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> Being a software engineer is tough. No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in th

by abxyz 2y ago

> Being a software engineer is tough. No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.

chrsw 2y ago
I've had quite a few jobs. I've been a computer engineer now I'm a software engineer. These are the only jobs I've had where I felt I could be fired for performance.
smackeyacky 2y ago
Exactly. Tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee how hard your software job is.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  Truck driver is a special kind of hell because of the time away from home. But if it paid well enough and had better job security, I’d much rather be building houses all day. I worked in retail for a while and made it to supervisor. It was much easier than being a software engineer, the pay was just crappy. Software engineering is definitely up there in terms of mentally demanding jobs, it just pays well.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns). And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
    - threatofrain 2y ago
      There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
    - m000 2y ago
      > And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying. May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
- stefanos82 2y ago
  I think it's an unfair comparison here. A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day. I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body. It took me a whole month to fully recover! I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means! Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways! At least, that's my case.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - rsynnott 2y ago
    > I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it That’s not normal or typical.
    - stefanos82 2y ago
      It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers. Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible. But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time. Those who know this nightmare, know!
      - nradov 2y ago
- rini17 2y ago
  Not easy either but they have less of "the reward for work done is more work more learning".
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
- threatofrain 2y ago
  Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing. Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
- 9rx 2y ago
  I work in software, farm, and in a restaurant (albeit not fast food). They are all easy and hard in their own dimensions.
- whateveracct 2y ago
  I guess the argument could be... They can't do my job. I won't do theirs.
- iLemming 2y ago
  I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it. Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies. You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it. Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.
dharmab 2y ago
I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, and yeah, SWE was the easiest and cushiest job in the room by a mile. One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.
- saurik 2y ago
  > I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, .... One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. An airline pilot is "grey collar". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-collar-jobs-offer-the-best-of-both-white-and-blue-collar-opportunities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
  - dharmab 2y ago
    I don't think anyone in that room would have agreed with that term.
    - trallnag 2y ago
      Why?
      - dharmab 2y ago
        Frankly, trying to claim their jobs, which all require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than mine, aren't white collar would have been rude and insulting to everyone.
        goda90 2y ago
        Did you read the Wikipedia article? Grey collar is work that takes both intellectual and physical skill. It even includes surgery as grey collar. Thinking white collar indicates more education and pressure is the issue. There's white collar jobs that can be done by high school graduates, and blue collar jobs where life and death are literally a split second away most of the time.
NL807 2y ago
Easiest careers, but also the hardest job to keep things from becoming an ungodly mess.
- dharmab 2y ago
  I used to work in a hospital. Software ain't bad at all, haha.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  At least software engineers can do something to not make a mess or change it. Once you get to real physical world that might not even be realistically done...
grahar64 2y ago
I think most jobs are hard, but "grass is always greener" means we focus on what is hard in our job and easy in other jobs.
batty_alex 2y ago
I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers. I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver. Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger
- MrJohz 2y ago
  That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
  - dharmab 2y ago
    The other two are dysfunctional but in the US, SWE are pretty much universally classified as exempt and legally aren't entitled to overtime pay. I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.
    - MrJohz 2y ago
      Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".
  - tayo42 2y ago
