10 ms·

People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to

70 points by lopkeny12ko 3y ago

sshine 3y ago
I occasionally wish I had some other job than being a programmer. But I quickly find out that most other jobs involve a lot of tasks that could be automated. Unless you're telling people what to do (imperative programming) or making high-level schematic drawings (declarative programming), I can't imagine not being a programmer in a classical sense and not get bored with repeating things that computers or robots could be doing, and I could be telling them how.
- panic101 3y ago
  I see more and more engineers that wish they had another job. Some are actively trying to get out.
  - vlan0 3y ago
    Yeah. I'm done. My five year plan is to open a bakery. If I'm gonna slave away, might as well be for my own sake.
    - lannisterstark 3y ago
      Well at least it's not farming this time. People have no idea how hard some of these careers they want to switch to are. (Note: not a dig at you per se, more the "I'm going to become a farmer" people because they can keep a monsterra alive)
      - travisgriggs 3y ago
        And even funnier for those of us that work in ag tech and know that the money in farming these days is in big business farming, run at scales far larger than traditional single family operations.
      - doubled112 3y ago
        I often joke about building a cabin in the woods where I don't even have an address, I'd have to send you coordinates. I always hope the story is just far fetched enough nobody thinks it's an actual plan, but I'm not sure. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life chopping firewood and hunting whatever I can find in these woods. It's an amazing fantasy (because it's short term) after dealing with a bunch of BS all week though.
        bluGill 3y ago
        That fantasy is really fun for about 2 weeks a year. After that you realize how bad it is. I used volunteer to run the food stand at a local annual event for a charity to get my going into the restaurant fix out of my system (I quit only because I moved for other reasons)
    - retrobox 3y ago
      I envy those with a solid plan to get out. I feel age is going to start to count against me and my passion for programming is dead. But I can’t deny the compensation in this career is great, which makes me not want to move on, for now
      - bluGill 3y ago
        I'm just glad I started contributing to my retirement plan before that happened. I can't afford to retire yet - but it looks like I'm well on my way to retiring early. Which is the ultimate out: If I don't like what I'm doing I can find a new hobby, then when that one gets boring either another or go back to a previous. (note that sitting around and doing nothing isn't in my plan)
    - doug_durham 3y ago
      I truly hope you succeed. However I program because I can't stand to do the same thing over and over again. I want to automate away the monotony. Running a bakery seems like it's everything I don't want to do. You have to make the same products the same way every day. It's good work and I know a lot of people for who that's their dream. It's interesting that you went into programming first and then go into something that I perceive to be the opposite. Best of luck.
      - sungho_ 3y ago
        I agree. But this is just out of curiosity, what about jobs that don't have repetitive tasks and don't feel like coding, after you've spent enough time on coding. For example, business manager.
  - silverquiet 3y ago
    I don't think it's a particularly new phenomenon. It's probably just as you age your cohort suffers from more burnout.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      It is called a mid-life crisis. Around 40-45 many people get sick of their job and do a major job shift. Others buy an expensive sports car. It is very common at that age and has been noted for a long time. That is age cohort doesn't refer to your generation, other than "millennials" are entering those years now. Generation X is mostly done with it.
    - space_oddity 3y ago
      burnout is such a horrible thing that happened to me quite recently
  - lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
    This was always the case. Anybody remember the old Kuro5hin thread about the programmer who quit to become a bike messenger? I think that was back in the early 00s. Jamie Zawinski quit programming to sell beer in 1998. What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
    - BadHumans 3y ago
      I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program on my off time.
      - runjake 3y ago
        So then you’re quitting a software engineer job, you’re not quitting programming. The problem isn’t the programming part.
      - rqtwteye 3y ago
        When you talk about insanity in programming, it’s probably not the best escape to go into construction :-).
        BadHumans 3y ago
        You're right but it's a different brand of crazy.
      - wizzwizz4 3y ago
        Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" circa 1965, because she recognised that she and her fellow Apollo programmers were doing engineering, and had to be doing engineering, because otherwise people would die. Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people. E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
  - liquidpele 3y ago
    I think it’s usually people that allow themselves to get burnt out though… Far too many programmers treat it like a hobby, and are severely taken advantage of by employers. 9-5, go home and don’t touch a computer, It’s just like any other job then.
    - gr4vityWall 3y ago
      While I agree with you, in the sense that your suggestion is a viable solution for burn out, the outcome of that for these people is that they would lose their favorite hobby.
    - kayodelycaon 3y ago
      I had to change my relationship with programming. To see it as a tool, a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. For me, this helped me put what I was doing into perspective. It's easier to accept imperfection when the goal does not require perfection.
      - from-nibly 3y ago
        Lets hope the rest of the industry can follow your example. Lets make software boring again.
  - close04 3y ago
