6 ms·

I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest

by n8cpdx 1y ago

I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar. I’m an unhinged lunatic who loves productivity software and user experiences. The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Watching videos about how the Ribbon was designed. Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. Eventually daydreaming about walking into the office, tired from a hard sprint, getting coffee in corporate-sponsored coffee cups. I wake up and reflect how profoundly lucky I am to have my dream job. Not just having the career I have, but having a dream at all and having a dream I could love in practice.

LPisGood 1y ago
I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money. Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.
- walt_grata 1y ago
  I went through that in the late 90s and saw the writing on the wall of the 2010s. Hoping it's not too cyclic
- munificent 1y ago
  Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today. They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
  - x______________ 1y ago
    ..but but... I've never had the opportunity or helpful environment to focus on learning languages and focused on other skillsets. Other efforts to try and coordinate the time, finances and a team to accomplish the projects that I have in mind also failed miserably.. Am I (for example) so bad to believe that I could possibly accomplish some of my dreams with the help of LLMs as another attempt to be an accomplished human being? (partly /s but partly not)
    - kevindamm 1y ago
      The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave. Ideally. In reality, that's impossible to enforce.
      - x______________ 1y ago
        >The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave. I will argue that this is a false pretense, in part that you say it's impossible to enforce, but also for the fact that it does not happen in reality. Anyone with a will to an objective will utilize any tools at their disposal, only the observer from another perspective will judge that this is 'good or not'. To the beholder, this has become the only way to achieve their goals. An anecdote goes by the lady who was using a ww2 era hand grenade to crush spices in her kitchen for decades without anything happening. Goals were met and nothing bad happened but general consensus states that this is bad for many reasons, to which nothing happened. Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks.
        kevindamm 1y ago
        > Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks. This understanding, and hint of broader/benevolent perspective, is what I meant by responsibility. I'm not so naive as to expect it in general but I have known it to exist, that there are people who respect the responsibility implicit in proper use of their tools. The world is a labyrinth of prisoners' dilemmas so I get that there's a reasonable argument for being "irresponsible" whatever that means in the context.
- RankingMember 1y ago
  Incredibly lucky, honestly. It's a rare thing to have a passion line up with a healthy income.
- toast0 1y ago
  I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.
erikerikson 1y ago
> somewhere around the 2010s It was there in the 90s
- rconti 1y ago
  My Information Systems major in college had 6 graduates in 2006. It had been over a hundred a few years prior.
- dkarl 1y ago
  Far less prominently. I'll never forget when a programmer I worked with in 2001 or so said that he had decided to study CS in college for the money, having never written a line of code beforehand. The rest of us looked at him like he had squeezed a second head out of his neck. We had first gotten into it as a hobby and were later surprised to find that we could get paid for it. Only a few of us had CS degrees or had even taken CS coursework in college.
  - morning-coffee 1y ago
    Yeah. I learned programming in high school in the mid-80's and was hooked. I liked electronics too, and got a BSEE. But took a summer job writing code and never looked back... still coding now, professionally. My analogy is that the 80's and 90's were like the "Golden years" of software jobs... maybe like being in the aircraft industry was in the 30's. Lot's of learning and discovery and fun to be had. Working in software now is probably like I imagine being an aeronautical engineer at Boeing now... you'd better be prepared for being satisfied working on some small part of a much larger and complex system and moving at a glacial pace (compared to the Golden years). (And yeah, the workplace now is flooded with people who seem to be here because they heard it paid well.)
keybored 1y ago
OP is a decent article which just becomes fodder for the usual 1. I love my job because (1) CRUD apps are so immensely satisfying (2) turns out that optimizing ad metrics at FAANG was my innately-sought destiny (3) being acquired by GOOG is bitter-sweet because now my wife will complain that I am not retiring even though I can 2. As opposed to the normies that just have this job because they need a job
svantana 1y ago
Same. Maybe this AI text generator trend will bring salaries back down, the opportunists will leave for greener pastures and us mega-nerds will have the software-writing all to ourselves.
mclau157 1y ago
I am a mechanical engineer who browses hackernews, if you want to get up and move around get a mechanical engineering degree
cryptoegorophy 1y ago
For the same reason i chose not to go into computer science, changed to a different degree after 1st year in college, best decision. What you really need in life is financial independence and then you can choose what you want to do. Wish you all financial independence.
fidotron 1y ago
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Dijkstra famously wasn't exactly keen on computers.
- chubot 1y ago
  I haven’t heard that, but if it’s true, it’s probably because he enjoyed math more than engineering or programming. Computer science as a branch of mathematics has a long and fruitful history Or to be more pithy, nobody accomplishes what Dijkstra did without liking their work. I’d say it’s zero people
boredemployee 1y ago
I think I relate with most of the things you've said, even with the ADHD part (not officially diagnosed, however) but what annoys me these days is the amount of work we have to do. The work is rewarding but very often just * too much *. Maybe I'm unlucky or maybe it is the companies I worked for...
