I don't know what type of code you write, or where you went to school, but I had a professor who actually put the exam score distribution on the whiteboard after each test in a second level CS class, and the bimodal distribution was stark. And these are people motivated or interested enough to spend their academic career pursuing it beyond intro level washout.

This is wrong. Even simple software requires a radically different way of thinking than the way most are trained. I've taught 6th graders how to code and it is clear that the way of approaching problems and creating solutions (i.e. creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to collaborate and ask questions) really separates the students from who "get it" and thse who don't. Don't sell it short because the industry has made tools and languages that abstract over some of the simpler concepts for entry-level tasks.

Perhaps he means in relation to other careers? As someone who is both a software developer and a farmer, software isn't exactly easy, but in comparison to the knowledge and skill required to farm successfully, it is a breeze.

This is quite interesting - I'm actually quite curious about what makes farming more intellectually challenging and difficult than programming, especially from somebody who does both. (Honest curiosity!)

I would imagine it's the constant problem-solving with real-world, "dirty" problems. You can't take the fact that your crops are failing through a debugger and reason about it line-by-line. You can't quickly run another simulation. You can't insert a single solution at one point and know that it won't affect the rest of the application.

Your answers are always based on fuzzy data, experience, and intuition. Your solutions will always affect the local ecosystem of the crops, and cause hard-to-predict chain reactions.

...but I'm not a farmer, so I'm just guessing.

I suspect it's that and so much more! There's a huge science aspect to it now; and every year there's new pesticides, new seed varieties, crop-rations, yield techniques, etc. Not to mention the huge complicated business and tax bureaucracy that is modern farming. I'm sure this is only a small slice which is why it would be great to see more.

What I don't have even a sense of is how much of a daily concern a lot of this is or if it's a once-a-year kind of thing, or how much of it impacts somebody who "only" farms to support his family and may only have 1-2 workers versus hundreds.

That is a good question. I'm not sure how well I will be able to put it into words, but I'll give it a go! For what it is worth, I have a grain farm, so my perspective comes from that type of operation.

A big one is simply the breadth of the subject matter. To me it feels like learning to program, forgetting everything, and repeating several more times. You have to know about plants, chemicals, machinery, computer technology, business, just to name a few. I don't think you need to be a expert in any of those things, but it seems to me like the most successful farmers approach being that.

Every year is different. If you've built one CRUD app, every CRUD app is going to come with a similar set of problems. If you've grown one field of corn, who knows what next year will bring? I've been farming for more than a decade now and I still encounter situations that I've never seen before. Luckily, which makes it much less of a challenge, but might be interesting being that I'm the sixth generation to work my family's farm, I can ask family for advice and you get the "Well, back in '72 it was like this and we did that." Still, there is lots of problem solving to do. In that respect, it is a lot like programming.

What is not not like programming is an answer for everything on the internet. I truly miss that. While programming, if I have any kind of mental block, a few minutes on Google will turn me right around. On the farm, family is an amazing resource, and there are plenty of academic and other professionals available to be contacted, but it's not the same. Programmers are incredibly fortunate!

I'll just throw in that farming constantly makes me feel dumb. Still, after a decade at it. Not very quantitate, I know, but it's a feeling I have never experienced in the same way as a programmer. I'm sure I could go on, but I have to move on to other engagements. I hope you found this interesting.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful response! The parallels are interesting. Farming sounds a lot like writing assembly! Start over every time, have to know about wildly arcane and disparate concepts, hard to get help except from somebody who has encountered something very similar perhaps a long time ago, and takes many years to feel productive.

My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?).

Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.

They've always been (incorrectly) characterized in what I've seen in media/pop-culture as hardworking but relatively simple. The more I learn about the difficulties of modern farming and what it takes to succeed, the more respect I have. I'd love read a blog from somebody with career-level experience in both software-engineering and farming. I'm sure I/we could learn a lot.

Business person, maybe economist when you take into account prices for crops and deciding what to grow.

I disagree, GP is absolutely correct. The reason people think that programming or software engineering is hard is because they were told that it is hard. US and the West in general has this strange culture where those that are supposed to know (teachers, parents, professors) like to tell those who are learning (students, children, etc) that whatever is done is hard. Math, apparently, is hard. Algebra is hard. Trigonometry is hard. Geography is hard. Physics is hard. It does not matter what it is - if it is worth doing it is all "hard".

Students that "get it" are the ones who managed to ignore the "hard" label. That's it.

In the industry I keep hearing that everything is hard:

Dev: "Logging is a solved problem at the rate we are looking at - it is what, 100 messages per second?" VP of Eng: "I dont know man. Logging is hard. We should outsource it."

SRE: "Just build images and spin them up" CTO: "That's hard. We should outsource it"

Dev: "Lets fix this reliability issue. We keep getting disconnects and it does something wacky to our API" CTO/VP Eng: "That's hard. Lets just see if we can spin up enough instances not to notice"

Most of stuff that we do is not hard.

Algebra is hard - it's an abstract problem-space. It takes learning problem-solving! I've seen brilliant middle-school kids struggle with it because it's a way of thinking that has to be learned. Don't cut yourself or others short by saying these things you think are easy are easy by their very nature.

Doing any of those things you describe with effectively in a mid/large-scale engineering organization with many competing tech priorities is not something an amateur or simpleton could do with any real success. I can put seeds in the ground, but that doesn't make me a farmer.

But also - maybe larger point - many of the things that are not coding/math/science are also quite hard. My father fixed auto-bodies for a living and he made some incredibly difficult, detail-oriented, craftsmanship tasks look dumb-simple. He asked me to tape off a car once so it could be painted - something he thought a 13 year old should be able to do because it was "so easy" was a complete disaster. He forgot how second-nature it had become to him.

So..just because you think it's easy doesn't mean it is. And just because it's hard doesn't mean it's fairly characterized in popular-opinion as being as hard as it actually is.

I completely disagree. Every single subject I've ever struggled with in a school setting was described to me as "No don't worry, it's actually really easy" which was a problem.

If I'm struggling to understand something that is so easy, maybe I'm just dumb.

I think software development is hard, but not because the subject matter is intrinsically difficult. (Sometimes it is, but usually that's not the primary reason.) It's hard because we've invented a mountain of little annoying problems with little annoying workarounds and it takes decades to learn most of them in any particular domain.

Does it have to be though? I'm sure reading/writing were thought the same for women/blacks/etc.. at some point in history.

I suspect I'm ideologically closer to you than to some of the more libertarian commenters on this thread, but that comment is both a false comparison, intensely reductive, and, I think, needlessly divisive.

No-one is arguing that certain groups have greater aptitude or learning ability for programming; they're arguing that certain individuals might differ.