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posted by takyon on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the pity dept.

Stumbled upon this blog entry:

One paragraph from the OP instantly stuck out to me.

I don't want to [be] a typical "code monkey". I want to go deep into low level, even to clear math when we talk about computer science, but at same time, I want to have a job in shorter period of time than let's say 3 years. I was switching so many times between Python, C++, Java and I'm nowhere. I know it's bad practise, it's worst, but I don't know, I'm just confused.

...

Web development has an extremely low barrier to entry in comparison to, say, systems programming. Setting up a Wordpress blog takes significantly less knowledge and effort than building an operating system.
As a consequence, being a web developer does not carry the same prestige as being a software engineer (whatever that is). God have mercy on your soul if HN or /r/programming learns you implemented some common functionality in NodeJS for fun. (Expect the words "web scale" to show up in the comment thread somewhere).
...
As I became more involved in online communities, the narrative became increasingly clear that my confidence and sense of accomplishment were unwarranted. PHP was a terrible language, and PHP developers were terrible programmers. JavaScript was a terrible language, and JS developers couldn't perform asymptotic analysis to save their life. Web developers don't have degrees and it shows in their code. Drupal/Wordpress developers are an absolute joke. Web developers never took a compilers course, so they don't understand just how easy their "jobs" are. Web developers are overpaid for how little they know. Web developers have everything handed to them. Web developers have never had to manage memory or make hard decisions. Web developers have no knowledge of data structures or algorithms. Web developers are not real programmers.

Armed with impulsive spending habits and a sense of urgency, I went to Amazon and purchased just about every programming book not related to web development I could find. Cryptographic protocol implementations in C, Embedded Systems development, Linux Kernel Development, etc. I wanted to learn things that real programmers knew. I wanted to learn the hard things. I bought an Arduino, started hanging out in ##c on freenode, began reading through implementations of the C standard library.
I never fully read any of those books. Most of them I never even started. I didn't do anything substantial with the arduino. I never made it passed analyzing "assert.h" in the C standard library (which I was planning on progressing through alphabetically.)
...
When you hate what you do, you stop caring about it. When you stop caring about something, you aren't going to bother learning more about it.
For a period of nearly 3 years, I was stuck in a terribly unproductive mental state. I hated web development, but I didn't know how to do anything else. Web development was all I knew. Bills needed to be paid, so CRUD apps needed to be made.

And thus arose my main cognitive dilemma: I hated web development because it was easy, but it was never actually easy to me. Instead of concluding "maybe web development is actually hard and those people don't know what they're talking about", I concluded that I must be a terrible programmer.

Question to SN fellows: have you had moments like this (doesn't matter if in relation with Web development or not)? Have you crossed over them? If true, how?


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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:10PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday July 26 2015, @03:10PM (#213869) Homepage

    Hahahahah, suckers actually give a fuck about programming for a living for any reason other than to eke out the minimum productivity to not get fired and actually have a life.

    You know, surfing, hunting, fishing, basketweaving, playing or listening to music, playing video games, going for a walk in the sun or having a cup of tea with the rain outside.

    A job is not a life, a job is for making money so you can have a life.

    For what it's worth, I hated my internet programming class. It was enough to scare me away from web development forever. HTML, CSS, PHP, JSON/JQuery...Throwing all that shit together looks like anything from spaghetti to 4 or 5 blind men trying to rape each other in a dark alley.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @10:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @10:00AM (#214201)
    Yeah somehow reminds me of the other story about the internet escort. Not like hookers do their jobs because its enjoyable. I'm sure they enjoy some clients, but most of it probably sucks. Some people think hookers jobs are easy but such jobs are dangerous.

    Do your job. Make money. Use money to let you do other stuff that's more fun to you.