"Just learn to Code" they said... the TRUTH about Coding / Programming Jobs

[LV Koopa]

I get that, and I hate that mans got so stretched out that it literally broke his psyche.

That's scary, and even scarier, cause it almost happened to me before.

About 5 yrs ago, I was involved in this huge huge thing (it was so huge that it was in mainstream media almost every day for like a year straight).

I had so much on me that I felt like I was dying sometimes. I started growing gray hair and everything. Near about destroyed all relationships with family and friends. Most people didn't know the amount of stress that I was under because I was in a nondisclosure agreement and couldn't speak on it to anybody.

Man, it was wild. I still have PTSD from that stuff.

God damn. Yo I seriously hope you fully recover from that. You a strong dude for even being under that amount of stress for that long.

 

[Neo. The Only. The One.]

God damn. Yo I seriously hope you fully recover from that. You a strong dude for even being under that amount of stress for that long.

thanks breh. It was rough, man. And I'm still somewhat loosely (LOOSELY) affiliated with the folks involved. And they've called me a couple times since then and every time they call me, my heart beats fast and my palms get sweaty cause I start feeling it all over again.

Imagine not being able to go to sleep at night because they might call and you HAD to answer the phone. I mean, you go to sleep but you have the phone sitting right by your head and you're in the slightest sleep mode possible because this is a life or death call that you cannot miss.

Man.... Y'all don't understand. My hair started turning gray. It was insane.

 

[null]

thanks breh. It was rough, man. And I'm still somewhat loosely (LOOSELY) affiliated with the folks involved. And they've called me a couple times since then and every time they call me, my heart beats fast and my palms get sweaty cause I start feeling it all over again.

Imagine not being able to go to sleep at night because they might call and you HAD to answer the phone. I mean, you go to sleep but you have the phone sitting right by your head and you're in the slightest sleep mode possible because this is a life or death call that you cannot miss.

Man.... Y'all don't understand. My hair started turning gray. It was insane.

I had a role similar to that but not quite as bad as yours I think.

I would never do a job like that again.

I could never relax at work because you never knew when things would blow up.

 

[Carlton Banks]

Been over coding. shyt is a scam

 

[Neo. The Only. The One.]

Honestly if I didn't lose focus and was more mature at the time, I'd be working in the field now. But I was young and out of control.

You ask me to choose between programming or p*ssy and

I would definitely work in the industry but I would be very selective on where I go. There are horror stories about developer burnout for a reason.
And if you end up in a place where management is blind to what developers do then you could be in for a world of pain (look at the video game industry)

It is really a look before you leap kind of thing now.

Elaborate?

 

[prose00]

Simple amateur coding is trivial and most people can do it. Making an Excel spreadsheet, probably making ten or twenty lines of code in a programming language is something most people could do I think.

As a job, two factors mess that up:

• Figuring out what to code. You just get asked, say, ‘Can you make it email me if more than five expense claims get rejected on the same day for the same person?’. How do you code that?
• Fitting it in to existing code. You have to figure out how to fit your new code in to the existing code without breaking it. It might be millions of lines you have never seen. it might be very badly constructed and might break on small changes.

That bit is hard.

And then, we want to do better as professionals.

We want our code to have automated tests, which changes how you design it a bit.

We want it to be easy to deploy to computers, so you have to design that in.

We want it free from security holes, to keep data safe.

We want to never corrupt any data.

We want our colleagues to easily read and easily change our code, which needs designing in.

We want our code to be robust and correctly handle bad data, bad user input and anything else ‘unexpected’. We have to learn to expect that.

Those bits are pretty hard, too.

Then, our bosses want to know when all that is going to be ready, so they can plan around it. Once the TV advert goes live, that software better be running.

That’s hard.

We have to juggle competing priorities of adding features, managing tech debt and fixing bugs.

There’s no right answer for that. Somebody is always disappointed.

We have to cope with floods of new users and feature requests that are difficult to build. The whole ‘scalability’ piece is hard.

The code needs to stay running 24/7 or close to it - even if half the computers, disk drives, cooling systems, internet switches and electrical power fails.

That adds a bit of trickyness for sure.

We need to use existing libraries wherever we can, so we need to understand code we’ve not written. Tricky. But trickier still, we need to be part-time lawyers, because we have to check we are legally allowed to use that code without it affecting the business.

We need to remember somebody pays for all the computing our code runs on, so we have to make it play nice.

We have to work for and with people who range from fantastic humans to the sort you’d rather not spend time with. And with all ranges of skill levels.