    > Why are you working overtime for free? Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it
everdrive 2y ago
I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough. Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.
- martinsnow 2y ago
  In America. If you work in other markets the salary is much lower. The only engineers I know who make above 100k euro are either lead or founder level.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    100k USD is about 90k EUR (and 77k GBP), which you may say doesn't change your point materially, but I'm not splitting hairs, that's more than a 10% difference. I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
    - dharmab 2y ago
      FWIW that 10% almost entirely comes from the current economic shock. At the beginning of 2025 1 USD was about 1 Euro.
  - dfawcus 2y ago
    It is possibly to earn over £100k as a software engineer employee in the UK, however those tend to be very specialised fields. (Not all of them are finance related). I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k. That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.
filoleg 2y ago
Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job. Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  >Compare working in big law to big tech Not everyone works in big tech. A lot of devs worldwide work in mom and pop shops, legacy businesses, or various consultancy/body shops. Big-tech workers are the exception, not the rule, except maybe for the US workers.
  - filoleg 2y ago
    That’s a fair point, but I am not sure how it is relevant, unless devs at mom&pop shops/legacy businesses/etc. and those outside of the US work more than the US lawyers (or any other highly-paid white collar job) or have barriers to entry similar to those. From those I know working at those places (and from working at a legacy business myself at one point, a big bank), that didn’t seem to be the case at all. At startups, sure, but that’s just a high risk/high reward type of a deal, and they still don’t have almost any barriers to entry either. Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
    - lucyjojo 2y ago
      most devs are not highly paid outside the USA. they're good jobs for sure, pay-wise it would be around plumber range? no high barrier to entry whether you're worked to the bone or not depends on the place but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.
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tiberriver256 2y ago
Thank you. If I complained for one second about my short houred, high paying, long vacationing, low-education requiring job around any of my family I'd get laughed out of the house.
trchek 2y ago
I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born). I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today. Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year). Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice. I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work. That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
- test6554 2y ago
  For me work is work. Getting up on Monday Morning is always going to be a bummer. So I might as well get PAID and air conditioning.
- sshine 2y ago
  How inspiring. As someone who only delivered newspapers and worked in a video store as a kid, before landing my first developer job, I’ve always had this impression. And I could never convince myself to go work on a farm, or in a nursery, or at a gas station, because working on my computer, often from home, always paid better. I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.
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OutOfHere 2y ago
That's not true at all because an eight hour shift of real coding work easily wears out the brain, making the entire evening useless. It is a sedentary job requiring excessive caffeine, with the result being that health deteriorates slowly but surely due to the job.
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Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
I think there is something to be said to how many people dislike doing what we do as software engineers. Forget about the people who like this job, there are so many looking at me sideways every time I describe what I do. True that the other jobs are usually treated very poorly, though.
purple-leafy 2y ago
Wrong. It is tough. But most jobs are tough - in some way. Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of. You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements. Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs. Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history. I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case. Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something. It has its definite perks like work from home. But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is. There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy
- 9rx 2y ago
  > and probably the most competitive industry in the world It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Indeed, GP's hypothesis can be trivially challenged by asking "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"
  - try_the_bass 2y ago
    I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software! This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows. But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.