    Several of my friends left the IT sector to pursue some work related to farming and food production (farm, bakery, cake shop, bio foods, etc. are for some reason very popular choices). Anecdotally almost without exception the new job turned out to be just as much of a slog after some time, except with much lower financial reward, if any. I think sometimes it's just easier to think the grass is greener elsewhere. Hobbies are often not as fun when they become a job, a necessity. You can burn out just as easily with a hobby-turned-job if you're overdoing it. IT was probably a hobby before it became a job for many of today's engineers. The solution is to avoid overdoing it rather than to jump from one hobby-job to the next, maybe ruining them all in the process.
    - silverquiet 3y ago
      Yes, I grew up in a blue collar home and understood the reality of that type of work enough to know to stay away from it. At the same time, a lot of knowledge work is very unsatisfying because it's often so abstract and even if meaningful (and there's plenty of bullshit software work out there) is such a small part of a larger system that it's hard to see your contribution. (I believe Marx would call it alienation of labor). Growing plants or building buildings or baking bread is the opposite; you can immediately see the product and get satisfaction from that. But given the economic realities, it's probably better if you can keep those as hobbies and slog through the day job.
      - spencerflem 3y ago
        I struggle with this too, and to some degree at least with my specific job and lots of the ones I see posted, it feels like its not the illusion of alienation, but that its actually correct and that the work is actually useless. At least for me personally I find it so very hard to be motivated to do something that doesn't matter for 40 hours a week. Which is easier than something that directly harms the world I guess..
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Learning AppleScript and (La)TeX as a graphic designer changed a lot of tedium into lengthy coffee breaks or, productive work on some more interesting aspect of the project at hand.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    We’re mostly pure programmers here, so we think of this wrong, I think. Most people shouldn’t learn to handle spaghetti code 10,000 line monstrosity programs. It isn’t a skill that most people will ever use. But for people like you, who already have a full skill-set and learn enough to automate it? That’s a super-power.
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      I've always wondered how things would have gone had Apple been able to release MacBASIC: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html HyperCard was close, and I've been productive with its clones, and hope that something interesting happens w/ LiveCode Community Edition, but I wonder if the solution isn't just Domain Specific Languages wrapped up in nice applications. I've been pretty successful w/ OpenSCAD, and its Customizer is _amazing_ and the new ability to run it in the browser is way cool: https://seasick.github.io/openscad-web-gui/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WillAdams/Design_Into_3D/master/openscadwebgui/Impossible_Dovetail_Box.scad https://seasick.github.io/openscad-web-gui/?https://raw.gith... for a finished example see: https://forum.makerforums.info/t/using-openscad-web-gui-to-make-a-dxf-to-cut-a-project/89278/2 https://forum.makerforums.info/t/using-openscad-web-gui-to-m... That said, its limitations are striking, and I have big hopes for: http://pythonscad.org http://pythonscad.org That said, I'd really like to see some programming environment worked up which was: - dynamic/interactive - allowed drawing up an interface in an interactive/iterative fashion - wasn't painfully sandboxed as Scratch or the LISPs seem to be - allowed exporting a stand-alone application --- ideally cross-platform
- ruined 3y ago
  when all you have is a plan everything looks like problem you know how to solve
- avgDev 3y ago
  This is my problem. Everywhere I go, I look at things and go I could automate this. The amount of useless jobs is staggering. But I am lazy, I solve problems for my employer and don't feel like solving problems for "free".....hoping to cash out some day because frankly I have done sales and never again.
vgatherps 3y ago
People who don't want to X can always find a reason not to, for any given X. Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X, and go through many of the motions and preparations, but always find some reason at the end to back out. Is Paul's statement much different from the statement "talk is cheap"?
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  No, but I think the more salient point to his post is to underscore the previous reasons — all of which came to naught.
- travisgriggs 3y ago
  Came here to say just this. Glad someone else saw it.
- travisgriggs 3y ago
  Though I think it should be “for any given Y”. As X refers to the thing avoided, and Y (or any variable other than X) would refer to the excuse given.
- sungho_ 3y ago
  No, if I had to nitpick, I'd say 'talk is expensive'. The original text doesn't say "Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X" like your comment, and it doesn't need to. But maybe someone who finds 'some reason not to do' will say it, and they won't actually do it. (B has never said he wants to learn to code) A: Do you have any plans to learn to code? It seems to be useful. B: No.... (thinking) Well, AIs. (And B doesn't learn to code in the real world) Actually, this comments doesn't matter at all, but I leave it in for fun
solardev 3y ago
Well, you can learn to program and much of that would still remain true. Many low level tech jobs are indeed outsourced, AI is causing a huge shift in investment away from traditional tech, and we're in the middle of another burst bubble right now. If you're just entering school now, maybe things will be different in a few years. But good luck trying to get an entry level tech job anywhere right now. And more to the point, we probably don't need this many programmers. The industry just shed several hundred thousand of us over the last 2 or 3 years. It seemed like an inevitable correction to the overhiring of the covid boom. If paulg is Paul Graham, well, presumably he's a VC and investor, and cheap programmer labor is good for people in his class. Commoditized coders + AI supplementation = rich investors at the top. It's not so good for existing programmers who already have trouble finding work, and not so good for the new programmers who are just signing up to become part of an ever larger bureaucracy. Shrug. If I were young, I'd definitely choose another career.
