> For many, programming is the lowest-risk way to put a roof over their head and feed their family.

It seems that to some extent the romantics are actually indebted to this cohort for pushing forth the ideas of fair compensation and fighting for workers' rights, because people who are passionate about their work usually end up getting taken advantage of.

Game Development is an example of what can happen when there are too many people passionate about their work. I'm not saying that everyone in that industry is taken advantage of but it's a lot more than the broader tech industry even though there's a lot of overlap between skill sets.

I would like to say that while this is definitely still a thing it has gotten better in recent years.

There has been a big push against crunch and there are more and more studios with a focus on work-life balance.

It should be noted that one of (if not the) biggest game release of all time this year, CP2077, was built on the back of terrible working conditions and months of crunch.

And yet we also see death threats against developers who delay games.

the recent emergence of many quality games from china might start reversing that trend thouugh...

My own writing on the subject of this industry falls into two pretty cleanly divided piles:

The writing about programming itself is "impractical" and "romantic," because that writing is for those who have an affinity with the "romance of programming."

The writing about getting a job, negotiating compensation, shipping products, hiring programmers, &c. is practical, because that writing is for everyone.

What is the difference between practical and romantic? Musashi wrote a book called The Book of Five Rings, which is as romantic as the name suggests, but half the book is an if-else set of instructions.

> We can make up little myths about how we romantics are obviously more passionate, work harder because it's our dream, are more deeply engaged, and so on.

This comment stuck out for me. There’s no shortage of people who “love their job” who aren’t actually good at their job. They can be very motivated to do the wrong thing and often have unearned egos.

I agree with your caution, I disagree largely with your reasons/the dangers you identify. I've avoided California, so maybe that has an impact, but I almost never have seen ego as a problem. I'm one of the only ones who will do impractical things sometimes (but just as often my crazy ideas are radically simpler).

My gut feel is that romantics have it the hardest. They are way more in touch with the potential & powers of it all, the overwhelming awesomeness that is everywhere, & how un-tapped, un-actualized the world-actual about them is. I don't have particular links, alas, but I think of MrDoob, author of the much loved Three.js library which has the lion's share of 3D on the web. He seems clearly to be engaged, to be interested, but he also has talked to himself not being great employee-material, suffering problems of motivation.

The really romantics have problems of alignment. There are few situations in the world where the passion is allowed to flow. There are few working environments that support the chaotic workflow & passion-driven-development. Agile: we all practice agile. What is agile but a way to insure consistent steady endless sprints, each slowly optimizing productivity? What an evil anethema, a plague upon those of us who work by our muses. The corporation, the industry, wants worker bees. And for many years that's probably a good way to function, probably a valuable personal development, of fitting in, declaring what you are working on, learning how to tackle problems. But in the long game, I think this mode of software development is a joke, is consistently low-ambition, squanders the immense potential we have. And I don't think you need long deep experience & talent to be squandered.

I once had someone vehemently complain to me about certain style rules in place in a code base saying, “only machines will ever read it, who cares how it looks as long as it works?” As someone who’s deeply passionate about software development it certainly made me look at this person in a different light.

Always remember: The next person to maintain it could be you.

Often that kind of view (who cares how it looks) is held by people, who leave and leave a mess for others to maintain.

insert Sussman quote about programs being written for others to read first and only last for computers to run here

It might be a lack of experience. I've seen people reacting like this when they are still very new to programming and feel pressured by the need to learn/adapt to stricter rules. After some time once they become more comfortable they pay more attention to the way something is written.

I've worked with people who would scatter literals throughout a codebase because they were too lazy to type out the names of variables and constants. I feel your pain.

> But answering the question literally, I am not representative of everyone in the industry,

I am deeply /deeply/ romantic about programming, but industry is dreck. Unimaginative, low potential, sapping, low-ambition, filled with endless middle- & low-roads & compromises. Countless stakeholders, endless non-technical-personals to "reason" with. Plans & designs & endless corporate aligning & planning. All for middling corporate plans, faint progress, carried forward under the weight of countless legacy systems & terrible decisions.