atoav 2y ago
Being a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to other engineering disciplines. Sure wrangling complexity and a shitton of knowledge is a lot of work, but most other engineering disciplines have much higher stakes, require you to put yourself out there and can land you in jail if you don't do your craft as you should. Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change. Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild. If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering.. I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.
mpalmer 2y ago
Quite a pronouncement to make with no supporting detail. Reads like troll bait if I'm being honest. But I'll respond in kind: Yes, it is. Tough is relative. There is no "we" to be coddled, only your flawed perception of a difficult-to-grasp, heterogeneous whole. There is no "we" to form a single impression of what is described in the post. Rhetoric isn't evidence.
dughnut 2y ago
A bridge engineer would need to know how to design a structure based on first principles of physics, nationally recognized reference documents, state agency published standards, state agency unpublished standards, agency project manager preferences, internal management preferences, and do so within a complicated project delivery protocol. These don’t all agree. Oh, and you can be sued and lose license to practice if you’re wrong. A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails. Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.
iLemming 2y ago
How old are you? You get to your forties as a software engineer, and you'd realize how taxing this occupation is. Your eyesight may deteriorate; your neck and spine may experience chronic pain; you could develop digestive and kidney problems from prolonged immobility; you might get hemorrhoids and carpal tunnel syndrome; your immune system could weaken from constant stress and may cause depression. The number of different "solutions" for solving ergonomics alone is evidence of how difficult a career as a software engineer is, both - mentally and physically.
- PhunkyPhil 2y ago
  Realistically, do you not think most of these things are largely solvable by a few, intentional changes to your daily routine? 30 minute walk before work, gym after work, outdoor/physical hobbies, intentional healthy eating, etc... These, to me, aren't difficult and end up providing a net benefit on your life far outweighing the effort required to implement them.
  - iLemming 2y ago
    Realistically, 30 minutes of walking a day is not enough to offset the long hours of sitting (no matter how great the chair is); standing desks aren't necessarily a better solution here either. Gym and healthy eating are a must, but not everyone can afford them (in terms of time). Anyhow, unlike my non-programmer friends, I can never leave my work - whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc. Yes, I still love my job and wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sure, I'm very happy that I don't have to leave the house at 2AM to risk my life, but still, it isn't really one of "the easiest careers" - I am easily disposable, I don't ever receive a pension, whenever I need to find another gig - I have to go through seven circles of hell, and it never is the same hell to go through, I have too many bosses, I constantly have to keep learning new skills, routinely prove my worth, and defend my opinions, because even after twenty years of building expertise in various areas, in our field of work, one can never confidently call themselves an expert.
grafmax 2y ago
“Appreciate how good you have it” doesn’t help the exploited be any less exploited. Instead it serves to nudge the comparatively-less-exploited to feel guilty enough to stay quiet.
Supermancho 2y ago
> No it isnt. Yes it is. I can name a number of careers that are easier. Start with accounting or tax prep or mechanic or welder or barber or nail salon anything, on and on. Ridiculous.
coldtea 2y ago
>We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough Just because the stress is mental and not physical, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ever heard of burnout?
subjectsigma 2y ago
It irks me to no end how much software engineers love to self-flagellate. If I had never met a software engineer before and just read HN my takeaway would be that all software engineers are privileged assholes who live in a bubble, get paid way too much, on top of that cheat on their hours, and provide functionally no value to society. In real life this is obviously not true. Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)
- subjectsigma 2y ago
  This “debate” has come up a few times in the streaming community. Viewer: “Streaming is so easy, you’re basically not even working, streamers are so privileged.” Streamer: “Can you act?” Viewer: “No, but what -“ Streamer: “Ok so you can’t act. Have you ever tried acting out a play, but it’s 6 hours long and also hundreds of people get to shout obscenities at you, and also you’re sometimes obligated to respond to their disturbing comments completely ad-lib without breaking character, and also you have to be juggling at the same time?” Viewer: “… well I still think <INSERT JOB> is harder” It doesn’t take a genius to realize there a different dimensions of difficulty and yet somehow many people can’t

