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Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. We've been fed the narrative of economic success that many folks have forgot

Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. We've been fed the narrative of economic success that many folks have forgotten what personal success looks like. You can be successful in your career and still feel like a failure. Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between. I agree that you need to push yourself and discover who you are -- but the answers to those questions aren't going to be found at work. This sort of mid-life crisis is pretty common for career-focused people in their late 20s - early 30s and the solution is to find interests and friendships outside of work.

booleandilemma 7y ago
Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. Come back and say this after you’ve had to fix concurrency bugs or had to maintain some overseas contractor’s terrible codebase with no documentation.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  I have; I was a software engineer for over a decade before I moved up through architecture and laterally into product. Those problems are tedious. Not difficult.
  - not_kurt_godel 7y ago
    While I agree that there are parts of software engineering that are merely 'tedious' rather than 'hard', there are definitely parts that are legitimately 'hard' too. Just because you've had a particular set of experiences that you've classified as tedious doesn't mean your perspective represents the totality of the industry.
    - jcims 7y ago
      The problem here is that 'hard' is dimensionless and relative. There are people in Australia right now storming the gates of hell with a shovel and a hose because that's the job they signed up for. If that type of work is on the spectrum, I can't really think of anything in software/systems engineering that's 'hard'.
      - codr7 7y ago
        That sounds more like courage to me. Many of those shovel and hose carrying people would not make very successful software developers from my experience. It takes a certain kind of mindset; attention to detail and an ability to visualize and work at high levels of abstraction. To do it well, that is. Copy-pasting framework cruft until it sort of works is simply boring and the world would be a better place if we stopped doing that.
      - sweeneyrod 7y ago
        Hard as in unpleasant, obviously not. Hard as in mentally challenging, obviously yes.
  - wolco 7y ago
    10 years ago everything was tedious but possible because you had full control. Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult.
    - Ocerge 7y ago
      > Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult. That's interesting, I've never thought of it this way. I'm bored out of my mind at work more often than not due to not having full access to a monolith where it's actually possible to understand/work on the whole thing. Instead, I have to work until I hit a black box/3rd party and I have to either work around it or knock on the black box and ask the proprietors for help. I know that's a generalization, but it's a real cost of componentization of everything into services and the like, at least in the web world. It's _super_ fucking easy to get like 95% to a solution to almost anything on the web, but that last 5% where you spend the most time is like a constant root-canal.
- Itaxpica 7y ago
  Both of those sound tedious, neither of them sound particularly hard.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Would it qualify if time was a factor? I think you could almost say: if those things aren't hard you are working to slow and if you are bored you could benefit by raising your own expectations for yourself?
- opportune 7y ago
  Do those once and you’ve done them a hundred times. Vast majority of software engineering is tedious and boring. Almost no developing cutting edge optimal algorithms. Occasionally interesting design/architecture problems but the majority of the time spent on those is on writing docs, consensus building/communication, and implementation. It’s hard to find the motivation and force yourself to spend week after week chasing down bugs through poorly written code, but almost no task itself is challenging.
jspaetzel 7y ago
Software engineering can be hard and it can be tedious, either or neither... I think it's what you make of it. That's one of the most entrancing things about it to me. It's one of the few jobs that's truly "choose your own adventure". There's a thousand ways to solve every problem and you get to decide the difficulty at every turn.
- asdff 7y ago
  This is the sinister part to me, that the right way is so hard to find, if it even exists. Try something -> get error -> fix error -> working might be ok for most uses, but this probably isn't going to yield the best way of doing things. It's the equivalent of building a bridge, watching it fall apart, then figuring out how to artfully tie a rope around the bridge to keep it upright, rather than just designing a bridge that can stand on it's own. Most practical knowledge is therefore about artfully wrapping different ropes in clever ways around various problems, rather than fundamental theory on how to build the best design. As a result of these thoughts, I doubt my code, I doubt everyone's code, and I've lost that naive optimism about technology. Good enough is good enough to ship, after all.
  - Zanneth 7y ago
    Humanity has built a /lot/ of bridges that have fallen apart before we were able to learn how to do it correctly. It’s sometimes easy to forget just how young the software industry is.
rzzzt 7y ago
How do you figure out what really matters?
- Difwif 7y ago
  This one is long but I recommend trying to finish it. If it resonates at all you'll probably get sucked in to it before the halfway point. (The whole blog is fantastic) https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
- phkahler 7y ago
  It's a process. There is no manual, but some have found therapy helpful.
- vasco 7y ago
  Everyone spends their whole lives trying to answer that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
barry-cotter 7y ago
> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between. You’re going to spend more time at work than doing almost anything else during those years of your life where you work. Why not do something meaningful with those hours if you can? And if OP can get a job at Google they almost certainly can.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  What percentage of software engineers are doing "something meaningful"? That seems like a small number, no? Contrast with teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., almost all of whom I think would say they do something meaningful.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    I’ve been a teacher. It’s basically just a job. If you want meaning have your own children. I have no idea what proportion of software engineers consider what they do meaningful but the team who work on Google Scholar have done a great deal for me and I’m not even an academic. The drivers at Uber and Lyft and their riders have almost all had their lives improved by their existence. Amazon has made the experience of buying books so much better it’s ridiculous. Lambda School is taking 1000s of people from basically useless as programmers to a new career. Those are all pretty meaningful, at least as meaningful as your list, which seems be about displaying caring as much as actually effecting people’s lives. If you build something people want and it isn’t harmful you’re having an effect.
    - greenie_beans 7y ago
      I'm not sure I agree that Amazon has done meaningful work in the world of books. They've crippled the book industry. They've ran a ton of brick and mortar bookstores out of business, which has effectively destroyed community centers. There are other alternatives to Amazon that have "made the experience of buying books so much easier". Visit powells.com or alibris.com. And what they've done to the publishing industry is a whole nother beast.
djcapelis 7y ago
> Software engineering just isn't that hard 1) I agree that this is often true! Code can be pretty boring. That doesn’t mean there are no interesting problems that you can tackle with programming. It just means most people work on incredibly boring stuff and think that’s all there is and totally fine. Find something that’s a better use of your time. 2) There is more and less difficult software engineering. If yours is really boring why wouldn’t you try something more challenging? It doesn’t always pay as well but it can be a lot less terrible to experience on a daily basis. 3) Most of the hardest problems in making interesting technology that touches the world isn’t in exactly how the code is written. Learning this is the first step towards starting to be equipped to tackle the actually hard problems in our field. Which you could work on directly, if you wanted. None of this is to say that anyone has to do this. You don’t have to have fulfillment in your job. Though you and most others should frankly probably look around and make sure the code you’re writing is doing actually good things in the world rather than bad ones, that’s an ethical obligation but one that is pretty orthogonal whether or not you’re working on interesting problems. (If people optimize solely for money though, they bend towards writing code that makes that empowers companies over people and generally makes the world a worst place. People have a responsibility to evaluate this and try and avoid the ones that don’t.) Mostly: it’s fine to make the choice to not work on something fulfilling. But stating that there’s nothing fulfilling to work on in this world is just nonsense, defeatist and mostly means you’ve resigned yourself and everyone who takes your advice to unfulfilling, boring and miserable work that doesn’t grow you worth a damn. And that probably sucks. So why take that approach?
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  If you want to do this, and you can consistently find interesting work, then go for it! What I mean by "these jobs aren't hard" is that one person is easy to replace, and you are not guaranteed a job in the future just because you have one now. There are always high periods and low periods in a person's career, and you have to mentally / emotionally prepare for those. Tech has a nasty age bias once you hit 40, and I've seen people fall apart when they get laid off and finding a new job is hard for reasons that aren't exactly fair. Finding meaning in your life outside your job is how you keep sane when economic circumstances aren't working in your favor.
dunkelheit 7y ago
> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life Yeah, but where is the guarantee that therapy really un-brainwashes instead of re-brainwashing you to just be content with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I guess it is a totally rational strategy if you want to maximize happiness (whatever that means) but it still feels like a cop-out.
- mpmpmpmp 7y ago
  It's a cop out to try and find a way to be happy regardless of your circumstance in life? What standards for life is that?
soulofmischief 7y ago
> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Surely that depends on the problem being solved, right? Some problems are harder than others. The variety of knowledge domains presented though the lens of engineering here at HN always surprises me.
- tinco 7y ago
  I think it's just the perspective. Most software engineering that provides significant value to businesses isn't very hard from the perspective of the person doing it. It just requires a shit ton of specific knowledge, and a bunch of time and tedious work. Of course mustering those things is hard. Try and find someone to replace you in all the things you do, and see how much work they have to put into it. Depending on how deep you're into it, or on how wide the spectrum is, it might even require a really talented person to achieve the skill required to not find the work hard ;)
aplummer 7y ago
> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. I find doing it well constantly really hard.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. If you're ever feeling this way, move to a games company. Plenty of hard programming problems...
thrills 7y ago
> Software engineering just isn't that hard. That doesn't even make sense. Software engineering is using software to solve problems. How hard software engineering is depends entirely on the problem you are trying to solve.
itsmefaz 7y ago
> That your job is not your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between This hit me very hard.
thewileyone 7y ago
"Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. " This is every job after you've mastered everything you need to be successful. The key is to keep learning more or just completely find a new challenge. " ... find interests and friendships outside of work." 100% agree.