- RSHEPP 3y ago
  Which career would you choose?
  - solardev 3y ago
    Probably some sort of actual engineering in the physical world (like renewables). But I'm terrible at math, so probably would've washed out early lol. I'm actually trying to get into an engineering program now, but I don't think I can afford to spend another 6-7 years of my life chasing that =/ Might have to choose something else instead.
    - MajimasEyepatch 3y ago
      If you're afraid of AI, I have bad news: it's just as capable of taking those jobs as it is of taking software engineering jobs, or any other white-collar job.
      - solardev 3y ago
        I'm not "afraid" of AI per se... the Borg have been my dream since childhood, lol. I look forward to it, just worried about the huge displacements it will have under our current hypercapitalistic system with a weak government and poor safety nets. It's gonna hurt, regardless of what I personally do for work :(
throwaway22032 3y ago
Programming is fun if you enjoy tinkering with computers. It's not if you don't. I see no reason at all for anyone to learn to do something that they don't care about. There are many ways to make a living, and people like Paul know this well.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Computers are everywhere nowadays. Everybody should learn enough to throw a couple lines of python together. It’s more like the ability to interface with the computer more pedantically. Not everybody needs to learn about SIMD and cache line widths. But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer: Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
  - throwaway22032 3y ago
    Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet. Cars are everywhere, everyone should know how to change their oil. Etc. I personally feel that way too. But everyone has their poison. What you like is not what I like.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      > Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet I don’t think everyone should learn how to build a computer. Most people should be able to, like, replace a cabinet hinge though. Maybe not everyone but it is a common enough skill that we don’t talk about whether or not people should learn it.
  - dlivingston 3y ago
    > But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer: > Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever. One day soon the office worker will be able to tell the computer that, literally and verbatim, and it will do it. Was it Karpathy who said plain English is the programming language of the future?
karmakaze 3y ago
People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India. [I purposely didn't mark that as a quote. Seeing the entirety as if it was written by a different Paul shows its emptiness.]
- bwing1 3y ago
  His obsession with clarity/minimalism in communication + the (befuddling) expectation that VCs are constantly opining on things seems to mean that more and more of his tweets read tonally as though they're addressed to a seven-year-old.
  - ballooney 3y ago
    Well, they absolutely _are_ addressed to impressionable, not always especially worldly, young [mostly] men. They are the workers he needs to send into his particular mine.
bluGill 3y ago
There is more to learn in life than you will have time before you die. That is just learn to the level of you can do something but are not very good, master takes a lot longer. You need to choose what to master, what you want to learn for other reasons, and what to let someone else do for you in life. If you decide that programming is not for you then I have no problem with that decision. If you are asking for advice: nobody knows what the future will bring. AI sometimes looks really useful and sometimes horrible. There may be things coming I'm not aware of. You have to make your best guess, and if it turns out wrong adjust. That said, programming has been a useful thing for the past few decades and looks to continue to be. However medical jobs have also been good for even longer and that too looks to continue. Music and art can be good for a few, but most people who go into them have to do something else to survive. Nothing stops you from mastering more than one thing. There is nothing wrong with being a master programmer for 8 boring hours at an insurance company, and then going home to create music with your friends. (I picked this example because I work with programmers who took a substantial pay cut to work where I do instead of the insurance company they worked with before)
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
  For what reasons do you believe programming and medicine will remain options but not music or art? They are most probably all doomed in the next few years. Diagnosis models are already showing superior accuracy over human-only and human-in-the-loop results (i.e. as with chess AIs, the best results come from following the machine blindly, humans get it wrong when they second guess it).
  - tsumnia 3y ago
    I think OP is more referring to art/music/theater careers are low paying, so people need some other form of income to sustain themselves. In very well may be the same for programming and medical - we really don't know. However, I am optimistic that with AI automation happening "everywhere" (wherever it can generate profit), we'll see culture shift to appreciating more human-only things. Singing can be AI generated, but we're still impressed by someone being able to harmonize and hit notes; Physical sports are still too chaotic for AI to effectively compete at human levels, so audiences will flock to watch humans. This line of reasoning actually warmed me up to people that are live-streaming as a career. They opened their lives to be experienced by others, another element that AI (I believe) will struggle to genuinely replicate because the audience will want living people. Similar to the popularity (and profitability) of reality shows (even dramatized ones) - you see highlights of someone "living".
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
Replace programing with anything else.
deleted 3y ago
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AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
