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> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Alwa

> Which is to say that the pleasure I get from programming is mostly about learning the underlying truths about computation and applying what I’ve learned. Always improving the craft. This, to me, is the practice of programming. I guess when you get to a certain age (I'm 45) I stop caring whether something like this has social value. I enjoy it anyways. Wanting to know how things work always brings me back. I don't care if an AI coded small or big parts of it, I still want to know how it works, how to make it better - what's holding the AI itself back from being a more effective programmer. I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. And it went through levels of hype and collapse. Maybe this is the ultimate collapse. But I still want to take apart the watch to see how it ticks. If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works.

pjmlp 8mo ago
It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss. So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.
- aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
  > So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    In many career paths, after senior developer there are only management roles. Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms, or go elsewhere where hopefully there is a more sane career path.
    - aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
      > Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms You did not get my point: it is not about non-acceptance of becoming a manager, but rather about having traits that commonly imply that "those in power" won't select you for becoming a manager.
      - pjmlp 8mo ago
        You are the one not getting it, there are companies where those in power only offer two pills, the red one allows to remain a company employee, the blue one means out willing or not. People aren't selected, they are dragged into their Peter principle role.
        temp8830 8mo ago
        For those of us "not getting it" the only option on offer is the blue pill. Imagine that.
  - reilly3000 8mo ago
    Maybe they choose not to exude those traits by choice (when a leader slot opens up), and can use them when they are circumstantially relevant. I have gone full founder, and I’m not happy with who I was. It’s an IC’s life for me. The only thing is, we’re all managers now. We’ve been given a fleet of robots to support a set of outcomes. We have to set expectations, monitor outputs, coach, intervene, step back, onboard new team members, train regularly, make sure they have the tools they need, etc and so on. Are those “soft skills” or just engineering? I’m curious if and how people are lacking in these areas when it’s just text.
acedTrex 8mo ago
I love this take, i feel similarly. LLMs can never rob me of my personal enjoyment of computing. Sure they might make my work life hell, but i've always considering my programming hobby to be completely separate from work.
mrcwinn 8mo ago
This. If you enjoy it for the sake of it, do more of it. You don’t need society with you. If, however, your job is to build value for a user, then you or the man or the system are to naturally optimize for what’s productive to that end. Arguing about generics doesn’t create any/enough value. It doesn’t build a product. These are two different sides of the profession and serve different ends.
iberator 8mo ago
I lost my job as a programmer and I think it's over for me. No, you will not hack the device drivers in the basement but you're gonna be flipping burgers and out of cash or energy for anything else. Worst thing: you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers without experience or young age... Once you are out of the field, and your money is gone: suddenly you are useless, old trash. No one even wants to employ ex programmers as they simply don't fit into any other workfield... /rant
- slashdev 8mo ago
  If you believe that, it could be true. On the other hand there are lots of companies hiring still, so you could also keep working as a software engineer, if that's what you're good at. The job has changed a lot though, it's not about writing code by hand anymore.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.
    - slashdev 8mo ago
      It's not all like that, but yeah there's a lot of artificialness to interviews and there always has been.
    - mapme 8mo ago
      What field has interviews without silliness like this. Jobs for lawyers in 1950 when all that mattered was your father and your alma mater? Hard pass. I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.
      - slashdev 8mo ago
        At work we do both. If you pass the somewhat artificial interviews we invite you for a trial week of 3-5 days working with the actual team on actual real work (a somewhat contained feature or problem). Lets us evaluate people in real conditions and visa versa.
PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
> when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. I don't remember this at all. I became a professional programmer in 1987, but perhaps it was the fact that I went directly to Unix, did not pass go, did not collect $200 and worked entirely on systems programming that helped skip any of the "low-status" of people doing RDBMS/forms work ?
- brandall10 8mo ago
  Low status is underselling it, but it certainly wasn't seen as an alternate path for those those considering medical/law/finance. I started my CS degree in '94, and my junior year was... weird. Suddenly a quarter of the faces in the lab were not the types you would ever expect to see there.
- ThrowawayR2 8mo ago
  At least in pop culture in the late '80s and early '90s, being into computers was for asocial dorks and other unflattering nerd stereotypes. It was really the rise of the Internet and dotcom boom in the late 90s where [EDIT] owning a computer became unavoidable and the first of the software industry billionaires started seeping into the public consciousness that being a computer nerd became respectable.
horns4lyfe 8mo ago
It’s always been a low-status profession, the pay is just better now
fuse711 8mo ago
> I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. No, you didn't! If you are 45, then you were 5-10 years old in the late 80s. You might have started playing around with programming at that time, but you didn't "get into" it in any professional sense. I am willing to bet anything that you had no knowledge, let alone concept, of the professional status of programming at that time.
- softwaredoug 8mo ago
  Fair. My perception was my parents thinking this is a dumb waste of time. When I eventually went to college in the late 90s / early 2000s that attitude seemed to switch. Add to that today's coding bootcamps for kids. It seems like quite a different world.
ferguess_k 8mo ago
> If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works. I'll probably do the same (actually doing this), camping in the woods or something, using a camper van.
elzbardico 8mo ago
HN is a terrible barometer for our profession opinions because here is the VC World Pravda Central. There are lots of brilliant folks here, but a lot of them are in it because of carrot of multigenerational money. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is definitelly a different ethos from the old slashdot. Programming is not going to disappear, neither AI coding assistants. But if anything I fear more a future backslash against those useful tools than being replace by them. Overly excited people using those tools without any controls are what is going to give us sooner or later a lot of high impact incidents, lik e Therac 25, but in a massive scale, and my fear is that the companies will err in overcorrecting once this inevitably happens. Also, cheap assistants are not going to last forever, real inference costs, despite all the hand-weaving will inevitably rear their ugly heads, and investor s will tire of subsidizing inference.

