Re:Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?
by amag on Monday February 01, 2016 @11:09AM
(#11012566)
Yeah, that and a lack of responsibility sometimes attracts me. My whole career (+15yrs) has basically been in industries where things are not allowed to go wrong. Some days I wish I was a lumberjack or maybe a programmer in an industry where you don't kill people or cost millions of dollars with a bug... But at the end of the day I can't stop myself from programming and I want to work on things that make a difference, so I'll leave the wood-cutting to my spare time.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?
by TheCoelacanth on Monday February 01, 2016 @01:04PM
(#11013711)
Odd that you would pick lumberjack as an example since that is a job where mistakes frequently do kill people.
Re:Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?
by amag on Monday February 01, 2016 @04:45PM
(#11015741)
Yeah, I know, I realized that as I wrote it, but I guess I like to be out in the woods and do some heavy labor.
A bit of a simplification maybe, but as a lumberjack there are N+2 moving parts you need to care about, the saw, the tree and N coworkers in the proximity (N < 10) (if there's a moose and I catch it with my falling tree, it doesn't count as an accident, it counts as a bonus). With software there are thousands of moving parts and you can be pretty sure that no matter the amount of testing and code-reviewing, the parts will move in new unexpected ways once they reach the customers. Besides as a lumberjack when you leave work you leave work. You only have to worry about not killing someone during your working hours.