It's amazing how certain programmers can't be arsed to do anyone else's job, but they sure are keen to extol the virtues of everyone trying to do their job (badly). Q: Can you help me troubleshoot this issue? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Product Support department. Q: Can you explain how this obscure feature works? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Documentation team. Q: Can you make this interface less janky to navigate? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the UX Team. But remember, guys, the real key to a successful product is making sure that everyone in the company knows how to program...
ranger_danger 3y ago
I love programming but I'm terrible at coming up with my own ideas for useful things to make that haven't already been done many times over. I don't particularly like making things for myself as I don't really have a need for much, I prefer to make things for other people, but finding those people (with good ideas), is very difficult.
- orev 3y ago
  My advice would be to make things even though it’s been done before. You might have a different perspective, or you can use it as an exercise to hone your skills. Many projects are just throwaways, like an illustrator might doodle. The goal would be to get better with your tools and keep the creativity flowing, even if it’s not going to turn into your next unicorn startup.
hexage1814 3y ago
I have the impression, and I might be totally wrong here, but that most programmers didn't learn how to program because they like programming itself, but rather because they wanted to do something that requires programming and then learning that skill is more like a consequence of them needing it to do something they enjoyed. I'm not a programmer, but, for instance I learned a little simple bash scripts to scrape some stuff, and I didn't learn that because I like writing bash scripts, but rather because I wanted to scrape stuff. We are not there yet, but if we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code. I think many people, who would want to learn how to code today, wouldn't want to learn how to write code in this reality. I've always saw programming as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Sure there are people who enjoy coding and see it as therapeutic for them, but I don't think this is most of programmers...
- CM30 3y ago
  This sounds pretty accurate to me. I personally got into programming because I wanted to create a website to share my knowledge online, and then felt like adding more and more interesting features to differentiate it from the crowd. I also learnt a lot about it due to wanting to code games as well. Wouldn't be surprised if something like 60-80% of programmers got started because they either wanted to make a website about something or they wanted to make a video game/video game mod. After all, nothing drives you to learn more than having a clear goal in mind and needing to find solutions for how to achieve it.
  - tinycombinator 3y ago
    I got into programming through making small games. It was very much a means to an end, a solution oriented path. I personally can't imagine trying to learn programming now in a similar manner to high school math courses, where problems are presented so abstractly. If I can't see a reachable and tangible end product in sight, it tanks my motivation to learn.
    - 3y ago
kpw94 3y ago
patio11's thread on that topic was quite interesting. His move to Japan was apparently 90% motivated by the wrong prediction of all the jobs moving abroad: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1779978518656332212 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1779978518656332212
reify 3y ago
The shaming of people who are unhappy being slaves still exists in the western world The statement "People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to" is clearly designed to shame those who are looking for a better future. Dont be a slave! Take an adventure. You only live once!!! Spread yourself about. expand your mind and knowledge. LIVE!!! I have had 4 main jobs in my life: I left school in 1972 aged 16: At 16 years old I trained as a baker for 2 years. At 18 years old I began an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic for Jaguar and Daimler. At 28 years old I set up my own company designing and installing high end bathrooms. At 36 Years old I went into higher education, college and university to train as a psychotherapist. At 40 years old I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor. At 42 years old I qualifed as a Psychotherapist I Retired in 2012
- dieselgate 3y ago
  I like your angle but rehashing what’s worked for you isn’t applicable or reproducible for others now.
devin 3y ago
A variation on this theme is that I frequently run across bios full of buzzword nonsense, and then the phrase "learning to code" in it.
philbin 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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thefaux 3y ago
What I think paulg might be getting at is that programming is a way of thinking as much as a practical skill. The job market fluctuates with economic cycles but the mindset that one develops when mastering programming is transferrable and useful in other contexts. Most people are not genuinely interested in mastery and are content with mediocrity (which is fine). I spend a huge amount of time programming, even though I don't even particularly like computers, because of what I learn about myself and the world through the work.
haunter 3y ago
This kind of pseudo intellectual wisdom is very funny on some level. Something really broke in the 20th century after the postmodern movement. We had actual thinkers now we have people spouting bullshit on Twitter. The actual hard job as an ordinary person is trying to not elevate these people beyond their field. If you are successful at X that doesn't make you authoritative about Y and Z or actually anything else. But you can see this in the tech world a lot, all the time.
oytis 3y ago
I guess it's an answer to Jensen Huang? He certainly has reasons to oversell AI, but he was talking about teaching kids at school programming - which never made sense IMO. Even if you want everyone of them to become professional programmers, better give more hours to math and sciences. As of AGI, if it comes, everyone apart from the owner class is equally doomed, so you are not missing anything if you learn profession you like, including if it is programming.

