9 ms·

Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt t

by pigpop 1mo ago

Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.

bananaflag 1mo ago
Could you elaborate? I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.
- estimator7292 1mo ago
  [dead]
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely because of this. It's not "they think right and they think wrong", it's just "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking".
  - elmer2 1mo ago
    We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.
    - embedding-shape 1mo ago
      > some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.
      - GTP 1mo ago
        The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy" (it is physically demanding, but doesn't require years of study to start and you quickly learn by doing). This also means that the vast majority of people would be able to do this kind of jobs. Our economy pays more for scarcity, i.e. jobs that are in demand and at the same time require more qualification, so that the number of people needed in that position tends to be less than the current amount. Both views have sense, they just start from two different points.
        Tanoc 1mo ago
        From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a farm. It's just that farming is still considered a blue-collar job because it was the domain of the poorest for millenia, where as software engineering in any form is relatively new and thus specialized and so considered white-collar.
        GTP 1mo ago
        You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, while there's a gap between the knowledge required and the earnings, I think this can be explained by farms having a much greater output now, and so the market doesn't ask for more farms than what we have. This could be false at a global scale, but I think it is true at a country-level scale in most of the developed countries. Hence why farmers aren't paid much in those countries.
  - bananaflag 1mo ago
    I thought it more in the sense of: if a clearer-thinking group has higher status, then clear thinking would be encouraged among the population. (This did not happen that much, ofc.)
  - vanviegen 1mo ago
    > "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking" I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.
- 27183 1mo ago
  I would not characterize software people as particularly "clear-thinking".. there's a huge buzzing cloud of unexamined cognitive biases and thoughtless herd behavior that swirls around every software organization I've worked for.
  - win311fwg 1mo ago
    I'd even go as far as to say that software people, as a group, are particularly bad at clear thinking. What software people tend to be great at is thinking within a space where the inputs are already clear. But where the inputs start messy, they typically struggle to find clarity more than most others.
shiomiru 1mo ago
I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well. (I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)
- ModernMech 1mo ago
  Being a good programmer gives you special social status amongst people who value programming. You only have to look at how people talk about others as slop coders and seek to expand their coding reputations. Those people are the most threatened by AI because of how it implicates their carefully crafted personas as coding gurus and keepers of knowledge.
  - SoftTalker 1mo ago
    It also gives you a special social status amongst people who do not understand programming: nobody wants to talk to you, at least not about your job.
0xpgm 1mo ago
This. When programming meant you get just a decent enough salary and enjoyed your work, and could prioritize technical excellence it was fun. But once it became a ticket to millionaire status it attracted the kind and of people who would have otherwise gone to Law, Corporate Consulting and the like, technical excellence diluted. Everyone doing everything possible to get their next higher paying job leaving a trail of technical debt behind them.
rayiner 1mo ago
Having done both, lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words. Often very well paid tinkering, but that's true for programmers as well.
- pigpop 1mo ago
  I don't disagree. You can add medical doctors to the list as well, lots of nerds but also a lot of clout chasers and money-grubbers who couldn't care less about the profession. I don't want to see programming take the same path.
  - ambicapter 1mo ago
    It already has? Clout-chasers and money grubbers go for all the big tech jobs in droves.
    - pigpop 1mo ago
      There are still plenty of the old guard left so it hasn't been entirely overwhelmed yet. I guess AI arrived just in time to nuke it on the way out.
    - hunterpayne 1mo ago
      And its been that way for at least a decade.
- dctoedt 1mo ago
  > Having done both [software and law], lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down. Lawyers who like to tinker with words can fuck things up more often and at greater scale — e.g., by inflicting compulsory burdens and costs on others — than can most programmers. That includes, e.g., contract drafters and litigation counsel, plus lobbyists trying to influence draft legislation and regulations. I'm not-infrequently dismayed by the quality of the contracts I review for clients because of the "tinkering with words" by the lawyers on the other side of the deal. Back when I did IP litigation, I was sometimes likewise dismayed by the bullshit arguments that some lawyers felt free to make in their court papers because what the hell, the worst that can happen is almost never more than the judge just saying "no." And as mostly a law professor these days, I review court opinions all the time and am regularly amazed how judges (and their law clerks, such as Rayiner used to be) can be so patient in responding to such arguments.
doug_durham 1mo ago
I could not agree more. Thank you for stating this. Software Engineering is about building things. You don't do it for status, you do it for passion. There are a lot of unhappy individuals who got into CS because of the money or status.
kbelder 1mo ago
Well put. We need to make lawyering more like programming, in the sense that it should be open to the everyman... not make programming credentialed and licensed like a professional guild.
taude 1mo ago
It doesn't irk me. But it's really funny how much the industry has changed, and I kind of think the 2008 financial crisis as that point in time. It's also funny to me to think that computer science got to be a trendy degree, vs the small programs back when I went to university, even at a top comp-sci school. I have a theory that a lot of people who would have normally gone to Wall Street for their lucrative jobs, couldn't, because of the crash, and Sillicon Vally was about to start booming in big ways....
overgard 1mo ago
I've never felt like it's a status profession (I don't think anybody has ever been impressed when I told them what my job was other than "oh sounds like it takes a lot of smarts") I do notice a lot of HN commenters seem to think that programmers are smug though, like we deserve to be knocked down a peg. I personally don't see it, but I also try not to work with jerks.
ytoast 1mo ago
Right there with you. I miss when software was fast because people actually cared about the craft itself.

