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> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career I'm a little triggered by this headline. I understand what it means, and I agree there's some t
by quicklime 6y ago
> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career
I'm a little triggered by this headline. I understand what it means, and I agree there's some truth to it. It can be good advice when given to developers who haven't yet figured out that their job is not exclusively to write code.
But in my company (which is a big non-tech corporate) I've noticed that a similar phrase often gets used by non-technical people to belittle the work that software developers do. The exact wording varies, but the sentiment is basically that technical problems are easy, and can safely be outsourced to the lowest bidder, as long as there's a good Project Manager who can enforce the right methodology and processes. It's the problems that require "soft" skills that are difficult - these are the kind that Thought Leaders and Influencers work on - and we need to pay a premium for people who can solve these problems.
In reality, technical and non-technical problems are both difficult in their own ways, and both occupy a space that ranges from trivial to impossible.
In terms of career advice, I'd really suggest not perpetuating this myth. One of the tactics that the book lists is "marketing yourself", and repeating the idea that coding is easy (especially to non-technical people) undermines your career and that of your technical colleagues.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoTo be honest, the technical problems are the easy thing in most companies since they just need a simple CRUD app and anything you do will be magic to most people regardless. The politics are the difficult part of most work in this industry. Everyone has an agenda (which is not a bad thing) and serving multiple agendas will make your technical problems even worse.
- foota 6y agoJust because something (a simple CRUD app) seems simple to you, doesn't mean it'll be easy for everyone, in particular if you don't know what the quick ways are of doing it.
- sharadov 6y agoDepends where you work, if it's a dinky ecommerce site with no scalability issues, then coding is not a problem. But if it's a real product company with AI/ML engineering problems, then coding definitely is.
- Mandatum 6y ago> a real product company with AI/ML engineering problems I've worked in just about every industry in my career, yet to find a place where those engineering specialisations are make-or-break, or even necessary.
- yowmamasita 6y agoSame. Most product startups I've worked on where the business model seemed to be working, always the stability and scalability of the platform are the main problems.
- bluntfang 6y agoCoding isn't the hard part of your job, it's convincing people that outsourcing isn't going to result in good outcomes. The reason why they won't result in good outcomes: * maintenance is hard * writing quality code is hard * CI/CD is hard * requirements gathering is hard etc.
- canadev 6y agoSometimes coding is hard in and of itself.
- bluntfang 6y agoI digress on my opinion on whether coding is hard or not, but it's certainly not as hard as other things.
- gautamdivgi 6y agoHow much success have you had? Not trying to be snarky - but the problem in corporates is there are no "lag indicators" of success. The success of a manager is defined as getting to a specific cost structure, there is no measure if that cost structure delivers the results. And in a lot of big corporations what's good for your career and what's good for the company may not be the same thing.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoCorporations won't stop outsourcing because of reason, but they will stop outsourcing because of feelings. I like to hammer down on issues with contractors by basically minimizing the issue: "who cares if our customers couldn't access our product for 3 hours due to an outage? we're saving so much money by outsourcing!". It's a simple way to get people on your side because noone would like to agree that 3 hours of outage is a good thing.
- kwanbix 6y agoBut in my experience I have never seen cases where you really save money. The outsourced dev charges less, yes, but the outsourcing company needs to make money. But let's say what was 10 an hour, now it is 5. In my experience is that what used to take 1 hour, now it takes 2 or even 3. In the end, hardly any savings.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- canadev 6y agoI agree, and I'm glad I don't work at a place where coding is considered easy work.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kubanczyk 6y ago> The Coding will always be the easiest part of a Coding Career The Coding will sometimes be the hardest part of a Coding Career. Since people are throwing around authoritatively-sounding statements here, anyone interested is cordially invited to use mine.
- adamsea 6y agoI dunno. Coding is the easiest part of programming, in a sense. The challenges in programming aren't literally "writing code", once you achieve a certain degree of facility with the language and libraries you are using. The challenge is, of course, solving the problem - doing the intellectual work. I get that people often say "writing code" and also mean the intellectual work of programming / CS / software engineering (whichever may be appropriate), but I really don't think that's accurate. Hope that makes sense and isn't pressing too fine a point on it.