5 ms·

It seems to me that "boring" often means "potentially automatable".

maxklein 17y ago
How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers? Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another platform You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.
- daleharvey 17y ago
  or you just need smarter programs I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.
  - thenduks 17y ago
    It's what we do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest' it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm. In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the examples given is simply lowering your job security.
    - coliveira 17y ago
      I always laugh at people who talk about the job security in writing bad code. The most secure job is for the one person that knows what he/she is doing, because they will find another one easily.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
- timwiseman 17y ago
  The answer is often by answering a higher level problem. For instance, writing a script that copies data across 5 servers with no major issues in the way is boring, but writing a script that synchronizing data across an arbitrary number of servers can be hard, interesting, and more valuable. When it is done, just hand it to the admin to apply to those particular 5 servers. Simple macros are often done by business power users instead of developers, but if it is something complicated then it is complicated and interesting. As for porting an app, there is some work on automating that depending on what the source and destination platforms are. The proper choice of language can minimize the work in the first place, and then you can build (or buy) tools to help automate at least large portions of the automation. Also, keep in mind there is a difference between knowingly hiring "bad programmers" and hiring "junior programmers." Bad programmers as the term seems to be used in this thread have no intention of improving, are good enough to get the job done eventually, but make no outside efforts. "Junior programmers" are often willing to do the boring stuff when they get started, but then they get better. You may have to deal with the fact they will want either promotion or to change companies in the near future, but in the meantime you get to benefit from the fact that they are constantly improving and using their own resources to do that.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  Strong AI?
ramchip 17y ago
I maintain a C++ app. Making the GUI, implementing the button callbacks, and writing the settings save/restore logic is all easy and boring compared to the signal and image processing core. But I can't possibly automate this, and I would be very happy to let a decent but less passionate or experienced, day-job coder do the GUI code while I take care of the more challenging parts. Even if I had to take more time teaching him than I would be doing it myself, I'd do it! More enjoyable and useful in the long-term.
- weavejester 17y ago
  I'm not sure I'd consider GUI design as easy and boring, just requiring a different set of skills to most programming work. Designing a good UI can be extremely difficult. I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. It seems to me that there are plenty of things interesting things you can do in a UI framework.
  - ramchip 17y ago
    > I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. Because of C++ :) More seriously, it's the actual design of the options screen. Different variables are hooked to different controls, and I have to make sure that eg. when a frequency (in Hz) is loaded from the registry, it is converted to GHz and the control is set to the appropriate value. Little things like this. I use Qt which is very good and abstracts the actual registry/config file access, but it cannot guess things for me. GUI design isn't always easy and boring, but I work on physics data acquisition apps that have 2 or 3 users in total, so literally nobody cares about the UI as long as the experiment data is fine. It could take 10 minutes to figure out the controls and the user would still be happy. Physicists are used to making and using GUIs that would make you weep! In my case the GUI is a very easy to solve problem compared to the rest of the code. Of course things would be different if I made an app with millions of users, a web app, etc.

How do you automate the writing of a script that copies data across 5 servers? Or an Excel macro for some business thing? Or porting an app to another platform You need developers for many things that cannot be automated.

daleharvey 17y ago
or you just need smarter programs I mean, I get the point, but making mundane tasks easy to do or removing the need to do them at all is kinda what we do as programmers.
- thenduks 17y ago
  It's what we do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest' it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm. In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the examples given is simply lowering your job security.
  - coliveira 17y ago
    I always laugh at people who talk about the job security in writing bad code. The most secure job is for the one person that knows what he/she is doing, because they will find another one easily.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
timwiseman 17y ago
The answer is often by answering a higher level problem. For instance, writing a script that copies data across 5 servers with no major issues in the way is boring, but writing a script that synchronizing data across an arbitrary number of servers can be hard, interesting, and more valuable. When it is done, just hand it to the admin to apply to those particular 5 servers. Simple macros are often done by business power users instead of developers, but if it is something complicated then it is complicated and interesting. As for porting an app, there is some work on automating that depending on what the source and destination platforms are. The proper choice of language can minimize the work in the first place, and then you can build (or buy) tools to help automate at least large portions of the automation. Also, keep in mind there is a difference between knowingly hiring "bad programmers" and hiring "junior programmers." Bad programmers as the term seems to be used in this thread have no intention of improving, are good enough to get the job done eventually, but make no outside efforts. "Junior programmers" are often willing to do the boring stuff when they get started, but then they get better. You may have to deal with the fact they will want either promotion or to change companies in the near future, but in the meantime you get to benefit from the fact that they are constantly improving and using their own resources to do that.
rsheridan6 17y ago
Strong AI?

ramchip 17y ago

I maintain a C++ app. Making the GUI, implementing the button callbacks, and writing the settings save/restore logic is all easy and boring compared to the signal and image processing core. But I can't possibly automate this, and I would be very happy to let a decent but less passionate or experienced, day-job coder do the GUI code while I take care of the more challenging parts. Even if I had to take more time teaching him than I would be doing it myself, I'd do it! More enjoyable and useful in the long-term.

weavejester 17y ago
I'm not sure I'd consider GUI design as easy and boring, just requiring a different set of skills to most programming work. Designing a good UI can be extremely difficult. I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. It seems to me that there are plenty of things interesting things you can do in a UI framework.
- ramchip 17y ago
  > I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. Because of C++ :) More seriously, it's the actual design of the options screen. Different variables are hooked to different controls, and I have to make sure that eg. when a frequency (in Hz) is loaded from the registry, it is converted to GHz and the control is set to the appropriate value. Little things like this. I use Qt which is very good and abstracts the actual registry/config file access, but it cannot guess things for me. GUI design isn't always easy and boring, but I work on physics data acquisition apps that have 2 or 3 users in total, so literally nobody cares about the UI as long as the experiment data is fine. It could take 10 minutes to figure out the controls and the user would still be happy. Physicists are used to making and using GUIs that would make you weep! In my case the GUI is a very easy to solve problem compared to the rest of the code. Of course things would be different if I made an app with millions of users, a web app, etc.