by pigpop 1mo ago

bananaflag 1mo ago

Could you elaborate? I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

estimator7292 1mo ago
[dead]
embedding-shape 1mo ago
The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely because of this. It's not "they think right and they think wrong", it's just "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking".
- elmer2 1mo ago
  We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.
    - GTP 1mo ago
      The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy" (it is physically demanding, but doesn't require years of study to start and you quickly learn by doing). This also means that the vast majority of people would be able to do this kind of jobs. Our economy pays more for scarcity, i.e. jobs that are in demand and at the same time require more qualification, so that the number of people needed in that position tends to be less than the current amount. Both views have sense, they just start from two different points.
      - Tanoc 1mo ago
        From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a farm. It's just that farming is still considered a blue-collar job because it was the domain of the poorest for millenia, where as software engineering in any form is relatively new and thus specialized and so considered white-collar.
        GTP 1mo ago
        You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, while there's a gap between the knowledge required and the earnings, I think this can be explained by farms having a much greater output now, and so the market doesn't ask for more farms than what we have. This could be false at a global scale, but I think it is true at a country-level scale in most of the developed countries. Hence why farmers aren't paid much in those countries.
- bananaflag 1mo ago
  I thought it more in the sense of: if a clearer-thinking group has higher status, then clear thinking would be encouraged among the population. (This did not happen that much, ofc.)
- vanviegen 1mo ago
  > "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking" I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.
27183 1mo ago
I would not characterize software people as particularly "clear-thinking".. there's a huge buzzing cloud of unexamined cognitive biases and thoughtless herd behavior that swirls around every software organization I've worked for.
- win311fwg 1mo ago
  I'd even go as far as to say that software people, as a group, are particularly bad at clear thinking. What software people tend to be great at is thinking within a space where the inputs are already clear. But where the inputs start messy, they typically struggle to find clarity more than most others.

shiomiru 1mo ago

I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well. (I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)

ModernMech 1mo ago
Being a good programmer gives you special social status amongst people who value programming. You only have to look at how people talk about others as slop coders and seek to expand their coding reputations. Those people are the most threatened by AI because of how it implicates their carefully crafted personas as coding gurus and keepers of knowledge.
- SoftTalker 1mo ago
  It also gives you a special social status amongst people who do not understand programming: nobody wants to talk to you, at least not about your job.

0xpgm 1mo ago

This. When programming meant you get just a decent enough salary and enjoyed your work, and could prioritize technical excellence it was fun. But once it became a ticket to millionaire status it attracted the kind and of people who would have otherwise gone to Law, Corporate Consulting and the like, technical excellence diluted. Everyone doing everything possible to get their next higher paying job leaving a trail of technical debt behind them.

rayiner 1mo ago

Having done both, lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words. Often very well paid tinkering, but that's true for programmers as well.

pigpop 1mo ago
I don't disagree. You can add medical doctors to the list as well, lots of nerds but also a lot of clout chasers and money-grubbers who couldn't care less about the profession. I don't want to see programming take the same path.
- ambicapter 1mo ago
  It already has? Clout-chasers and money grubbers go for all the big tech jobs in droves.
  - pigpop 1mo ago
    There are still plenty of the old guard left so it hasn't been entirely overwhelmed yet. I guess AI arrived just in time to nuke it on the way out.
  - hunterpayne 1mo ago
    And its been that way for at least a decade.
dctoedt 1mo ago
> Having done both [software and law], lots of lawyers are also nerds who just like to tinker with the law and words Having also done both: In legal drafting work, there's less systematic pre-release testing before the equivalent of a "program" is loosed upon the world. There's not much in the way of counterparts to software unit testing and regression testing, in part because legal-drafting clients can be vociferous in demanding that their lawyers keep costs down. Lawyers who like to tinker with words can fuck things up more often and at greater scale — e.g., by inflicting compulsory burdens and costs on others — than can most programmers. That includes, e.g., contract drafters and litigation counsel, plus lobbyists trying to influence draft legislation and regulations. I'm not-infrequently dismayed by the quality of the contracts I review for clients because of the "tinkering with words" by the lawyers on the other side of the deal. Back when I did IP litigation, I was sometimes likewise dismayed by the bullshit arguments that some lawyers felt free to make in their court papers because what the hell, the worst that can happen is almost never more than the judge just saying "no." And as mostly a law professor these days, I review court opinions all the time and am regularly amazed how judges (and their law clerks, such as Rayiner used to be) can be so patient in responding to such arguments.

doug_durham 1mo ago

I could not agree more. Thank you for stating this. Software Engineering is about building things. You don't do it for status, you do it for passion. There are a lot of unhappy individuals who got into CS because of the money or status.

kbelder 1mo ago

Well put. We need to make lawyering more like programming, in the sense that it should be open to the everyman... not make programming credentialed and licensed like a professional guild.

taude 1mo ago

It doesn't irk me. But it's really funny how much the industry has changed, and I kind of think the 2008 financial crisis as that point in time. It's also funny to me to think that computer science got to be a trendy degree, vs the small programs back when I went to university, even at a top comp-sci school. I have a theory that a lot of people who would have normally gone to Wall Street for their lucrative jobs, couldn't, because of the crash, and Sillicon Vally was about to start booming in big ways....

overgard 1mo ago

I've never felt like it's a status profession (I don't think anybody has ever been impressed when I told them what my job was other than "oh sounds like it takes a lot of smarts") I do notice a lot of HN commenters seem to think that programmers are smug though, like we deserve to be knocked down a peg. I personally don't see it, but I also try not to work with jerks.

ytoast 1mo ago

Right there with you. I miss when software was fast because people actually cared about the craft itself.