alexpotato 1y ago
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling. Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!
mieubrisse 1y ago
This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.
- nomel 1y ago
  It's nice to get paid to do what I would be doing anyways.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar. Yup. Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog. Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
Right - there are two types of people working as developers. 1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day. 2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer. If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.
- assword 1y ago
  I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then. But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on. But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
  - voidfunc 1y ago
    > I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on. I'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.
  - piva00 1y ago
    Same, same. It was my main hobby since I discovered a little terminal in my dad's 80s videogame that could run BASIC, used my rudimentary 9 years old reading skills to look hard enough to the manual and figure out something about that puzzling black screen. Discovered I could make it do stuff. I could make stuff, just by typing some white characters in the black screen. Fell in love, was my main indoors hobby, bought books, learned enough C/C++ to try to mod games before I was 14. The web started to be a thing. I asked for HTML books for Christmas. Then learnt about ASP, it had something to do with Visual BASIC, I knew BASIC. Learnt the web, got a job, worked my ass off. 12 hours day and loving it, I was 18, and lucky. My hobby was my job. 20+ years later, it's a job, programming is a skill I have and I'm extremely grateful for being so lucky that it also made me a career, allowed me to live in other countries, and ultimately settle down in a very different place than what used to be my home. But still, it's a job now, not my hobby. After working in many different places, seeing the transformation of this industry, me getting older, it's just all a bit jading, I don't aspire to do this for more than a job these days, the only figment left of the old hobby is the odd electronics project for artists. I have other hobbies that fulfill me in a very different way, I think it's just life :)
MangoToupe 1y ago
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Sometimes the interest just fades. What stimulated me at age 14 no longer does at age 36.
lanfeust6 1y ago
> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. This was a discussion that came up a few times in College. I argued that with hyper-specialization, you can't satisfy a desirable balance of cerebral and manual work, socializing, and being outdoors. Pick your poison. I didn't want to do shift work at the bottom of a mine pit so here I am. You can have flexibility in your free time to do something else. My father was always tired from shift-work and did basically nothing at leisure even as we grew up.
- n8cpdx 1y ago
  It depends on your ideal balance. There are jobs that involve field work, thinking, and socializing, but there are always trade offs. I find that being indoors from dawn to dusk with a 30 minute walking commute and a hike once or twice a year is my ideal balance. Police officer actually has a really good balance of physical exertion, mental/social challenge, and indoor/outdoor exposure. And you get to write A LOT. But there are lots of adjacent roles, and many more not so close; e.g. I know someone who used to do field data collection and data analysis for some conservation nonprofit; lots of nature, physical exercise, and mental stimulation.
  - lanfeust6 1y ago
    You're right. Some with a academic slant I knew took biology and ended up working as park conservationists. That allowed them to be outdoors and do assessments for research. I'll also concede that some proponents for trades will argue that their work is cerebral, but this probably depends on the job. Dev can be like that too. I knew union guys who would describe their work as pretty rote and dull despite the long hours (even for electrical), and others who'd say it was interesting.
BeetleB 1y ago
“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience. I've lived both worlds. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-monkey/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...
- bananaflag 1y ago
  I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    Not the ones I dealt with. Mechanical Engineer: I build real things that I can touch! Electrical Engineer: I get to play with oscilloscopes, and do soldering! You get the idea. I think this is because as students, a lot of engineering work is either labs, or on paper. They don't realize how much dependent on computers professional engineering work is.
wagwang 1y ago
I think there are a lot of people who liked programming until it became a job.
DontchaKnowit 1y ago
1) I LOVED computer science school 2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer. 3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life 4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not. Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades
bawolff 1y ago
I actually find i tend to dislike non-programming computer activity. Love programming, but if someone suggests taking notes with a laptop instead of paper, my reaction is ewww computers.
poemxo 1y ago
But sitting in front of computers isn't what computer science is about, and some of those students might have aspirations to change the HCI status quo. Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are 1) can you solve hard problems? 2) do you want to continue solving hard problems? At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.
Izikiel43 1y ago
> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.
- a96 1y ago
  That's why the real term is computing science.
piperswe 1y ago
> The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school. And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.
xlinux 1y ago
True, teamblind.com shows how horrible people have become software engineers. no wonder software quality has become very bad
BatmanAoD 1y ago
> Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.