That’s a real mixed bag.

We have to know so much about computing, engineering, the problem area we are solving, testing.

Coding isn’t hard - if you are left alone to code what you want, when you want, how you want and keep the option to just give up when it gets too hard.

That’s the really hard bit: we can’t do that.

 

[Action Mike]

why not just quit?


brehs, if you're ever in something that is destroying your mental health (and I sympathize because it's happened to me), JUST LEAVE.

I left and refuse to be involved anymore for my own sanity. My sanity and peace of mind suffered greatly.

Not a dev but I'm feeling this now and readying my exit

Funny thing is whenever your foot out the door they offer more money that wasnt in budget before, new role and other trinkets

 

[poppastoppa]

People who actually love learning and what they do dont mind it. I wasnt coding job tasks, just stuff I find interesting that have been on my radar lately.

If you want to do repetitive tasks that dont require constant learning then go to another field. I've never heard anyone say that you reach a point where u know everything in tech.

Anyone who has a solid foundation in software development and design (i.e Data Structures, Algorithms, design patterns, archtecture), will never have a hard time picking up a new tool, because it literally takes less than a day to learn it and less than a month to be proficient in it. Reading documentation for a new tool when you have a bit of experience is not a hard task. Im really not sure why this is an issue with you.

You do what you love, make your money, save, invest then quick when YOU want to and no longer feel like coding....then use that money you made on other ventures that interest you and live happily ever after.

If you dont like doing all that then go to another field and not try to recruit other black men to quit with you. Its okay to not like to code, not everyone is cut out for it

Just stop juelzing about it acting like you need to be a savant to be successful

He gonna be stuck fixing legacy code written in VB6. You always need to sharpen your skills in this field.

 

[LV Koopa]

Elaborate?

Crunch aka unpaid overtime is mandatary in the industry. The Cyberpunk 2077 developers were crunching on that game for over a year. shyt is common.

 

[Taharqa]

As a computer engineering major that has about a year left, one conclusion I came to is never taking a coding job. I find coding tedious as hell and mentally draining. fukk that shyt

 

[Neo. The Only. The One.]

Crunch aka unpaid overtime is mandatary in the industry. The Cyberpunk 2077 developers were crunching on that game for over a year. shyt is common.

These ppl are out they got dang mind. Why wouldn't you WANT to take care of your employees?

They are literally the ppl who make your world possible. And the only thing you can do is lay them off when your profit margins are higher than ever or force them to work unpaid overtime?

The greed of these ppl is some off the charts inhuman stuff. Man I can't even fathom treating ppl this way and being able to sleep at night afterwards.

 

[LV Koopa]

These ppl are out they got dang mind. Why wouldn't you WANT to take care of your employees?

They are literally the ppl who make your world possible. And the only thing you can do is lay them off when your profit margins are higher than ever or force them to work unpaid overtime?

The greed of these ppl is some off the charts inhuman stuff. Man I can't even fathom treating ppl this way and being able to sleep at night afterwards.

That's why I don't give a shyt when these companies go bankrupt. I just wish most developers had more of a spine and fukked these management zombies over more often.

 

[Neo. The Only. The One.]

That's why I don't give a shyt when these companies go bankrupt. I just wish most developers had more of a spine and fukked these management zombies over more often.

This is why I will code for MY company. That's why I'm learning right now. Why can't we create the next big thing? Zuckerberg did it. There are so many things that we can do. The sky is the limit and you are only stifled by your imagination and your skills.

 

[Neo. The Only. The One.]

I remember when Stackoverflow first started. It was part of Stack Exchange and I used to read the guy who created it, Joel Spolsky's, software development blog in college. His ideas on management stuck with me forever and he really showed programming is not that complicated.
No surprise Stackoverflow became the place to learn anything you had a question for.

Thanks for this. I'm reading his blog now and this is fantastic. I started at the very beginning.

Man im really excited about my journey into programming and I'm consuming everything that I can. Stuff like this is extremely inspiring.

 

[LV Koopa]

Thanks for this. I'm reading his blog now and this is fantastic. I started at the very beginning.

Man im really excited about my journey into programming and I'm consuming everything that I can. Stuff like this is extremely inspiring.

There are a ton of gems on that site, and it was from almost 20 years ago a lot of it was written. A lot of his views on Software Development shaped the way I thought about the industry.

There was one article on growing fast vs growing slow. And the 2 examples were Ben & Jerry's and I think Amazon. Dude hit the nail on the head 1000% and what he said would happen is exactly how it looked to me when I started learning about corporate finance.