Programming

I’ve been wondering the same, so hard. I feel like at this point I’d like to see a comparative study of the job of people that see it VS the job of people that don’t.

I remember some twenty years ago when I finished college I had this internship that turned into a summer job afterwards. Prestigious organization in fancy skyscraper. Our teachers were a bit nervous about it since it was the first time the got the org to accept interns and made it clear we should be extremely grateful and well behaved, or else.

Godfuck the job was boring. This massive tentacular place had a million subdivisions doing roughly the same thing in a different region but somehow each had enough torque to get to have their own little website with a different interface design and a handful of different fields. Our job was to rewrite backends from [boring old basic MS tech] to [shiny new overengineered MS tech]. Dozens and dozens of roughly alike but not entirely identical backends. After months of work there was still at least as much to do as had been done. The architects in place had no desire for harmonization or reuse. They knew be heart the features the seemed to rewrite periodically in a fancier ways.

Sometimes I wonder how many places feel like that, how many programmers embrace the repetitive churn, oblivious to the affront against the very core of software this represents. If these are the ones that see it.