pjmlp 8mo ago

It kind of depends on where in the globe one is, many countries see programmers as a white collar job that happens to be better paid than a plain secretary, a mere transition phase into management, that is the success story for most families, the programmer turned boss. So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. And being unemployed beyond 50 years old in many countries that see being a programmer as yet another office job, means too old for employment, and too young for retirement.

aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
> So those of us that fight against becoming managers, it was for love of programming and the related technical details, as it usually comes with a payment and career ceiling. I think quite a lot of these programmers don't fight against becoming a manager, but it's rather that they don't have traits (character traits, demeanour, low on dark triad traits (it is known that the selection process and work reality for managers actively selects for these), ...) that are necessary to get "selected" to become a manager.
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  In many career paths, after senior developer there are only management roles. Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms, or go elsewhere where hopefully there is a more sane career path.
  - aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
    > Doesn't matter what traits they have, the only way up, to get that raise, additional benefits, or not being thrown into some improvement program is to accept becoming a manager in one of its various forms You did not get my point: it is not about non-acceptance of becoming a manager, but rather about having traits that commonly imply that "those in power" won't select you for becoming a manager.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      You are the one not getting it, there are companies where those in power only offer two pills, the red one allows to remain a company employee, the blue one means out willing or not. People aren't selected, they are dragged into their Peter principle role.
      - temp8830 8mo ago
        For those of us "not getting it" the only option on offer is the blue pill. Imagine that.
- reilly3000 8mo ago
  Maybe they choose not to exude those traits by choice (when a leader slot opens up), and can use them when they are circumstantially relevant. I have gone full founder, and I’m not happy with who I was. It’s an IC’s life for me. The only thing is, we’re all managers now. We’ve been given a fleet of robots to support a set of outcomes. We have to set expectations, monitor outputs, coach, intervene, step back, onboard new team members, train regularly, make sure they have the tools they need, etc and so on. Are those “soft skills” or just engineering? I’m curious if and how people are lacking in these areas when it’s just text.

acedTrex 8mo ago

I love this take, i feel similarly. LLMs can never rob me of my personal enjoyment of computing. Sure they might make my work life hell, but i've always considering my programming hobby to be completely separate from work.

