local jurisdictions legislative website to fully understand the laws around me. In college my hobby was reading the laws about public nuisances and noise violations (and none of our parties were ever shutdown!). I still do this today to fully educate myself. Along with other nonstandard hobbies like flying planes, studying neuroscience or genetics, and owning a server farm for fun.. > Many programmers have a bias in thinking I think the odds of finding hobbies outside of software and hardware on HN is probably lower than the general public, but the very reason we have specialists in other fields is because of their dedication to their hobbies!

fragsworth 7y ago
They were exaggerating, there are going to be counterexamples but their point still stands...

tlbsofware 7y ago

> Hobbyist programmers (who usually end up being the best ones) usually put great investment into their career by doing side projects on their free time. Who’s to say those that went to school didn’t enjoy the learning process of their degree? They are by this definition giving up free time in order to learn something and are as well making a great investment in not only time but money as well. I think that this needs to be reread as “Programmers who are passionate about what they do usually end up being the best at what they do” since if you think about it, they are dedicating ~40 hrs a week to their hobby. Who’s to say someone can’t excel in a hobby if they can’t dedicate more than that? What about people who have more than 1 hobby?

ves 7y ago
the amount of programming/hour you get at a job vs on a hobby project is very different, though, and tends to go down as you get more responsibility. Not that the other work you do instead of programming, like problem decomposition, spec authoring, review, etc., isn’t useful for improving your programming skills, but not having to coordinate with anyone means you can just write code on a hobby project. I recently lead a project and even with a tight schedule and trying to focus on implementing as much as possible I spent maybe 30% of my time programming. Note further that I don’t really do any programming outside of work and don’t think it’s necessary or even useful to spend that much extra time programming. Iterating implementation ideas like a scientist is the only way I’ve improved and that’s fairly independent of time spent.

yibg 7y ago

You are implying the amount of difficulty / effort put in by programmers is as great as for other highly paid professions. I just don’t think this is true for most cases. I’ve worked at 2 of the FANG companies where compensations is on par or higher than doctors / lawyers / consultants etc. Sure we all pulled some nights and weekends and did some reading and experimentation on the side, but for the most part it was off to the pub / go home at 6. My evenings and weekends were mostly spent doing “normal” things like playing games, hanging out with friends etc. outside of startups I don’t know any programmers pulling 80 hour weeks regularly, including side projects and self learning.

milankragujevic 7y ago
I don't know any lawyers or doctors pulling 80 hour weeks regularly without billing extra for it.
- akiselev 7y ago
  You don't know any doctors who have ever done a residency?
  - buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
    I wouldn’t say that “Regularly” means “only during the first 3 years of your career”
    - sukilot 7y ago
      and 4 years of medical school. A programmer can earn enough to retire before a doctor finishes their training.
- yibg 7y ago
  I know quite a few lawyers at the larger firms doing 70 - 80 hour weeks on a regular basis. The goal of course is making partner, but few will get there. Consultants and bankers ditto.
7y ago

piokoch 7y ago

"Nobody has a hobby of learning by heart the bones in the human body or the law texts on intellectual property;" I don't know anyone who likes learning about bones, but I have actually met a guy, who was really passionate about quirks of IP related laws (my company hired him as consultant to clarify some mundane and fuzzy issues we had with usage of fragments of published academic books). He could talk for hours about various cases he worked on and was citing paragraphs of some obscure laws, going with true passion into detailed analysis how a given case looks in view of local Polish, Romanian, EU and international regulations. I would compare him to Rust, Lisp advocates easily.