70 points by lopkeny12ko 3y ago

I occasionally wish I had some other job than being a programmer. But I quickly find out that most other jobs involve a lot of tasks that could be automated. Unless you're telling people what to do (imperative programming) or making high-level schematic drawings (declarative programming), I can't imagine not being a programmer in a classical sense and not get bored with repeating things that computers or robots could be doing, and I could be telling them how.

panic101 3y ago
I see more and more engineers that wish they had another job. Some are actively trying to get out.
- vlan0 3y ago
  Yeah. I'm done. My five year plan is to open a bakery. If I'm gonna slave away, might as well be for my own sake.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    Well at least it's not farming this time. People have no idea how hard some of these careers they want to switch to are. (Note: not a dig at you per se, more the "I'm going to become a farmer" people because they can keep a monsterra alive)
    - travisgriggs 3y ago
      And even funnier for those of us that work in ag tech and know that the money in farming these days is in big business farming, run at scales far larger than traditional single family operations.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      I often joke about building a cabin in the woods where I don't even have an address, I'd have to send you coordinates. I always hope the story is just far fetched enough nobody thinks it's an actual plan, but I'm not sure. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life chopping firewood and hunting whatever I can find in these woods. It's an amazing fantasy (because it's short term) after dealing with a bunch of BS all week though.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        That fantasy is really fun for about 2 weeks a year. After that you realize how bad it is. I used volunteer to run the food stand at a local annual event for a charity to get my going into the restaurant fix out of my system (I quit only because I moved for other reasons)
  - retrobox 3y ago
    I envy those with a solid plan to get out. I feel age is going to start to count against me and my passion for programming is dead. But I can’t deny the compensation in this career is great, which makes me not want to move on, for now
    - bluGill 3y ago
      I'm just glad I started contributing to my retirement plan before that happened. I can't afford to retire yet - but it looks like I'm well on my way to retiring early. Which is the ultimate out: If I don't like what I'm doing I can find a new hobby, then when that one gets boring either another or go back to a previous. (note that sitting around and doing nothing isn't in my plan)
  - doug_durham 3y ago
    I truly hope you succeed. However I program because I can't stand to do the same thing over and over again. I want to automate away the monotony. Running a bakery seems like it's everything I don't want to do. You have to make the same products the same way every day. It's good work and I know a lot of people for who that's their dream. It's interesting that you went into programming first and then go into something that I perceive to be the opposite. Best of luck.
    - sungho_ 3y ago
      I agree. But this is just out of curiosity, what about jobs that don't have repetitive tasks and don't feel like coding, after you've spent enough time on coding. For example, business manager.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  I don't think it's a particularly new phenomenon. It's probably just as you age your cohort suffers from more burnout.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It is called a mid-life crisis. Around 40-45 many people get sick of their job and do a major job shift. Others buy an expensive sports car. It is very common at that age and has been noted for a long time. That is age cohort doesn't refer to your generation, other than "millennials" are entering those years now. Generation X is mostly done with it.
  - space_oddity 3y ago
    burnout is such a horrible thing that happened to me quite recently
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  This was always the case. Anybody remember the old Kuro5hin thread about the programmer who quit to become a bike messenger? I think that was back in the early 00s. Jamie Zawinski quit programming to sell beer in 1998. What is it about programming that makes so many people want to quit and do something else?
  - BadHumans 3y ago
    I am working towards quitting programming. Everyone in programming is insane. Managers, stakeholders, other programmers. I'd rather do construction and program on my off time.
    - runjake 3y ago
      So then you’re quitting a software engineer job, you’re not quitting programming. The problem isn’t the programming part.
    - rqtwteye 3y ago
      When you talk about insanity in programming, it’s probably not the best escape to go into construction :-).
      - BadHumans 3y ago
        You're right but it's a different brand of crazy.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Margaret Hamilton coined the term "software engineering" circa 1965, because she recognised that she and her fellow Apollo programmers were doing engineering, and had to be doing engineering, because otherwise people would die. Engineering involves requirements analysis, specification, and the mathematical analysis of families of components to demonstrate – according to the known laws of reality – that the proposed solution meets the requirements and won't kill people. E.W.Dijkstra advocated, repeatedly, from the 1970s onwards (EWD340 – and probably earlier than that also), that software should be formally-analysed and -verified as a matter of course. He called this humility. We call him arrogant, and insane.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  I think it’s usually people that allow themselves to get burnt out though… Far too many programmers treat it like a hobby, and are severely taken advantage of by employers. 9-5, go home and don’t touch a computer, It’s just like any other job then.
  - gr4vityWall 3y ago
    While I agree with you, in the sense that your suggestion is a viable solution for burn out, the outcome of that for these people is that they would lose their favorite hobby.
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    I had to change my relationship with programming. To see it as a tool, a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. For me, this helped me put what I was doing into perspective. It's easier to accept imperfection when the goal does not require perfection.
    - from-nibly 3y ago
      Lets hope the rest of the industry can follow your example. Lets make software boring again.
- close04 3y ago
  Several of my friends left the IT sector to pursue some work related to farming and food production (farm, bakery, cake shop, bio foods, etc. are for some reason very popular choices). Anecdotally almost without exception the new job turned out to be just as much of a slog after some time, except with much lower financial reward, if any. I think sometimes it's just easier to think the grass is greener elsewhere. Hobbies are often not as fun when they become a job, a necessity. You can burn out just as easily with a hobby-turned-job if you're overdoing it. IT was probably a hobby before it became a job for many of today's engineers. The solution is to avoid overdoing it rather than to jump from one hobby-job to the next, maybe ruining them all in the process.
  - silverquiet 3y ago
    Yes, I grew up in a blue collar home and understood the reality of that type of work enough to know to stay away from it. At the same time, a lot of knowledge work is very unsatisfying because it's often so abstract and even if meaningful (and there's plenty of bullshit software work out there) is such a small part of a larger system that it's hard to see your contribution. (I believe Marx would call it alienation of labor). Growing plants or building buildings or baking bread is the opposite; you can immediately see the product and get satisfaction from that. But given the economic realities, it's probably better if you can keep those as hobbies and slog through the day job.
    - spencerflem 3y ago
      I struggle with this too, and to some degree at least with my specific job and lots of the ones I see posted, it feels like its not the illusion of alienation, but that its actually correct and that the work is actually useless. At least for me personally I find it so very hard to be motivated to do something that doesn't matter for 40 hours a week. Which is easier than something that directly harms the world I guess..
WillAdams 3y ago
Learning AppleScript and (La)TeX as a graphic designer changed a lot of tedium into lengthy coffee breaks or, productive work on some more interesting aspect of the project at hand.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  We’re mostly pure programmers here, so we think of this wrong, I think. Most people shouldn’t learn to handle spaghetti code 10,000 line monstrosity programs. It isn’t a skill that most people will ever use. But for people like you, who already have a full skill-set and learn enough to automate it? That’s a super-power.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    I've always wondered how things would have gone had Apple been able to release MacBASIC: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html HyperCard was close, and I've been productive with its clones, and hope that something interesting happens w/ LiveCode Community Edition, but I wonder if the solution isn't just Domain Specific Languages wrapped up in nice applications. I've been pretty successful w/ OpenSCAD, and its Customizer is _amazing_ and the new ability to run it in the browser is way cool: https://seasick.github.io/openscad-web-gui/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WillAdams/Design_Into_3D/master/openscadwebgui/Impossible_Dovetail_Box.scad https://seasick.github.io/openscad-web-gui/?https://raw.gith... for a finished example see: https://forum.makerforums.info/t/using-openscad-web-gui-to-make-a-dxf-to-cut-a-project/89278/2 https://forum.makerforums.info/t/using-openscad-web-gui-to-m... That said, its limitations are striking, and I have big hopes for: http://pythonscad.org http://pythonscad.org That said, I'd really like to see some programming environment worked up which was: - dynamic/interactive - allowed drawing up an interface in an interactive/iterative fashion - wasn't painfully sandboxed as Scratch or the LISPs seem to be - allowed exporting a stand-alone application --- ideally cross-platform
ruined 3y ago
when all you have is a plan everything looks like problem you know how to solve
avgDev 3y ago
This is my problem. Everywhere I go, I look at things and go I could automate this. The amount of useless jobs is staggering. But I am lazy, I solve problems for my employer and don't feel like solving problems for "free".....hoping to cash out some day because frankly I have done sales and never again.

