> Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.
You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.
The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.
I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)
You and me both, and I truly sympathise, but really we were just lucky that we could enjoy our passion at work.
> It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Delivering stuff to customers for money is always what we've been paid for; that's not new, it's just that perhaps many of us didn't really pay much mind to that in the past. That's perhaps why there's traditionally been so much complaining about artificial deadlines and managers and sales teams; many of us also didn't really notice that the programming was never the thing that our employers cared about; it is just a link in a long chain from idea to income.
The way I'm looking at our current situation is this: I spent my whole career and much of my free time learning to become a great furniture maker, and I take a lot of pleasure producing functional and elegant items. Now someone has handed me some power tools. I can mourn the loss of care and love that goes into hand-crafting something, but I can also learn to use the tools to crank out the good-enough cabinets that my employer wants me to make, focussing on the more abstract elements of the craft and doing less of the laborious stuff. I think I can still take pleasure and pride in my work in this way, and personally I find the design aspect of software development to be a lot of fun. I can still hand-craft things sometimes too; there will no doubt always be important difficult parts of a project that would take as long to describe to an LLM as they would to write by hand, at least for those of us with sufficient experience of the latter.
I can also, hopefully, finally knock out some of those side projects that I have had on my list for many years but never had time to make. I would prefer that those things existed in a less than perfect state, than that they were perfect but only in my head :-)