by n8cpdx 1y ago

LPisGood 1y ago

I was still in middle school in the early 2010’s and I remember thinking how lucky I am to want to be a computer programmer for a career AND it happens to pay a lot of money. Unfortunately many people today got into for the money and not the passion (or at least the passion and the money). Those people look for shortcuts and are generally unpleasant to work with, in my opinion.

walt_grata 1y ago
I went through that in the late 90s and saw the writing on the wall of the 2010s. Hoping it's not too cyclic
munificent 1y ago
Those are the exact people who are most excited about AI today. They just want the code but they don't enjoy the coding, so they're trying to find something that will give them the former while sparing them the latter.
- x______________ 1y ago
  ..but but... I've never had the opportunity or helpful environment to focus on learning languages and focused on other skillsets. Other efforts to try and coordinate the time, finances and a team to accomplish the projects that I have in mind also failed miserably.. Am I (for example) so bad to believe that I could possibly accomplish some of my dreams with the help of LLMs as another attempt to be an accomplished human being? (partly /s but partly not)
  - kevindamm 1y ago
    The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave. Ideally. In reality, that's impossible to enforce.
    - x______________ 1y ago
      >The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave. I will argue that this is a false pretense, in part that you say it's impossible to enforce, but also for the fact that it does not happen in reality. Anyone with a will to an objective will utilize any tools at their disposal, only the observer from another perspective will judge that this is 'good or not'. To the beholder, this has become the only way to achieve their goals. An anecdote goes by the lady who was using a ww2 era hand grenade to crush spices in her kitchen for decades without anything happening. Goals were met and nothing bad happened but general consensus states that this is bad for many reasons, to which nothing happened. Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks.
      - kevindamm 1y ago
        > Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks. This understanding, and hint of broader/benevolent perspective, is what I meant by responsibility. I'm not so naive as to expect it in general but I have known it to exist, that there are people who respect the responsibility implicit in proper use of their tools. The world is a labyrinth of prisoners' dilemmas so I get that there's a reasonable argument for being "irresponsible" whatever that means in the context.
RankingMember 1y ago
Incredibly lucky, honestly. It's a rare thing to have a passion line up with a healthy income.
toast0 1y ago
I've taken to having a hobby car, and I'm pretty sure I could have been solving automotive problems for a living rather than computer problems; these days, automotive problems are computer problems, but my hobby car is my age and only has one computer in it, but it's not servicable ... it just works and runs the fuel injectors, or it stops working and I'll get a used replacement or a megasquirt. Computer problems are nicer, cause I don't smell like car for 2 days afterwards, but if there was no money in computer problems, I might have been redirected into car problems or other similar things.

erikerikson 1y ago

> somewhere around the 2010s It was there in the 90s

rconti 1y ago
My Information Systems major in college had 6 graduates in 2006. It had been over a hundred a few years prior.
dkarl 1y ago
Far less prominently. I'll never forget when a programmer I worked with in 2001 or so said that he had decided to study CS in college for the money, having never written a line of code beforehand. The rest of us looked at him like he had squeezed a second head out of his neck. We had first gotten into it as a hobby and were later surprised to find that we could get paid for it. Only a few of us had CS degrees or had even taken CS coursework in college.
- morning-coffee 1y ago
  Yeah. I learned programming in high school in the mid-80's and was hooked. I liked electronics too, and got a BSEE. But took a summer job writing code and never looked back... still coding now, professionally. My analogy is that the 80's and 90's were like the "Golden years" of software jobs... maybe like being in the aircraft industry was in the 30's. Lot's of learning and discovery and fun to be had. Working in software now is probably like I imagine being an aeronautical engineer at Boeing now... you'd better be prepared for being satisfied working on some small part of a much larger and complex system and moving at a glacial pace (compared to the Golden years). (And yeah, the workplace now is flooded with people who seem to be here because they heard it paid well.)

keybored 1y ago

OP is a decent article which just becomes fodder for the usual 1. I love my job because (1) CRUD apps are so immensely satisfying (2) turns out that optimizing ad metrics at FAANG was my innately-sought destiny (3) being acquired by GOOG is bitter-sweet because now my wife will complain that I am not retiring even though I can 2. As opposed to the normies that just have this job because they need a job

svantana 1y ago

Same. Maybe this AI text generator trend will bring salaries back down, the opportunists will leave for greener pastures and us mega-nerds will have the software-writing all to ourselves.

