6 ms·

When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS de

When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school. I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now, 30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I still love programming, but it is a trap in that I've not, for a long time, seriously tried doing anything else. So for me it has been 30 years of regular retooling, and likely another 20 years of the same. Unless I decide to open the trap and leave.

derefr 12y ago
A trap, compared to what? Is plumbing a trap? Is finance a trap? Is hairstyling a trap?
- ebbv 12y ago
  Exactly. How is this different from any other profession? Developers can be so myopic. The narcissism in our industry really drives me up the wall. The only other industry that is this way, that I've seen, is the entertainment industry. The denizens of which also seem to suffer from this idea that they are totally unique and none of the plebeian hordes can possibly relate to what they go through.
  - staunch 12y ago
    Seems to fit Maslow's hierarchy of needs pretty well. Being a programmer mostly provides for the physiological needs (food and shelter), but it doesn't necessarily offer much else. It's natural and healthy that people also strive for financial security, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
  - malvosenior 12y ago
    I don't think it's the developers being myopic. For the most part, it's management that views development as a young person's game and encourages people to move out of the technical track and into the management track. If companies viewed programming as a long term career, they would put the pay scales in place to treat it as such. It's only a "trap" in the respect that in many (not all) places your pay maxes out as a programmer faster than it does as a manager. I don't think it's most developer's choice for it to be that way.
    - derefr 12y ago
      I thought this was a problem of managers for the longest time, but recently I read an argument once that convinced me of the opposite. Tu quoque: the "my boss doesn't understand" problem in companies basically comes from people working for people with lower IQ than them. It's not a skillset gap, it's a pattern-recognition gap. In the military, the best soldiers become officers, and the best officers become generals—even though these are all different skill-sets—because it's more important to have a good general than to have a good soldier, and so if you could, theoretically, do both tasks well, then the military's comparative advantage in allocating your brainpower is to make you a general. In tech, we see a "career track" of engineers that attempts to be a meritocracy, with the engineering leads and fellows being the guys who have been there the longest—but that's more like the NCO track of the military, valuing experience for the job they're doing, but not the raw brainpower and tenacity to do jobs well generally. Management, meanwhile, is not-at-all a meritocracy; managers hire from outside based on credentialism, and engineers are "pushed into" management based on credence from fellow devs (the same thing you get from being a battle-tested NCO), rather than being "pulled in" by an actual need.
      - voronoff 12y ago
        What military? Most have different requirements for soldiering and officering that don't allow track switching. In modern ones, it's level of schooling, while in older ones it might be nobility of blood. You'd have an extremely hard time even making the argument that going from officer to general is meritocratic in the U.S. right now.
      - gaius 12y ago
        In the military, the best soldiers become officers This isn't true in any modern military.
        walshemj 12y ago
        Well there are LE late entry officers in the UK ie you where a squadie before. And there is some truth I am told in the old adage that the NCO's really run the Army they just let Rupert pretend he's in charge.
- baldeagle 12y ago
  Plumber know all about traps. http://www.homeharmonizing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/simple-steps-for-replacing-a-drain-trap_1.jpg http://www.homeharmonizing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/si...
- markbnj 12y ago
  I get your point and agree with it. I've said it many times myself. But people don't think in terms of mastering a craft and spending a productive life practicing it. In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. In that sense most engineering fields are "traps" because if you stay an engineer you aren't going any further up the ladder. I'm a craftsperson, and I still practice the craft of building software systems professionally, every day, even though I've been doing it for twenty years. That's one thing that hasn't changed. Another thing that hasn't really changed in twenty years is my salary. I understand and accept that, but if you don't know that will be a consequence of being essentially in a trade then I can understand how you might come to feel stuck.
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    > In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. And what, exactly, is it that you're losing? You can have a pretty damn fine life without getting anywhere near the 1%.
    - derefr 12y ago
      The respect of your peers, presumably. The best gift I was ever given was to grow up on a farm. I'm doing way better than my peers.
      - marktangotango 12y ago
        I always say shoveling manure was good preparation for the corporate world.
    - diminoten 12y ago
      Legacy. Empire. Providing for your children's children. Giving your loved ones the kind of life they've never even considered possible. Seeing the smile on your mother's face when you get to tell her she can stop working, that you've taken care of her and your father, and your brothers and sisters. The 1% are living in a way that will last longer than they will, on a scale that the rest of us won't achieve in our lifetimes. That's okay, certainly, but to pretend like there's no reason to work towards the 1% is silly.
- nilkn 12y ago
  It's a ridiculous term which I suppose is supposed to make people feel less guilty about having extremely comfortable, high paying, and overall relatively easy jobs, when they know that millions of others are struggling in jobs they hate, are drastically underpaid, or can't even find jobs. A common version of this is to complain about a lack of vacation time (even though you have 4 weeks, plus holidays, plus sick time, plus sometimes getting to work from home), as if struggling menial workers barely making above minimum wage are spending half the year in the Bahamas. [Note: this paragraph is written from a US perspective.] "Golden handcuffs" is a similar term. It's not that there is no validity to these notions or that the phenomenon of golden handcuffs doesn't actually occur, because it most certainly does. It's just that, in their typical usage that I see, these terms are used to invent an abstract struggle that upper middle class people are supposedly facing in order to assuage guilt over their own fortune.
