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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 m

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.

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.