vgatherps 3y ago

People who don't want to X can always find a reason not to, for any given X. Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X, and go through many of the motions and preparations, but always find some reason at the end to back out. Is Paul's statement much different from the statement "talk is cheap"?

JKCalhoun 3y ago
No, but I think the more salient point to his post is to underscore the previous reasons — all of which came to naught.
travisgriggs 3y ago
Came here to say just this. Glad someone else saw it.
travisgriggs 3y ago
Though I think it should be “for any given Y”. As X refers to the thing avoided, and Y (or any variable other than X) would refer to the excuse given.
sungho_ 3y ago
No, if I had to nitpick, I'd say 'talk is expensive'. The original text doesn't say "Somebody might even talk about how they want to do X" like your comment, and it doesn't need to. But maybe someone who finds 'some reason not to do' will say it, and they won't actually do it. (B has never said he wants to learn to code) A: Do you have any plans to learn to code? It seems to be useful. B: No.... (thinking) Well, AIs. (And B doesn't learn to code in the real world) Actually, this comments doesn't matter at all, but I leave it in for fun

solardev 3y ago

Well, you can learn to program and much of that would still remain true. Many low level tech jobs are indeed outsourced, AI is causing a huge shift in investment away from traditional tech, and we're in the middle of another burst bubble right now. If you're just entering school now, maybe things will be different in a few years. But good luck trying to get an entry level tech job anywhere right now. And more to the point, we probably don't need this many programmers. The industry just shed several hundred thousand of us over the last 2 or 3 years. It seemed like an inevitable correction to the overhiring of the covid boom. If paulg is Paul Graham, well, presumably he's a VC and investor, and cheap programmer labor is good for people in his class. Commoditized coders + AI supplementation = rich investors at the top. It's not so good for existing programmers who already have trouble finding work, and not so good for the new programmers who are just signing up to become part of an ever larger bureaucracy. Shrug. If I were young, I'd definitely choose another career.