mclau157 1y ago

I am a mechanical engineer who browses hackernews, if you want to get up and move around get a mechanical engineering degree

cryptoegorophy 1y ago

For the same reason i chose not to go into computer science, changed to a different degree after 1st year in college, best decision. What you really need in life is financial independence and then you can choose what you want to do. Wish you all financial independence.

fidotron 1y ago

> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Dijkstra famously wasn't exactly keen on computers.

chubot 1y ago
I haven’t heard that, but if it’s true, it’s probably because he enjoyed math more than engineering or programming. Computer science as a branch of mathematics has a long and fruitful history Or to be more pithy, nobody accomplishes what Dijkstra did without liking their work. I’d say it’s zero people

boredemployee 1y ago

I think I relate with most of the things you've said, even with the ADHD part (not officially diagnosed, however) but what annoys me these days is the amount of work we have to do. The work is rewarding but very often just * too much *. Maybe I'm unlucky or maybe it is the companies I worked for...

alexpotato 1y ago

> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. I went to college in the late 1990s at the height of the dotcom boom. Saw a bunch of people who had this same feeling. Which made no sense to me b/c I loved programming so much that I would do my homework assignments ahead of time!

mieubrisse 1y ago

This is me too! Everything about writing code, running it, messing with Github, tinkering with my dotfiles, automations... even as a preschooler, I was always dissatisfied that my drawings didn't do anything. I feel astoundingly lucky to have a job I was born to do.

nomel 1y ago
It's nice to get paid to do what I would be doing anyways.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

> I think the “get rich easy” reputation that software engineering gained somewhere around the 2010s really hurt the industry and a lot of people who are chasing the dollar. Yup. Also, "The Company is the Product," where the goal is to sell the company, and the end-users are just food for the prize hog. Just start talking about improving software quality, or giving end-users more agency, privacy, and freedom, around here, and see the response.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

Right - there are two types of people working as developers. 1) People who love programming, do it as a hobby, and love being in front of a computer all day. 2) People who doing it because it's a decent paying job, but have no passion (and probably therefore not much skill) for it, and the last thing they want when they clock off their job is to be back on a computer. If you are from group 1) - getting paid to do your hobby, then being a developer is a great job, but if you are from group 2) I imagine it can be pretty miserable, especially if trying to debug complex problems, or faced with tasks pushing your capability.

assword 1y ago
I love(d) programming when I was a hobbyist and still get the itch to hack around with stuff now and then. But even then, I was never interested in doing it as a career. I knew I’d hate it. And lo and behold here we are. I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on. But I was also young and way too broke to go to school so it was really the best financial option at the time. In retrospect, I’d have wasted my time doing something else.
- voidfunc 1y ago
  > I just don’t care about most of the crap products people pay me to work on. I'm a masochist, I like the challenges and pain I have to deal with everyday for a product I don't care about.
- piva00 1y ago
  Same, same. It was my main hobby since I discovered a little terminal in my dad's 80s videogame that could run BASIC, used my rudimentary 9 years old reading skills to look hard enough to the manual and figure out something about that puzzling black screen. Discovered I could make it do stuff. I could make stuff, just by typing some white characters in the black screen. Fell in love, was my main indoors hobby, bought books, learned enough C/C++ to try to mod games before I was 14. The web started to be a thing. I asked for HTML books for Christmas. Then learnt about ASP, it had something to do with Visual BASIC, I knew BASIC. Learnt the web, got a job, worked my ass off. 12 hours day and loving it, I was 18, and lucky. My hobby was my job. 20+ years later, it's a job, programming is a skill I have and I'm extremely grateful for being so lucky that it also made me a career, allowed me to live in other countries, and ultimately settle down in a very different place than what used to be my home. But still, it's a job now, not my hobby. After working in many different places, seeing the transformation of this industry, me getting older, it's just all a bit jading, I don't aspire to do this for more than a job these days, the only figment left of the old hobby is the odd electronics project for artists. I have other hobbies that fulfill me in a very different way, I think it's just life :)

MangoToupe 1y ago

> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Sometimes the interest just fades. What stimulated me at age 14 no longer does at age 36.

lanfeust6 1y ago

> I’ll never forget overhearing this quote from a fellow sophomore in the comp sci lab in college: “if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. This was a discussion that came up a few times in College. I argued that with hyper-specialization, you can't satisfy a desirable balance of cerebral and manual work, socializing, and being outdoors. Pick your poison. I didn't want to do shift work at the bottom of a mine pit so here I am. You can have flexibility in your free time to do something else. My father was always tired from shift-work and did basically nothing at leisure even as we grew up.

