We're digital plumbers.

90% of this job is figuring out what thing to connect to what thing and then figuring out how to connect them.

Writing the code that goes in-between both ends of the pipe is easy if not trivial 90% of the time.

Meaningful change in this industry is centered around endpoints: contracts, deployments, etc. Nobody needs yet another way to organize and import their leftpad().

That is deep

Your post reminded me of this gem of a movie.

Brazil is the movie.

While actual plumbers do an essential job in maintaining our water supply and keeping our shit away from us and get low money and reputation for it, most of our jobs are to maintain some useless product with almost no public benefit and absurd energy bill for a nice salary.
So the metaphor has it's limits i guess.

@horus idk man.

I used to support software that ships medical logs to millions of hospitals across the globe instantaneously.

There was that one time I worked for a major electrical provider that serviced over 20 million people.

That's gotta change somebody's life, right?

I never did it directly, but supported those that did. Still think my actions had SOME impact on someone living or dying...

@sariel sure. Thats why i wrote most of our jobs. It's hard to tell how the ratio actually is, but i'd say the vast majority of dev jobs all bull shit jobs™.

@horus Some are also dangerous.

I maintain/improve a system to make custom products. Without the program, no more orders coming in...

And then there are the small programs used internal to improve the work flow or make tasks faster. 90% of programs is just that i think.

Programming is mostly a craft rather than science or art.

Yep.

It usually takes longer to research and plan out a feature than to actually build it. And it takes longer to write specs to ensure the feature continues to work, too.

My time spent developing is precious and enjoyable, and it keeps dwindling as i improve. It's disheartening.

You can simplify any production to this diagram. The key thing is that the process needs to add sufficient value to create that valuable output worth the energy and machinery cost. If not it's just connecting inputs to outputs.

@hjk101 That’s a 100% editable slide right there.

@hjk101 And here we are with a senior who as 'skills' yet implement stuff (And I mean, orders external devs to program new fields and all) later I ask him what those fields are. And now it is turned into 'brainstorming' on how many fields we should use. And that those fields are not final. 🤦‍♂️

To make everything worse, we find out we only need 1 field. Not 4 like he already ordered to make...

Stuff like that will make simple process very expensive imo

@Root Yes it is but it's about the input, process, output part.