  - Maxels 12y ago
    I thought golden handcuffs were typically referring to vesting options in a company. I know I have friends that don't want to resign themselves to a life of programming/software engineering/whatever you want to call it because they see a ceiling to their compensation, or career path. Theres only so many numbers they can tack on to your title before it becomes meaningless.
    - freyr 12y ago
      I go back and forth on this. There's always a ceiling. For a doctor, banker, corporate lawyer, or salesperson, the ceiling is some multiple higher. But are they better jobs? An MD would require many years of study first, a law degree would burn $100k of your net worth and likely leave you underemployed, you're probably not cut out for sales, and so on. You really only escape the ceiling going into business for yourself. And there probably has never been a time where it's easier to go into business than the last decade, because of the relatively low cost and high reward of developing software. Maybe that's why programmers are often restless, because the path to wealth seems close at hand (even when it's much harder than it seems, and requires many more skills than just programming).
    - deleted 12y ago
- weavie 12y ago
  I imagine any career path you specialize in can be considered a trap. The more time you invest in, the more it feels like you have to stick with that path so that time doesn't get wasted. My friend who was a plumber recognized this. He also realised that plumbing is not something that you want to be trapped in. As you age it get's harder and harder to be constantly crouching down and contorting yourself into those hard to reach areas. So he jumped ship and is retraining as an architect. Programming doesn't have that limitation. Barring the odd bit of RSI there is nothing to stop you coding until the day you drop.
songzme 12y ago
Right out of college, I joined a startup and I learned alot. Then I joined a huge financial corporate company as a senior developer and find myself moving into more and more management roles. Having been in both worlds, I conclude that management is a trap, especially in your twenties and thirties.
logicallee 12y ago
the fuck! This is like someone telling you your fiancée is a trap, because she is amazing and perfect for you, you have everything in common and you will end up happy and together forever. like a black hole of perfect happiness - you'd better turn away before you're past the event horizon. Odd advice to say the least. :)
- mpdehaan2 12y ago
  I believe he implied the income was great, not that you would continue to enjoy the work, so it was hard to pivot into less-technical fields even if you wanted to. I like software, but for instance, I really couldn't make the same as a photographer (plus, I don't want to shoot weddings or people or stock photos and stuff...). However there are some great examples of stock traders becoming potters and things like that, so it CAN be done, you just have to change what things you are addicted to - or earn a bunch first :)
- cositarica 12y ago
  ...you're a virgin, right?
brachi 12y ago
Do you mean it as a trap financially speaking? e.g. after certain age your salary stagnates, and your 'hireability' is reduced dramaticlly (ageism comes to mind). If so, I agree that might be true in some cases (anecdotically speaking), but not only for programming. But if you love it, what is the non financial cost of 'leaving the trap'? Isn't the real trap not improving/advancing in the things that really matter to you, because of things you can't or are very hard to control?
ErikAugust 12y ago
You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded. Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.
- Cymen 12y ago
  I feel blessed too. I truly love what I do for a living and couldn't imagine it being any other way. And for that I feel extremely lucky.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    I always say doing software beats working for a living.
- onaclov2000 12y ago
  I guess what I read into that is similar to how you can consider television a "trap". It's easy to get sucked into and not think about anything else. I know that I spend a lot of time thinking about different software related stuff, I love it, but I would suspect (and i could be wrong) that the cashier working at burger king doesn't think about how they can ring things up faster, move between the pickup window and the fries more efficiently while they're playing with their kids, I suspect they go home and thing about their family, not their job, and i think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about work much easier when your job is a "thought" job per se.... again I could be crazy though.... good luck if I am.
  - Klinky 12y ago
    They may not actually be going home. They may be going to a second job or school, seeing their kids for an hour in the evening, and then going to bed worried about paying bills. Low-wage jobs are their own cyclical trap, which can lead to not enough resources to improve your situation and apathy towards your day-to-day life. You can easily get stuck in a rut.
henrik_w 12y ago
Keep doing it if you love it! Sure, you have to learn new languages and tools every few years (at least), but your experience is still valuable - http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ For the record, I've been programming professionally for close to 25 years, and I still love it - http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
ExpiredLink 12y ago
> Unless I decide to open the trap and leave. But where do you go? You haven't "seriously tried doing anything else" for the last 30 years. A trap is a trap because you cannon leave it.
samspot 12y ago
I think that I understand. Programming is a trap because it is easy to be satisfied with writing code. It is fun and rewarding. But it may not be the most valuable thing you could be doing for your organization or for your career.
- intrasight 12y ago
  Yes. Thank you for understanding my use of the term "trap". My solution this week was to purchase a mandolin and start learning to play an instrument. Not so much a "trap release" as an "escape valve".