mrcwinn 8mo ago

This. If you enjoy it for the sake of it, do more of it. You don’t need society with you. If, however, your job is to build value for a user, then you or the man or the system are to naturally optimize for what’s productive to that end. Arguing about generics doesn’t create any/enough value. It doesn’t build a product. These are two different sides of the profession and serve different ends.

iberator 8mo ago

I lost my job as a programmer and I think it's over for me. No, you will not hack the device drivers in the basement but you're gonna be flipping burgers and out of cash or energy for anything else. Worst thing: you never gonna even be good at flipping burgers without experience or young age... Once you are out of the field, and your money is gone: suddenly you are useless, old trash. No one even wants to employ ex programmers as they simply don't fit into any other workfield... /rant

slashdev 8mo ago
If you believe that, it could be true. On the other hand there are lots of companies hiring still, so you could also keep working as a software engineer, if that's what you're good at. The job has changed a lot though, it's not about writing code by hand anymore.
- pjmlp 8mo ago
  Provided one can go through the silliness of fitting golf balls into planes, or going through the algorithms and data structures books from 30 years ago.
  - slashdev 8mo ago
    It's not all like that, but yeah there's a lot of artificialness to interviews and there always has been.
  - mapme 8mo ago
    What field has interviews without silliness like this. Jobs for lawyers in 1950 when all that mattered was your father and your alma mater? Hard pass. I would take a interview premised on a know, learnable challenge (even if silly) over one that exclusively relied on what college you went to.
    - slashdev 8mo ago
      At work we do both. If you pass the somewhat artificial interviews we invite you for a trial week of 3-5 days working with the actual team on actual real work (a somewhat contained feature or problem). Lets us evaluate people in real conditions and visa versa.

PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago

> when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. I don't remember this at all. I became a professional programmer in 1987, but perhaps it was the fact that I went directly to Unix, did not pass go, did not collect $200 and worked entirely on systems programming that helped skip any of the "low-status" of people doing RDBMS/forms work ?

brandall10 8mo ago
Low status is underselling it, but it certainly wasn't seen as an alternate path for those those considering medical/law/finance. I started my CS degree in '94, and my junior year was... weird. Suddenly a quarter of the faces in the lab were not the types you would ever expect to see there.
ThrowawayR2 8mo ago
At least in pop culture in the late '80s and early '90s, being into computers was for asocial dorks and other unflattering nerd stereotypes. It was really the rise of the Internet and dotcom boom in the late 90s where [EDIT] owning a computer became unavoidable and the first of the software industry billionaires started seeping into the public consciousness that being a computer nerd became respectable.

horns4lyfe 8mo ago

It’s always been a low-status profession, the pay is just better now

fuse711 8mo ago

> I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s. No, you didn't! If you are 45, then you were 5-10 years old in the late 80s. You might have started playing around with programming at that time, but you didn't "get into" it in any professional sense. I am willing to bet anything that you had no knowledge, let alone concept, of the professional status of programming at that time.

softwaredoug 8mo ago
Fair. My perception was my parents thinking this is a dumb waste of time. When I eventually went to college in the late 90s / early 2000s that attitude seemed to switch. Add to that today's coding bootcamps for kids. It seems like quite a different world.

ferguess_k 8mo ago

> If society collapses because 80% of white collar jobs disappear, I guess I'll just be in my basement wanting to know how a linux kernel driver works. I'll probably do the same (actually doing this), camping in the woods or something, using a camper van.

elzbardico 8mo ago

HN is a terrible barometer for our profession opinions because here is the VC World Pravda Central. There are lots of brilliant folks here, but a lot of them are in it because of carrot of multigenerational money. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but it is definitelly a different ethos from the old slashdot. Programming is not going to disappear, neither AI coding assistants. But if anything I fear more a future backslash against those useful tools than being replace by them. Overly excited people using those tools without any controls are what is going to give us sooner or later a lot of high impact incidents, lik e Therac 25, but in a massive scale, and my fear is that the companies will err in overcorrecting once this inevitably happens. Also, cheap assistants are not going to last forever, real inference costs, despite all the hand-weaving will inevitably rear their ugly heads, and investor s will tire of subsidizing inference.