by abxyz 2y ago

chrsw 2y ago

I've had quite a few jobs. I've been a computer engineer now I'm a software engineer. These are the only jobs I've had where I felt I could be fired for performance.

smackeyacky 2y ago

Exactly. Tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee how hard your software job is.

sarchertech 2y ago
Truck driver is a special kind of hell because of the time away from home. But if it paid well enough and had better job security, I’d much rather be building houses all day. I worked in retail for a while and made it to supervisor. It was much easier than being a software engineer, the pay was just crappy. Software engineering is definitely up there in terms of mentally demanding jobs, it just pays well.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Both construction and mowing lawns are two jobs I can say felt much more rewarding than programming. Each day you walked away with a sense of having "built" something (or, er, tidied up in the case of mowing lawns). And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying.
  - threatofrain 2y ago
    There are a lot of programming jobs where people never get to build anything, only fix things that other people didn't do well enough. Many people have never seen greenfield. Other people work jobs where they're pumping out new creative works. So when people talk about how spiritually satisfying programming is we're gonna hear this discordance.
  - m000 2y ago
    > And accomplishing anything with your hands and manual labor is instantly gratifying. May I add that Agile (which appears to be the currently prevalent work methodology in SE) takes away much of the gratification of software engineering?
stefanos82 2y ago
I think it's an unfair comparison here. A developer, programmer, software engineer, call this category of work however you like, it uses the brain at such relentless limits, implicitly or explicitly depending on the problem a person it's currently working on, it takes an incredible amount of effort to relax your mind at the end of the day. I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it, and by the end of the project I was so exhausted that I had to take a whole week to cool down my brain and relax my body. It took me a whole month to fully recover! I have worked as a construction worker with my father and I know how to grow my own fruits and veggies; I know the struggles with those things...but trust me, you cannot compare the two by any means! Using your body exclusively it can be tiring indeed, but at the end of the day, you will have a nice shower, eat and rest well, and the next day you will be good to go; whereas with using your mind exclusively can be so dangerous in so many ways! At least, that's my case.
- deleted 2y ago
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- rsynnott 2y ago
  > I remember working on a very difficult project for a customer and I would sleep for 4-5 hours per day until I deliver it That’s not normal or typical.
  - stefanos82 2y ago
    It's actually quite common and typical for freelancers. Unfortunately when you evaluate a project, initially everything looks and feel just right, that you wouldn't have any problem delivering the end result as soon as possible. But..! We know how customers ask for small "favors" of "tiny" changes that won't affect the whole project, or so they think(!), which eventually end up delaying the whole development as they become painful hurdles, only to find yourself struggling to deliver the project so you can get paid in time. Those who know this nightmare, know!
    - nradov 2y ago
rini17 2y ago
Not easy either but they have less of "the reward for work done is more work more learning".
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Actually when I was gutting salmon in Alaska, making pizzas at Godfather's, mowing lawns, working as dishwasher in the dorms to pay tuition ... these all were much less stressful jobs that I look back on almost fondly. (Well, maybe not the cannery.)
threatofrain 2y ago
Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing. Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
9rx 2y ago
I work in software, farm, and in a restaurant (albeit not fast food). They are all easy and hard in their own dimensions.
whateveracct 2y ago
I guess the argument could be... They can't do my job. I won't do theirs.
iLemming 2y ago
I think you're conflating job satisfaction and the difficulty of doing it. Software engineering can bring immense joy, but it is often a hard job to do. While it may not be physically demanding like some trades, it is often intellectually demanding and stressful, especially with tight deadlines and evolving technologies. You know that intellectual tasks, such as those found in software engineering, can require significant mental effort and may burn more calories than some physical jobs due to constant cognitive engagement and stress?
Ferret7446 2y ago
How about this: tell a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee: software engineering is so easy, you should go do it. Clearly, being a truck driver, construction worker, farmer, fast food employee is easier for them, and software engineering is harder, otherwise they would have switched to the easier and better paying job.

dharmab 2y ago

I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, and yeah, SWE was the easiest and cushiest job in the room by a mile. One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. They probably had more intense study and testing in 3 months than most people do in a 4 year undergraduate program, SWE included.

saurik 2y ago
> I was talking with friends at a party last night about their white collar jobs, .... One friend had just finished a 3 month program to certify to fly a certain type of airliner. An airline pilot is "grey collar". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey-collar https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-collar-jobs-offer-the-best-of-both-white-and-blue-collar-opportunities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/02/01/gray-colla...
- dharmab 2y ago
  I don't think anyone in that room would have agreed with that term.
  - trallnag 2y ago
    Why?
    - dharmab 2y ago
      Frankly, trying to claim their jobs, which all require more education and have much higher pressure and consequences for error than mine, aren't white collar would have been rude and insulting to everyone.
      - goda90 2y ago
        Did you read the Wikipedia article? Grey collar is work that takes both intellectual and physical skill. It even includes surgery as grey collar. Thinking white collar indicates more education and pressure is the issue. There's white collar jobs that can be done by high school graduates, and blue collar jobs where life and death are literally a split second away most of the time.

NL807 2y ago

Easiest careers, but also the hardest job to keep things from becoming an ungodly mess.

dharmab 2y ago
I used to work in a hospital. Software ain't bad at all, haha.
Ekaros 2y ago
At least software engineers can do something to not make a mess or change it. Once you get to real physical world that might not even be realistically done...

grahar64 2y ago

I think most jobs are hard, but "grass is always greener" means we focus on what is hard in our job and easy in other jobs.

batty_alex 2y ago

I don't agree at all that it's the easiest of careers. I never had to work free overtime as a postal clerk until 1AM because of a production bug in deployment I never had to figure out how to fix a fry machine on-the-spot at McDonald's because the person who normally fixes it is on vacation in the mountains I also never had to learn brand new ways of driving cars every few months as a valet driver. Maybe your software engineering job is easy but, this is the most stressful job I've had. And i'm not your average HN'er that's only ever known being a code slinger