RSHEPP 3y ago
Which career would you choose?
- solardev 3y ago
  Probably some sort of actual engineering in the physical world (like renewables). But I'm terrible at math, so probably would've washed out early lol. I'm actually trying to get into an engineering program now, but I don't think I can afford to spend another 6-7 years of my life chasing that =/ Might have to choose something else instead.
  - MajimasEyepatch 3y ago
    If you're afraid of AI, I have bad news: it's just as capable of taking those jobs as it is of taking software engineering jobs, or any other white-collar job.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I'm not "afraid" of AI per se... the Borg have been my dream since childhood, lol. I look forward to it, just worried about the huge displacements it will have under our current hypercapitalistic system with a weak government and poor safety nets. It's gonna hurt, regardless of what I personally do for work :(

throwaway22032 3y ago

Programming is fun if you enjoy tinkering with computers. It's not if you don't. I see no reason at all for anyone to learn to do something that they don't care about. There are many ways to make a living, and people like Paul know this well.

bee_rider 3y ago
Computers are everywhere nowadays. Everybody should learn enough to throw a couple lines of python together. It’s more like the ability to interface with the computer more pedantically. Not everybody needs to learn about SIMD and cache line widths. But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer: Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever.
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet. Cars are everywhere, everyone should know how to change their oil. Etc. I personally feel that way too. But everyone has their poison. What you like is not what I like.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    > Furniture is everywhere nowadays, everyone should learn enough to build a cabinet I don’t think everyone should learn how to build a computer. Most people should be able to, like, replace a cabinet hinge though. Maybe not everyone but it is a common enough skill that we don’t talk about whether or not people should learn it.
- dlivingston 3y ago
  > But it would be useful if most office workers could learn how tell the computer: > Look at all the purchase orders in this directory, if they have a customer name, copy them to this folder, if they don’t, copy them to the “needs inspection” folder. Or whatever. One day soon the office worker will be able to tell the computer that, literally and verbatim, and it will do it. Was it Karpathy who said plain English is the programming language of the future?

karmakaze 3y ago

People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason why not to. This time it's AI, last time it was that tech was over because the Internet Bubble burst, the time before that it was that all the programming jobs were going to be outsourced to India. [I purposely didn't mark that as a quote. Seeing the entirety as if it was written by a different Paul shows its emptiness.]

bwing1 3y ago
His obsession with clarity/minimalism in communication + the (befuddling) expectation that VCs are constantly opining on things seems to mean that more and more of his tweets read tonally as though they're addressed to a seven-year-old.
- ballooney 3y ago
  Well, they absolutely _are_ addressed to impressionable, not always especially worldly, young [mostly] men. They are the workers he needs to send into his particular mine.

bluGill 3y ago

There is more to learn in life than you will have time before you die. That is just learn to the level of you can do something but are not very good, master takes a lot longer. You need to choose what to master, what you want to learn for other reasons, and what to let someone else do for you in life. If you decide that programming is not for you then I have no problem with that decision. If you are asking for advice: nobody knows what the future will bring. AI sometimes looks really useful and sometimes horrible. There may be things coming I'm not aware of. You have to make your best guess, and if it turns out wrong adjust. That said, programming has been a useful thing for the past few decades and looks to continue to be. However medical jobs have also been good for even longer and that too looks to continue. Music and art can be good for a few, but most people who go into them have to do something else to survive. Nothing stops you from mastering more than one thing. There is nothing wrong with being a master programmer for 8 boring hours at an insurance company, and then going home to create music with your friends. (I picked this example because I work with programmers who took a substantial pay cut to work where I do instead of the insurance company they worked with before)

HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago
For what reasons do you believe programming and medicine will remain options but not music or art? They are most probably all doomed in the next few years. Diagnosis models are already showing superior accuracy over human-only and human-in-the-loop results (i.e. as with chess AIs, the best results come from following the machine blindly, humans get it wrong when they second guess it).
- tsumnia 3y ago
  I think OP is more referring to art/music/theater careers are low paying, so people need some other form of income to sustain themselves. In very well may be the same for programming and medical - we really don't know. However, I am optimistic that with AI automation happening "everywhere" (wherever it can generate profit), we'll see culture shift to appreciating more human-only things. Singing can be AI generated, but we're still impressed by someone being able to harmonize and hit notes; Physical sports are still too chaotic for AI to effectively compete at human levels, so audiences will flock to watch humans. This line of reasoning actually warmed me up to people that are live-streaming as a career. They opened their lives to be experienced by others, another element that AI (I believe) will struggle to genuinely replicate because the audience will want living people. Similar to the popularity (and profitability) of reality shows (even dramatized ones) - you see highlights of someone "living".