booleandilemma 7y ago

Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. Come back and say this after you’ve had to fix concurrency bugs or had to maintain some overseas contractor’s terrible codebase with no documentation.

wayoutthere 7y ago
I have; I was a software engineer for over a decade before I moved up through architecture and laterally into product. Those problems are tedious. Not difficult.
- not_kurt_godel 7y ago
  While I agree that there are parts of software engineering that are merely 'tedious' rather than 'hard', there are definitely parts that are legitimately 'hard' too. Just because you've had a particular set of experiences that you've classified as tedious doesn't mean your perspective represents the totality of the industry.
  - jcims 7y ago
    The problem here is that 'hard' is dimensionless and relative. There are people in Australia right now storming the gates of hell with a shovel and a hose because that's the job they signed up for. If that type of work is on the spectrum, I can't really think of anything in software/systems engineering that's 'hard'.
    - codr7 7y ago
      That sounds more like courage to me. Many of those shovel and hose carrying people would not make very successful software developers from my experience. It takes a certain kind of mindset; attention to detail and an ability to visualize and work at high levels of abstraction. To do it well, that is. Copy-pasting framework cruft until it sort of works is simply boring and the world would be a better place if we stopped doing that.
    - sweeneyrod 7y ago
      Hard as in unpleasant, obviously not. Hard as in mentally challenging, obviously yes.
- wolco 7y ago
  10 years ago everything was tedious but possible because you had full control. Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult.
  - Ocerge 7y ago
    > Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult. That's interesting, I've never thought of it this way. I'm bored out of my mind at work more often than not due to not having full access to a monolith where it's actually possible to understand/work on the whole thing. Instead, I have to work until I hit a black box/3rd party and I have to either work around it or knock on the black box and ask the proprietors for help. I know that's a generalization, but it's a real cost of componentization of everything into services and the like, at least in the web world. It's _super_ fucking easy to get like 95% to a solution to almost anything on the web, but that last 5% where you spend the most time is like a constant root-canal.
Itaxpica 7y ago
Both of those sound tedious, neither of them sound particularly hard.
- eitland 7y ago
  Would it qualify if time was a factor? I think you could almost say: if those things aren't hard you are working to slow and if you are bored you could benefit by raising your own expectations for yourself?
opportune 7y ago
Do those once and you’ve done them a hundred times. Vast majority of software engineering is tedious and boring. Almost no developing cutting edge optimal algorithms. Occasionally interesting design/architecture problems but the majority of the time spent on those is on writing docs, consensus building/communication, and implementation. It’s hard to find the motivation and force yourself to spend week after week chasing down bugs through poorly written code, but almost no task itself is challenging.

jspaetzel 7y ago

Software engineering can be hard and it can be tedious, either or neither... I think it's what you make of it. That's one of the most entrancing things about it to me. It's one of the few jobs that's truly "choose your own adventure". There's a thousand ways to solve every problem and you get to decide the difficulty at every turn.

asdff 7y ago
This is the sinister part to me, that the right way is so hard to find, if it even exists. Try something -> get error -> fix error -> working might be ok for most uses, but this probably isn't going to yield the best way of doing things. It's the equivalent of building a bridge, watching it fall apart, then figuring out how to artfully tie a rope around the bridge to keep it upright, rather than just designing a bridge that can stand on it's own. Most practical knowledge is therefore about artfully wrapping different ropes in clever ways around various problems, rather than fundamental theory on how to build the best design. As a result of these thoughts, I doubt my code, I doubt everyone's code, and I've lost that naive optimism about technology. Good enough is good enough to ship, after all.
- Zanneth 7y ago
  Humanity has built a /lot/ of bridges that have fallen apart before we were able to learn how to do it correctly. It’s sometimes easy to forget just how young the software industry is.

rzzzt 7y ago

How do you figure out what really matters?

Difwif 7y ago
This one is long but I recommend trying to finish it. If it resonates at all you'll probably get sucked in to it before the halfway point. (The whole blog is fantastic) https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
phkahler 7y ago
It's a process. There is no manual, but some have found therapy helpful.
vasco 7y ago
Everyone spends their whole lives trying to answer that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

barry-cotter 7y ago

> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between. You’re going to spend more time at work than doing almost anything else during those years of your life where you work. Why not do something meaningful with those hours if you can? And if OP can get a job at Google they almost certainly can.