MrJohz 2y ago
That does not sound like normal work for a software engineer. That sounds more like you have found an unusually bad workplace. Why are you changing out tools every few months? Why are you working overtime for free? Why is there only one person who knows how to fix things when they break (especially if that happens so regularly that you have one person who "normally" fixes it)?
- dharmab 2y ago
  The other two are dysfunctional but in the US, SWE are pretty much universally classified as exempt and legally aren't entitled to overtime pay. I see from your bio that you are based in a country with much better worker rights than the US.
  - MrJohz 2y ago
    Ah, if that's the case I can understand the argument a bit better, but maybe the article should then be titled "the insanity of being in one of the best-paid professions in one of the richest countries in the world, and still having poor working conditions".
- tayo42 2y ago
  > Why are you working overtime for free? Thats what oncall is, every job ive seen makes you do it

everdrive 2y ago

I agree completely, but I always struggle with how to characterize this. Software engineers are generally pretty privileged, and even relatively mediocre ones can pretty easily break $100k per year. But, work in this field is incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating. For sure, none of us would drop what we're doing to go work in retail. It's not as if we're suffering in any strict sense; no one is really allowed to abuse us, our jobs aren't ruining our bodies compared to something like construction. But, many of us kind of hate it and only stay because of the money, and would work anywhere else if the other jobs paid well enough. Now before you get out your tiny violin, I'm not saying other people don't have it worse, or that anyone should direct their sympathy towards us at all. I guess it feels more like a golden handcuffs situation.

martinsnow 2y ago
In America. If you work in other markets the salary is much lower. The only engineers I know who make above 100k euro are either lead or founder level.
- OJFord 2y ago
  100k USD is about 90k EUR (and 77k GBP), which you may say doesn't change your point materially, but I'm not splitting hairs, that's more than a 10% difference. I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
  - dharmab 2y ago
    FWIW that 10% almost entirely comes from the current economic shock. At the beginning of 2025 1 USD was about 1 Euro.
- dfawcus 2y ago
  It is possibly to earn over £100k as a software engineer employee in the UK, however those tend to be very specialised fields. (Not all of them are finance related). I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k. That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.

filoleg 2y ago

Agreed. We don’t even need to reach for the apples to oranges comparisons with manual labor jobs, just gotta look at anyone working another highly paid white collar job. Compare working in big law to big tech, and it will be plain as day. And I am not even getting into the baseline requirements to get there (undergrad from a good school with great GPA, LSAT, a top law school that is gonna cost you a pretty penny, hustling for internships, BAR, etc.), which SWE as a career has pretty much none of. The overall work-life balance difference alone is crazy.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
>Compare working in big law to big tech Not everyone works in big tech. A lot of devs worldwide work in mom and pop shops, legacy businesses, or various consultancy/body shops. Big-tech workers are the exception, not the rule, except maybe for the US workers.
- filoleg 2y ago
  That’s a fair point, but I am not sure how it is relevant, unless devs at mom&pop shops/legacy businesses/etc. and those outside of the US work more than the US lawyers (or any other highly-paid white collar job) or have barriers to entry similar to those. From those I know working at those places (and from working at a legacy business myself at one point, a big bank), that didn’t seem to be the case at all. At startups, sure, but that’s just a high risk/high reward type of a deal, and they still don’t have almost any barriers to entry either. Is it the case outside of the US? Genuine question, because I am not super familiar with close reality dev jobs outside of the US. But from what I saw, it didn’t strike me as an obvious thing that they get ground to the bone or have high barriers to entry (as opposed to other highly-paid white collar jobs).
  - lucyjojo 2y ago
    most devs are not highly paid outside the USA. they're good jobs for sure, pay-wise it would be around plumber range? no high barrier to entry whether you're worked to the bone or not depends on the place but yeah, in general devs have nothing to complain about.