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

Replace programing with anything else.

deleted 3y ago

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AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

It's amazing how certain programmers can't be arsed to do anyone else's job, but they sure are keen to extol the virtues of everyone trying to do their job (badly). Q: Can you help me troubleshoot this issue? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Product Support department. Q: Can you explain how this obscure feature works? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the Documentation team. Q: Can you make this interface less janky to navigate? Programmer: Not my job. Ask the UX Team. But remember, guys, the real key to a successful product is making sure that everyone in the company knows how to program...

ranger_danger 3y ago

I love programming but I'm terrible at coming up with my own ideas for useful things to make that haven't already been done many times over. I don't particularly like making things for myself as I don't really have a need for much, I prefer to make things for other people, but finding those people (with good ideas), is very difficult.

orev 3y ago
My advice would be to make things even though it’s been done before. You might have a different perspective, or you can use it as an exercise to hone your skills. Many projects are just throwaways, like an illustrator might doodle. The goal would be to get better with your tools and keep the creativity flowing, even if it’s not going to turn into your next unicorn startup.

hexage1814 3y ago

I have the impression, and I might be totally wrong here, but that most programmers didn't learn how to program because they like programming itself, but rather because they wanted to do something that requires programming and then learning that skill is more like a consequence of them needing it to do something they enjoyed. I'm not a programmer, but, for instance I learned a little simple bash scripts to scrape some stuff, and I didn't learn that because I like writing bash scripts, but rather because I wanted to scrape stuff. We are not there yet, but if we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code. I think many people, who would want to learn how to code today, wouldn't want to learn how to write code in this reality. I've always saw programming as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Sure there are people who enjoy coding and see it as therapeutic for them, but I don't think this is most of programmers...

CM30 3y ago
This sounds pretty accurate to me. I personally got into programming because I wanted to create a website to share my knowledge online, and then felt like adding more and more interesting features to differentiate it from the crowd. I also learnt a lot about it due to wanting to code games as well. Wouldn't be surprised if something like 60-80% of programmers got started because they either wanted to make a website about something or they wanted to make a video game/video game mod. After all, nothing drives you to learn more than having a clear goal in mind and needing to find solutions for how to achieve it.
- tinycombinator 3y ago
  I got into programming through making small games. It was very much a means to an end, a solution oriented path. I personally can't imagine trying to learn programming now in a similar manner to high school math courses, where problems are presented so abstractly. If I can't see a reachable and tangible end product in sight, it tanks my motivation to learn.
  - 3y ago

kpw94 3y ago

patio11's thread on that topic was quite interesting. His move to Japan was apparently 90% motivated by the wrong prediction of all the jobs moving abroad: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1779978518656332212 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1779978518656332212

reify 3y ago

The shaming of people who are unhappy being slaves still exists in the western world The statement "People who don't want to learn how to program can always find a reason not to" is clearly designed to shame those who are looking for a better future. Dont be a slave! Take an adventure. You only live once!!! Spread yourself about. expand your mind and knowledge. LIVE!!! I have had 4 main jobs in my life: I left school in 1972 aged 16: At 16 years old I trained as a baker for 2 years. At 18 years old I began an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic for Jaguar and Daimler. At 28 years old I set up my own company designing and installing high end bathrooms. At 36 Years old I went into higher education, college and university to train as a psychotherapist. At 40 years old I qualified as a therapeutic counsellor. At 42 years old I qualifed as a Psychotherapist I Retired in 2012

dieselgate 3y ago
I like your angle but rehashing what’s worked for you isn’t applicable or reproducible for others now.

devin 3y ago

A variation on this theme is that I frequently run across bios full of buzzword nonsense, and then the phrase "learning to code" in it.

philbin 3y ago

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thefaux 3y ago

What I think paulg might be getting at is that programming is a way of thinking as much as a practical skill. The job market fluctuates with economic cycles but the mindset that one develops when mastering programming is transferrable and useful in other contexts. Most people are not genuinely interested in mastery and are content with mediocrity (which is fine). I spend a huge amount of time programming, even though I don't even particularly like computers, because of what I learn about myself and the world through the work.

haunter 3y ago

This kind of pseudo intellectual wisdom is very funny on some level. Something really broke in the 20th century after the postmodern movement. We had actual thinkers now we have people spouting bullshit on Twitter. The actual hard job as an ordinary person is trying to not elevate these people beyond their field. If you are successful at X that doesn't make you authoritative about Y and Z or actually anything else. But you can see this in the tech world a lot, all the time.

oytis 3y ago

I guess it's an answer to Jensen Huang? He certainly has reasons to oversell AI, but he was talking about teaching kids at school programming - which never made sense IMO. Even if you want everyone of them to become professional programmers, better give more hours to math and sciences. As of AGI, if it comes, everyone apart from the owner class is equally doomed, so you are not missing anything if you learn profession you like, including if it is programming.