n8cpdx 1y ago
It depends on your ideal balance. There are jobs that involve field work, thinking, and socializing, but there are always trade offs. I find that being indoors from dawn to dusk with a 30 minute walking commute and a hike once or twice a year is my ideal balance. Police officer actually has a really good balance of physical exertion, mental/social challenge, and indoor/outdoor exposure. And you get to write A LOT. But there are lots of adjacent roles, and many more not so close; e.g. I know someone who used to do field data collection and data analysis for some conservation nonprofit; lots of nature, physical exercise, and mental stimulation.
- lanfeust6 1y ago
  You're right. Some with a academic slant I knew took biology and ended up working as park conservationists. That allowed them to be outdoors and do assessments for research. I'll also concede that some proponents for trades will argue that their work is cerebral, but this probably depends on the job. Dev can be like that too. I knew union guys who would describe their work as pretty rote and dull despite the long hours (even for electrical), and others who'd say it was interesting.

BeetleB 1y ago

“if I have to sit in front of a computer every day for the rest of my life I’ll kill myself.” Heh. And then they go become a "real" engineer (mechanical, electrical, whatever), and end up sitting in front of a computer all day, dealing with poor UI and poorly designed SW because a lot of CAD tools are either built in-house or owned by monopolies who have no incentive to improve the experience. I've lived both worlds. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-monkey/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-mon...

bananaflag 1y ago
I imagine the people who say that would like a more people-facing job (like, I dunno, maybe a DJ) rather than a computer-facing one. They don't necessarily imagine being a "real" engineer as an alternative to being a programmer, they put them both in the same category.
- BeetleB 1y ago
  Not the ones I dealt with. Mechanical Engineer: I build real things that I can touch! Electrical Engineer: I get to play with oscilloscopes, and do soldering! You get the idea. I think this is because as students, a lot of engineering work is either labs, or on paper. They don't realize how much dependent on computers professional engineering work is.

wagwang 1y ago

I think there are a lot of people who liked programming until it became a job.

DontchaKnowit 1y ago

1) I LOVED computer science school 2) I really love certain aspects of being a software engineer. 3) I have definutely said Ill kill myself if I have to sit in front of a computer for my entire life 4) this job will afford me a future where I can retire at a reasonable age. Whereas a non-computer oriented alternative (the other career available to me was house painting) will not. Therefore I will bear the monotony of sitting in front of a computer all day for a few decades

bawolff 1y ago

I actually find i tend to dislike non-programming computer activity. Love programming, but if someone suggests taking notes with a laptop instead of paper, my reaction is ewww computers.

poemxo 1y ago

But sitting in front of computers isn't what computer science is about, and some of those students might have aspirations to change the HCI status quo. Software engineering and computer science seem to have two strict criteria to consider and neither of them is the same sort of continuous, analog suffering as wearing large shoes or practicing shooting a basketball. These criteria are 1) can you solve hard problems? 2) do you want to continue solving hard problems? At least to me it seems that those two things take more effort and willpower than anything else in software. So I don't think challenging a person about whether they would love to sit in front a computer all day is the right approach.

Izikiel43 1y ago

> Computer science is an interesting career choice for someone who hates computers and being with computers. Well, people who do real computer science don't program a lot, it's all theoretical math. Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy does with telescopes.

a96 1y ago
That's why the real term is computing science.

piperswe 1y ago

> The type of kid who was setting up Outlook betas in 6th grade to try the new features. Oh man, this brings up memories of me being inordinately excited about Office 2007 when it was in beta. I was in elementary school. And memories of staying up late reading my collection of outdated tech books (Borland C++, UNIX SVR4, HTML 4, and the MS-DOS 6.22 manual were the big ones). Initially learning about programming and UNIX from those books were extremely formative for how I view programming today, and I suspect that's given me quite a different perspective on a lot of things (especially things like HTML & CGI) than a lot of other folks in my age cohort.

xlinux 1y ago

True, teamblind.com shows how horrible people have become software engineers. no wonder software quality has become very bad

BatmanAoD 1y ago

> Reading C++ for dummies even though I had untreated ADHD and couldn’t sit still long enough to get much past std::cout. You may have lucked out. I also didn't get terribly far in that book, but I thought it was fairly weird when I tried to read it, and after majoring in CS in college and eventually reading some very good books on programming, I believe I was entirely justified in not liking that one.