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tiberriver256 2y ago

Thank you. If I complained for one second about my short houred, high paying, long vacationing, low-education requiring job around any of my family I'd get laughed out of the house.

trchek 2y ago

I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born). I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today. Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year). Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice. I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work. That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.

test6554 2y ago
For me work is work. Getting up on Monday Morning is always going to be a bummer. So I might as well get PAID and air conditioning.
sshine 2y ago
How inspiring. As someone who only delivered newspapers and worked in a video store as a kid, before landing my first developer job, I’ve always had this impression. And I could never convince myself to go work on a farm, or in a nursery, or at a gas station, because working on my computer, often from home, always paid better. I feel like most computer problems are made up, and so many real-world problems draw in your emotions and senses.

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OutOfHere 2y ago

That's not true at all because an eight hour shift of real coding work easily wears out the brain, making the entire evening useless. It is a sedentary job requiring excessive caffeine, with the result being that health deteriorates slowly but surely due to the job.

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Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

I think there is something to be said to how many people dislike doing what we do as software engineers. Forget about the people who like this job, there are so many looking at me sideways every time I describe what I do. True that the other jobs are usually treated very poorly, though.

purple-leafy 2y ago

Wrong. It is tough. But most jobs are tough - in some way. Software Engineering is one of the most information-volatile industries in history that I can think of. You have to aggressively keep pace with potentially, and I’m guessing here, the fastest shifting industry in history in terms of practices and knowledge and improvements. Not only that, it is constant failure and obstacles - bugs, frameworks, features, platforms, what have you - and constant layers of abstraction. A lot of the time you cannot visualise any outputs. Software Engineering is a highly skilled industry, and probably the most competitive industry in the world, with a very high rate of uncertainty and layoffs and change. We are working with some of the most complex systems created by man in history. I don’t think you can make a broad generalisation that we are coddled lol. Software Engineers in the USA in certain population centres earn a large salary, sure, but look overseas and comparatively that is not the case. Seriously, by what metric is Software Engineering one of the easiest careers? I’d like to hear your viewpoint because I think it’s so off-base that I must be missing something. It has its definite perks like work from home. But Software is up there as one of the toughest knowledge-worker industries there is. There are much tougher careers like anything Electrical Engineering, but by no yardstick is Software easy

9rx 2y ago
> and probably the most competitive industry in the world It may be fair to say that it wants to work its way towards that as the industry matures, but that hasn't been the case. People have been able to make insane amounts of money in software. You cannot make money in a competitive industry.
Ferret7446 2y ago
Indeed, GP's hypothesis can be trivially challenged by asking "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"
- try_the_bass 2y ago
  I mean, everyone's trying. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of people in software engineering who are there first and foremost for the paycheck. Some of them don't even like writing software! This doesn't necessarily correlate to skill at writing software, but I've also encountered a higher ratio of poor performers from this growing demographic, as well. The end result is that the median skill level seems to go down over time. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and seems like it should be expected as the pool of people working in software development grows. But as time goes on, there are definitely more and more people who are trying (and succeeding!) at doing it.

atoav 2y ago

Being a software engineer is a piece of cake compared to other engineering disciplines. Sure wrangling complexity and a shitton of knowledge is a lot of work, but most other engineering disciplines have much higher stakes, require you to put yourself out there and can land you in jail if you don't do your craft as you should. Have you ever heard of a modern software engineer who landed in jail because their error was part of an incident thst costed others their lives? Typically software errors are shrugged away as if they are extreme wheather events thst nobody can change. Creating usable elegant, efficient, reliable, testable and maintainable software isn't trivial, but it is doable and the consequences to not getting it 100% right are usually comparably mild. If I fuck up a part of code I usually produce a crash, patch it and I am good to go, if I select the wrong cables and put them into a building, I either cause a fire or I have to tear the whole building open to replace them, and let's not talk about civil engineering.. I remember sitting in a class of 30 people where people had over 30 different solutions to a complex load calculation of the kind that could kill people if it was realized.