derefr 12y ago

A trap, compared to what? Is plumbing a trap? Is finance a trap? Is hairstyling a trap?

ebbv 12y ago
Exactly. How is this different from any other profession? Developers can be so myopic. The narcissism in our industry really drives me up the wall. The only other industry that is this way, that I've seen, is the entertainment industry. The denizens of which also seem to suffer from this idea that they are totally unique and none of the plebeian hordes can possibly relate to what they go through.
- staunch 12y ago
  Seems to fit Maslow's hierarchy of needs pretty well. Being a programmer mostly provides for the physiological needs (food and shelter), but it doesn't necessarily offer much else. It's natural and healthy that people also strive for financial security, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
- malvosenior 12y ago
  I don't think it's the developers being myopic. For the most part, it's management that views development as a young person's game and encourages people to move out of the technical track and into the management track. If companies viewed programming as a long term career, they would put the pay scales in place to treat it as such. It's only a "trap" in the respect that in many (not all) places your pay maxes out as a programmer faster than it does as a manager. I don't think it's most developer's choice for it to be that way.
  - derefr 12y ago
    I thought this was a problem of managers for the longest time, but recently I read an argument once that convinced me of the opposite. Tu quoque: the "my boss doesn't understand" problem in companies basically comes from people working for people with lower IQ than them. It's not a skillset gap, it's a pattern-recognition gap. In the military, the best soldiers become officers, and the best officers become generals—even though these are all different skill-sets—because it's more important to have a good general than to have a good soldier, and so if you could, theoretically, do both tasks well, then the military's comparative advantage in allocating your brainpower is to make you a general. In tech, we see a "career track" of engineers that attempts to be a meritocracy, with the engineering leads and fellows being the guys who have been there the longest—but that's more like the NCO track of the military, valuing experience for the job they're doing, but not the raw brainpower and tenacity to do jobs well generally. Management, meanwhile, is not-at-all a meritocracy; managers hire from outside based on credentialism, and engineers are "pushed into" management based on credence from fellow devs (the same thing you get from being a battle-tested NCO), rather than being "pulled in" by an actual need.
    - voronoff 12y ago
      What military? Most have different requirements for soldiering and officering that don't allow track switching. In modern ones, it's level of schooling, while in older ones it might be nobility of blood. You'd have an extremely hard time even making the argument that going from officer to general is meritocratic in the U.S. right now.
    - gaius 12y ago
      In the military, the best soldiers become officers This isn't true in any modern military.
      - walshemj 12y ago
        Well there are LE late entry officers in the UK ie you where a squadie before. And there is some truth I am told in the old adage that the NCO's really run the Army they just let Rupert pretend he's in charge.
baldeagle 12y ago
Plumber know all about traps. http://www.homeharmonizing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/simple-steps-for-replacing-a-drain-trap_1.jpg http://www.homeharmonizing.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/si...
markbnj 12y ago