CydeWeys 7y ago
What percentage of software engineers are doing "something meaningful"? That seems like a small number, no? Contrast with teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, etc., almost all of whom I think would say they do something meaningful.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  I’ve been a teacher. It’s basically just a job. If you want meaning have your own children. I have no idea what proportion of software engineers consider what they do meaningful but the team who work on Google Scholar have done a great deal for me and I’m not even an academic. The drivers at Uber and Lyft and their riders have almost all had their lives improved by their existence. Amazon has made the experience of buying books so much better it’s ridiculous. Lambda School is taking 1000s of people from basically useless as programmers to a new career. Those are all pretty meaningful, at least as meaningful as your list, which seems be about displaying caring as much as actually effecting people’s lives. If you build something people want and it isn’t harmful you’re having an effect.
  - greenie_beans 7y ago
    I'm not sure I agree that Amazon has done meaningful work in the world of books. They've crippled the book industry. They've ran a ton of brick and mortar bookstores out of business, which has effectively destroyed community centers. There are other alternatives to Amazon that have "made the experience of buying books so much easier". Visit powells.com or alibris.com. And what they've done to the publishing industry is a whole nother beast.

djcapelis 7y ago

> Software engineering just isn't that hard 1) I agree that this is often true! Code can be pretty boring. That doesn’t mean there are no interesting problems that you can tackle with programming. It just means most people work on incredibly boring stuff and think that’s all there is and totally fine. Find something that’s a better use of your time. 2) There is more and less difficult software engineering. If yours is really boring why wouldn’t you try something more challenging? It doesn’t always pay as well but it can be a lot less terrible to experience on a daily basis. 3) Most of the hardest problems in making interesting technology that touches the world isn’t in exactly how the code is written. Learning this is the first step towards starting to be equipped to tackle the actually hard problems in our field. Which you could work on directly, if you wanted. None of this is to say that anyone has to do this. You don’t have to have fulfillment in your job. Though you and most others should frankly probably look around and make sure the code you’re writing is doing actually good things in the world rather than bad ones, that’s an ethical obligation but one that is pretty orthogonal whether or not you’re working on interesting problems. (If people optimize solely for money though, they bend towards writing code that makes that empowers companies over people and generally makes the world a worst place. People have a responsibility to evaluate this and try and avoid the ones that don’t.) Mostly: it’s fine to make the choice to not work on something fulfilling. But stating that there’s nothing fulfilling to work on in this world is just nonsense, defeatist and mostly means you’ve resigned yourself and everyone who takes your advice to unfulfilling, boring and miserable work that doesn’t grow you worth a damn. And that probably sucks. So why take that approach?

wayoutthere 7y ago
If you want to do this, and you can consistently find interesting work, then go for it! What I mean by "these jobs aren't hard" is that one person is easy to replace, and you are not guaranteed a job in the future just because you have one now. There are always high periods and low periods in a person's career, and you have to mentally / emotionally prepare for those. Tech has a nasty age bias once you hit 40, and I've seen people fall apart when they get laid off and finding a new job is hard for reasons that aren't exactly fair. Finding meaning in your life outside your job is how you keep sane when economic circumstances aren't working in your favor.

dunkelheit 7y ago

> Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life Yeah, but where is the guarantee that therapy really un-brainwashes instead of re-brainwashing you to just be content with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. I guess it is a totally rational strategy if you want to maximize happiness (whatever that means) but it still feels like a cop-out.

mpmpmpmp 7y ago
It's a cop out to try and find a way to be happy regardless of your circumstance in life? What standards for life is that?

soulofmischief 7y ago

> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Surely that depends on the problem being solved, right? Some problems are harder than others. The variety of knowledge domains presented though the lens of engineering here at HN always surprises me.

tinco 7y ago
I think it's just the perspective. Most software engineering that provides significant value to businesses isn't very hard from the perspective of the person doing it. It just requires a shit ton of specific knowledge, and a bunch of time and tedious work. Of course mustering those things is hard. Try and find someone to replace you in all the things you do, and see how much work they have to put into it. Depending on how deep you're into it, or on how wide the spectrum is, it might even require a really talented person to achieve the skill required to not find the work hard ;)

aplummer 7y ago

> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. I find doing it well constantly really hard.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

> Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. If you're ever feeling this way, move to a games company. Plenty of hard programming problems...

thrills 7y ago

> Software engineering just isn't that hard. That doesn't even make sense. Software engineering is using software to solve problems. How hard software engineering is depends entirely on the problem you are trying to solve.

itsmefaz 7y ago

> That your job is not your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then focus on that, and use your job to fill the boring hours in between This hit me very hard.

thewileyone 7y ago

"Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. " This is every job after you've mastered everything you need to be successful. The key is to keep learning more or just completely find a new challenge. " ... find interests and friendships outside of work." 100% agree.