mpalmer 2y ago

Quite a pronouncement to make with no supporting detail. Reads like troll bait if I'm being honest. But I'll respond in kind: Yes, it is. Tough is relative. There is no "we" to be coddled, only your flawed perception of a difficult-to-grasp, heterogeneous whole. There is no "we" to form a single impression of what is described in the post. Rhetoric isn't evidence.

dughnut 2y ago

A bridge engineer would need to know how to design a structure based on first principles of physics, nationally recognized reference documents, state agency published standards, state agency unpublished standards, agency project manager preferences, internal management preferences, and do so within a complicated project delivery protocol. These don’t all agree. Oh, and you can be sued and lose license to practice if you’re wrong. A doctor can’t give you aspirin without 2+ layers of administration to do the medical coding. I can only guess what bullshit liability insurance and licensure entails. Knowledge work is usually paid because it isn’t trivial.

iLemming 2y ago

How old are you? You get to your forties as a software engineer, and you'd realize how taxing this occupation is. Your eyesight may deteriorate; your neck and spine may experience chronic pain; you could develop digestive and kidney problems from prolonged immobility; you might get hemorrhoids and carpal tunnel syndrome; your immune system could weaken from constant stress and may cause depression. The number of different "solutions" for solving ergonomics alone is evidence of how difficult a career as a software engineer is, both - mentally and physically.

PhunkyPhil 2y ago
Realistically, do you not think most of these things are largely solvable by a few, intentional changes to your daily routine? 30 minute walk before work, gym after work, outdoor/physical hobbies, intentional healthy eating, etc... These, to me, aren't difficult and end up providing a net benefit on your life far outweighing the effort required to implement them.
- iLemming 2y ago
  Realistically, 30 minutes of walking a day is not enough to offset the long hours of sitting (no matter how great the chair is); standing desks aren't necessarily a better solution here either. Gym and healthy eating are a must, but not everyone can afford them (in terms of time). Anyhow, unlike my non-programmer friends, I can never leave my work - whenever I'm walking my dog, working out, cooking dinner, or taking a shower - I still keep thinking about the things I need to solve, the failing tests, the PR comments, my open-source projects, etc. Yes, I still love my job and wouldn't trade it for anything else. Sure, I'm very happy that I don't have to leave the house at 2AM to risk my life, but still, it isn't really one of "the easiest careers" - I am easily disposable, I don't ever receive a pension, whenever I need to find another gig - I have to go through seven circles of hell, and it never is the same hell to go through, I have too many bosses, I constantly have to keep learning new skills, routinely prove my worth, and defend my opinions, because even after twenty years of building expertise in various areas, in our field of work, one can never confidently call themselves an expert.

grafmax 2y ago

“Appreciate how good you have it” doesn’t help the exploited be any less exploited. Instead it serves to nudge the comparatively-less-exploited to feel guilty enough to stay quiet.

Supermancho 2y ago

> No it isnt. Yes it is. I can name a number of careers that are easier. Start with accounting or tax prep or mechanic or welder or barber or nail salon anything, on and on. Ridiculous.

coldtea 2y ago

>We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough Just because the stress is mental and not physical, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Ever heard of burnout?

subjectsigma 2y ago

It irks me to no end how much software engineers love to self-flagellate. If I had never met a software engineer before and just read HN my takeaway would be that all software engineers are privileged assholes who live in a bubble, get paid way too much, on top of that cheat on their hours, and provide functionally no value to society. In real life this is obviously not true. Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)

subjectsigma 2y ago
This “debate” has come up a few times in the streaming community. Viewer: “Streaming is so easy, you’re basically not even working, streamers are so privileged.” Streamer: “Can you act?” Viewer: “No, but what -“ Streamer: “Ok so you can’t act. Have you ever tried acting out a play, but it’s 6 hours long and also hundreds of people get to shout obscenities at you, and also you’re sometimes obligated to respond to their disturbing comments completely ad-lib without breaking character, and also you have to be juggling at the same time?” Viewer: “… well I still think <INSERT JOB> is harder” It doesn’t take a genius to realize there a different dimensions of difficulty and yet somehow many people can’t