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It's not a cushion job. At least not when you are working on a huge codebase together with lots of other developers.

What other jobs have you had? I have been a photo lab assistant, a sign maker apprentice, a graphic designer, an insurance agent, a financial advisor, a construction worker and manual laborer, an inner-city math teacher, a software developer turned manager turn developer, now at the staff level.

Software is the most cush job I have had. More money for less work. Better perks. Less stress overall. Constantly learning, yes. Often frustrating, yes. But having financial resources beyond what the other jobs could provide is a thing. Other jobs I could leave at work, sure, but others I couldn't. I would never go back to being a public high school teacher; that shit was the suck. So was selling stocks. Software is a dream in comparison.


100% - my friends who have only ever written code think it's a "hard" job in the objective sense. That among all possible jobs, it is on the difficult side of the spectrum.

I've been an EMT, a line cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, sold insurance, and worked on political campaigns. The easiest of all those is 10x harder than the hardest day of writing code.

It's frustrating at times, sure. There's office politics, sure. We probably have to deal with a disproportionate percentage of weaponized autism, sure.

But it is a cushy job and the "money per unit of effort" metric is off the charts compared to basically every other job I can think of, and definitely every other job I've ever had.


I don't have much experience in jobs like those, but a family member who jumped between whole different professions for years does. He always got bored of them because, at least according to him, all of them had one failing: you learn everything you need in a couple of months or so, then it's pretty much just getting better at doing those things repeatedly.

Eventually he tried out programming and found there's no real end to the amount of things to learn. It was the only job he found that he wouldn't get bored on. He only eventually left because of bad bosses.

I think that might be the factor that makes it hard vs easy compared to others - that for a lot of people, continual learning (which they thought they'd left behind when they finished school) is why it might be harder than the other jobs ones you listed. Though I know I'd find those ones harder for other different reasons.


Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Any time you see someone saying how hard it is to write code as a job, you can tell they've never had a "real" job. I grew up working on a farm every day - I would take programming every day of the week. Even on the days when I'm frustrated or dealing with difficult people, it's better than hard physical labor which wears down your body, is fairly gross (lots of poop!), and doesn't even pay 1/2 of what programming does.

That is from the viewpoint of the top 10% earners if you look at the european market or small / local business than you are looking at people doing the job of multiple departments and getting blamed if something does not work or for their salary if everything works.

And the salary is most of the time lower than anyone from the HR or Marketing department whose job if you are unlucky you also have to do because the tools they use are too complicated for them.

And if take the freelancer / remote work market into consideration everyone wants to pass all the work to the lowest bidder and some of them get lucky with skilled workers whose salary may be in the median considering their location after substracting the share of the middleman.


I thought it would be about Trump ;)

Maybe the US just has just lost its fascination.

I mean, we are bombarded with America's stupidity amost every day, why spend our vacation there? The whole travel experience just sucks anyway and at the border you are treated like the next Osama Bin Laden.

Compare this to travelling inside the EU, where we enjoy complete freedom of travel, good food, nice cities, safety and general rationality.

It's just way more pleasant over here.


On the other hand, you are writing in American English and everything in Europe is in the final stages of being fully Americanised.

> nice cities, safety and general rationality.

Which leads to the "Paris Syndrome" when reality hits tourists...


Well, of course I'm not denying any of that. The US influence has brought a lot positives to Europe after ww2. But right now, things are changing. I've spent a lot of time in the States in the past, but now I'm trying to stay away as much as possible....

Algorithms as well. Python is close to pseudocode, which makes it a perfect fit.


Same here. I hate having to do business trips to the US. Unfortunately, our most important customer is from there, which forces me to travel once in a while. But the whole experience just sucks.


Anders is answering this in the Video. Go is the lower level and also closer to Javascript's programming style. They didn't want to fully object oriented for this project.


I like Anders'answer there. "But you can achieve pretty great things with it".


This works for me.

if res, err := doSomething(); err == nil { return nil, err }

no point in continuing with a null object anyway


The teaching tools nowadays available to CFIs are fantastic. Get yourself X-Plane 12, Honeycomb yoke, throttles and rudders and a decent aircraft like the Challenger 650 and you are good to go. All of this can be had for around 1000 bucks and is the best investment anyone can make to stay current. I used to be a CFII a long time ago (1995) when sims where expensive and only the best flight schools had them. Back then, instrument training was flying long and boring hours under the hood and if you were lucky, one or two hours actual IFR. Most people were afraid to fly real IFR after the rating, since they were aware that the training was so bad, myself included. A couple of hours flying a PC sim fixed this problem once and forever and made a huge difference in real world flying.


I think that's the main problem.

The low hanging fruits have all been picked a long time ago. You can try to undercut existing software, but it's not easy.


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