I get your point and agree with it. I've said it many times myself. But people don't think in terms of mastering a craft and spending a productive life practicing it. In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. In that sense most engineering fields are "traps" because if you stay an engineer you aren't going any further up the ladder. I'm a craftsperson, and I still practice the craft of building software systems professionally, every day, even though I've been doing it for twenty years. That's one thing that hasn't changed. Another thing that hasn't really changed in twenty years is my salary. I understand and accept that, but if you don't know that will be a consequence of being essentially in a trade then I can understand how you might come to feel stuck.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  > In the modern world if you're not on a trajectory toward the 1% you're losing. And what, exactly, is it that you're losing? You can have a pretty damn fine life without getting anywhere near the 1%.
  - derefr 12y ago
    The respect of your peers, presumably. The best gift I was ever given was to grow up on a farm. I'm doing way better than my peers.
    - marktangotango 12y ago
      I always say shoveling manure was good preparation for the corporate world.
  - diminoten 12y ago
    Legacy. Empire. Providing for your children's children. Giving your loved ones the kind of life they've never even considered possible. Seeing the smile on your mother's face when you get to tell her she can stop working, that you've taken care of her and your father, and your brothers and sisters. The 1% are living in a way that will last longer than they will, on a scale that the rest of us won't achieve in our lifetimes. That's okay, certainly, but to pretend like there's no reason to work towards the 1% is silly.
nilkn 12y ago
It's a ridiculous term which I suppose is supposed to make people feel less guilty about having extremely comfortable, high paying, and overall relatively easy jobs, when they know that millions of others are struggling in jobs they hate, are drastically underpaid, or can't even find jobs. A common version of this is to complain about a lack of vacation time (even though you have 4 weeks, plus holidays, plus sick time, plus sometimes getting to work from home), as if struggling menial workers barely making above minimum wage are spending half the year in the Bahamas. [Note: this paragraph is written from a US perspective.] "Golden handcuffs" is a similar term. It's not that there is no validity to these notions or that the phenomenon of golden handcuffs doesn't actually occur, because it most certainly does. It's just that, in their typical usage that I see, these terms are used to invent an abstract struggle that upper middle class people are supposedly facing in order to assuage guilt over their own fortune.
- Maxels 12y ago
  I thought golden handcuffs were typically referring to vesting options in a company. I know I have friends that don't want to resign themselves to a life of programming/software engineering/whatever you want to call it because they see a ceiling to their compensation, or career path. Theres only so many numbers they can tack on to your title before it becomes meaningless.
  - freyr 12y ago
    I go back and forth on this. There's always a ceiling. For a doctor, banker, corporate lawyer, or salesperson, the ceiling is some multiple higher. But are they better jobs? An MD would require many years of study first, a law degree would burn $100k of your net worth and likely leave you underemployed, you're probably not cut out for sales, and so on. You really only escape the ceiling going into business for yourself. And there probably has never been a time where it's easier to go into business than the last decade, because of the relatively low cost and high reward of developing software. Maybe that's why programmers are often restless, because the path to wealth seems close at hand (even when it's much harder than it seems, and requires many more skills than just programming).
  - deleted 12y ago
weavie 12y ago
I imagine any career path you specialize in can be considered a trap. The more time you invest in, the more it feels like you have to stick with that path so that time doesn't get wasted. My friend who was a plumber recognized this. He also realised that plumbing is not something that you want to be trapped in. As you age it get's harder and harder to be constantly crouching down and contorting yourself into those hard to reach areas. So he jumped ship and is retraining as an architect. Programming doesn't have that limitation. Barring the odd bit of RSI there is nothing to stop you coding until the day you drop.

