The words 'external gratification' popped out. I only recently found out that my sensitivity to it is the biggest flaw/weakness in my and many other's personality.
I think the profession of teacher comes close. There are extremely good and extremely bad teachers and everything in between. Knowing the subject you teach very well does not guarantee you can teach it well, often on the contrary.
Maybe coders can see themselves as teachers to the machine. Either they teach character by character, or vibe idea by vibe idea, or anything in between.
Recently a lady was telling me that she wasn't taken seriously. When a male colleague proposed something that she proposed years ago, people suddenly accepted it, she said. I explained her about 'implicit pecking order' in company culture and 'he is taller'. Then she said "yeah i'm short". Then I said yes but you are perfect the way you are, and I think she appreciated that.
There's bias in _every_ company, every culture even. The bias is towards age, race, height, beauty, weight, as well as gender. I live in one of the most inclusive countries in the world and work for a very inclusive company. Still, pecking order and biases exist. I think it is human nature and maybe it is fine even.
there are so many potential confounders in that story that might influence why the proposal was accepted. maybe his co-worker just proposed it too early and no one was ready for it?
I haven't looked at this topic this way, but now this really does make sense! I remember a lady asking me once how tall I am. I'm rather tall and in fact I don't like being asked that, since it is obvious that I am tall and the actual number does not matter. I responded with my height and immediately asked: what is your weight? Wrong question. In my male brain it was an equal kind of question. In the female brain totally not.
Probably because it's a completely unrelated question. Height and weight are only similar in that they're both descriptors of something physical. That's... pretty much it. Height is basically immutable. More of it is not bad. Less of it is not bad. It's not particularly reflective of lifestyle outside of simply not being malnourished. It's just... there.
Weight, obviously, is nothing like this. It absolutely comes off like you're trying to be snarky.
Indeed. If we SW developers define ourselves as 'coders', we could easily end up into this identity crisis which the article seems to refer to. But in fact we are much more than that. We are problem solvers and a big part of it is understanding, defining and refining the problem itself and in finding an elegant solution. The meaningfulness comes from all the communication and experimenting involved with that process, and in the creativity needed to design an elegant solution. In fact the more boring part is often the coding itself.
This is the frustrating part of software engineering too; the coding itself is the "boring" part, but for me and many others it's also the most fun and gratifying part, the thing you really want to be doing. Something to grow out of I suppose, but still.
The AI vendors want to sell to upper management that that part is what's slowing their company down or costing a lot of money, but I don't think it's that. And in a few years (or now already), AI tooling will probably be an accepted part of the toolchain, but software engineers will always be necessary.
Cobol said you won't need coders anymore because it's basically English. Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing. No-code platforms said you won't need coders anymore because you can just click and drag. AI evangelists say you don't need coders anymore because you just type in a prompt and working software comes out.
"Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject.
(So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
If you take a software engineering textbook, you’ll see there’s nothing about code other than a chapter about methodology. It’s mostly about decomposing problems and stating criteria for a good solution. Which by itself is a lot of writing and talking.
> Dreamweaver and Frontpage said you won't need to know HTML because you can just build a website by clicking and typing.
The ability for people to express themselves online on their own domain has regressed immensely since WYSIWYG editors were taken off the market. I don't know who to blame, but the way it is now that you have to learn to code and to be a Linux server admin just to have a website is very damaging.
WordPress does not help much at all in that department, it only makes it worse for people who aren't database admins and PHP developers and want to have a functioning website. I think it only became the "standard" because it was free. Same thing for Linux as the host OS.
I hope things turn around. There's some small hope with services like Fastmail offering an easy interface for publishing your webpage and Wix and the likes which are at least something.
I'd blame Social Media. It did more to kill small websites than anything else. Possibly starting with MySpace in 2004.
WYSIWYG never really went away even after Dreamweaver and FrontPage lost popularity. My ISP had a web-based editor in the early 2000s, lots and lots of free hosting providers also had them (HN tends to only remember only GeoCities, but there were hundreds of those providers).
Also: Weebly, Wix and Squarespace are quite old, mid-2000s.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, standing up a public-facing web page (even a single static HTML one) is more complex than saving a word doc. Especially if it gets a lot of traffic, has any kind of user-input, or it comes under attack. So far, out of the attempts to bring web publishing to the masses, the only successful ones so far have been the "hosted" ones where you have to pay someone else to do the hard, non-creative work for you, and are for the most part dependent on them.
The dream of laymen, needing nothing else but an Internet connection, pushing a button on a locally-running application and "poof" a web page appears and is accessible to the world, remains out of reach.
It used to be no more complex than saving a Word document. You used to get a small storage space from your ISP with FTP credentials to upload files. Security was not an issue and neither was traffic. User input was a more advanced matter, but when you've reached the level to having concern for any of these, either your ISP would help you or you'd contract a professional web host. Today it's an immense task for amateurs to just get off the ground.
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