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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 Beige on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:05PM

    by Beige (3989) on Sunday July 26 2015, @04:05PM (#213885) Homepage

    It doesn't really make any sense to me that the blogger would buy all these books on programming and then not bother reading them. What's the actual problem that he is trying to fix? Burnout?

    If it's not a case of burnout then why worry about whether developing in language X is prestigious or not? At the end of the day it matters whether or not you can deliver working software, and if you are ambitious you can always be better at it than the next guy. If you keep your eyes and ears open in the startup scene and keep networking you could achieve a decent career knowing little more than web development.