songzme 12y ago

Right out of college, I joined a startup and I learned alot. Then I joined a huge financial corporate company as a senior developer and find myself moving into more and more management roles. Having been in both worlds, I conclude that management is a trap, especially in your twenties and thirties.

logicallee 12y ago

the fuck! This is like someone telling you your fiancée is a trap, because she is amazing and perfect for you, you have everything in common and you will end up happy and together forever. like a black hole of perfect happiness - you'd better turn away before you're past the event horizon. Odd advice to say the least. :)

mpdehaan2 12y ago
I believe he implied the income was great, not that you would continue to enjoy the work, so it was hard to pivot into less-technical fields even if you wanted to. I like software, but for instance, I really couldn't make the same as a photographer (plus, I don't want to shoot weddings or people or stock photos and stuff...). However there are some great examples of stock traders becoming potters and things like that, so it CAN be done, you just have to change what things you are addicted to - or earn a bunch first :)
cositarica 12y ago
...you're a virgin, right?

brachi 12y ago

Do you mean it as a trap financially speaking? e.g. after certain age your salary stagnates, and your 'hireability' is reduced dramaticlly (ageism comes to mind). If so, I agree that might be true in some cases (anecdotically speaking), but not only for programming. But if you love it, what is the non financial cost of 'leaving the trap'? Isn't the real trap not improving/advancing in the things that really matter to you, because of things you can't or are very hard to control?

ErikAugust 12y ago

You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded. Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.

Cymen 12y ago
I feel blessed too. I truly love what I do for a living and couldn't imagine it being any other way. And for that I feel extremely lucky.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  I always say doing software beats working for a living.
onaclov2000 12y ago
I guess what I read into that is similar to how you can consider television a "trap". It's easy to get sucked into and not think about anything else. I know that I spend a lot of time thinking about different software related stuff, I love it, but I would suspect (and i could be wrong) that the cashier working at burger king doesn't think about how they can ring things up faster, move between the pickup window and the fries more efficiently while they're playing with their kids, I suspect they go home and thing about their family, not their job, and i think it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about work much easier when your job is a "thought" job per se.... again I could be crazy though.... good luck if I am.
- Klinky 12y ago
  They may not actually be going home. They may be going to a second job or school, seeing their kids for an hour in the evening, and then going to bed worried about paying bills. Low-wage jobs are their own cyclical trap, which can lead to not enough resources to improve your situation and apathy towards your day-to-day life. You can easily get stuck in a rut.

henrik_w 12y ago

Keep doing it if you love it! Sure, you have to learn new languages and tools every few years (at least), but your experience is still valuable - http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ For the record, I've been programming professionally for close to 25 years, and I still love it - http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/ http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/

ExpiredLink 12y ago

> Unless I decide to open the trap and leave. But where do you go? You haven't "seriously tried doing anything else" for the last 30 years. A trap is a trap because you cannon leave it.

samspot 12y ago

I think that I understand. Programming is a trap because it is easy to be satisfied with writing code. It is fun and rewarding. But it may not be the most valuable thing you could be doing for your organization or for your career.

intrasight 12y ago
Yes. Thank you for understanding my use of the term "trap". My solution this week was to purchase a mandolin and start learning to play an instrument. Not so much a "trap release" as an "escape valve".