Programming & open source is this limitless potential, this endless imagineering & exploration. We are unencumbered by anything beyond what we might imagine, what we might want to do, free to think of how we want to represent, structure, develop things.

Not everyone is into programming for the same reasons. But I find increasing distance, increasing inability to articulate to others how amazing being a programmer is, what expressiveness & power we have, how unencumbered & free we are. Even if others don't share the ambition & sense of grandiosity, don't feel the immense pull of the vast humanistic work that we distinctly are the crafters & doers of, there's still such power to create & share & inform that is so rewarding, so immense, so imminent in the craft, & I deeply deeply crave seeing some recognition, somewhere, of some of it- of themselves!- at some level, in my fellow peers. It's ok if we have different reasons, different motivations, different engagements, but there is a might of human potential here that programmers are so uniquely connected to, so immersed in, and I want these fish to realize the water about them, even if they only aspire to be small fish.

I affirm strongly the question: how indeed can you not be romantic about programming?

Do you have any example code that enforces the idea of romantic to you? I've always just worked on business related tasks, and might have missed out on the romantic side of programming

We are all human. Just because I don't understand why someone would spend their whole life studying beetles doesn't mean I don't respect that they find it engaging and worthwhile.

You are making the classic mistake of projection. Accept that people are unique and will find different things engaging even within the most "mundane" areas of software.

That seems like a harsh view. A lot of software isn't very glamorous or exciting at first glance, that's true. But if you're sufficiently intrigued by logic puzzles and the challenge of solving things elegantly, my guess is that even the most boring piece of software has some opportunity for fun buried in its architecture.

But since you don't seem to be able to relate that too much, maybe you are just motivated by other things than many programmers. What would be the 'actual fun' things then in your opinion, that you have to be 'socially successful' to participate in?

I like the optimism in your comment. I'm glad that we can appreciate things like this, the flexing of mental muscles in pursuit of a productive task.

Most jobs are boring if you aren’t interested in the problem they’re solving. I appreciate you throwing some shade at the otherwise hive mind here but you’ve kind of jumped to the opposite direction. I don’t find recording audio interesting but there’s a whole field about it and I assure you I know people who find the art of recording sounds interesting who aren’t “telling themselves” it isn’t just to keep from being depressed. People are interested in different things and programming, like math, is the art of abstract problem solving and there very much are millions of people who find the act of abstracting problems and automating their solutions interesting. Your comment is downvoted because you are claiming otherwise to a community full of these very people.

Sure programming is boring, to the billions of people who aren’t programmers just as recording audio or, for a “real world” type of fun like you imply, playing most sports, is boring to me.

Making a file manager sounds interesting. A customer service platform not so much because I've done it before. A payroll system could be interesting.

Typing a letter and having it show up interests me.

  What interests you?

I don't understand this. You make it sound as if other trades and professions are about getting invited to parties.

Other professions arent as technical, and focus more on creating human connections rather than abstract connections.

- Accounting? - Finance? - Law? I dunno, I think this notion that software development is uniquely technical is pretty misguided.

This is really right on the mark. Real accounting involving trusts, tax shelters involving various corporate structures, the intricate tax code knowledge required to understand and take advantage of loopholes is quite technical.

Having been exposed to what it takes to do this level of accounting via direct conversations with someone who does this, they can't wait to move on from it. It's not a good fit for their personality. It really is a back office type of work that can get quite lonely.

You’re partly right, programming as a whole and on a sort of macro level is soils crushingly boring and pointless. But on the micro scale, even boring pointless programming tasks can offer challenges that are interesting enough to keep you entertained for a few hours until you look up and remember how pointless it all is.

I like to compare it to solving sudoku. If that entertains you and you can make 200k doing it, it’s not the worst thing in the world, even if it is sad and boring when you see it in a wider context. Who wants to go through life as a programmer?

Some people just have great interest in a narrow area.

I agree that most of those types of applications have a very low interest-to-drudgery ratio just in general, and I personally don't find them interesting at all. But let's not forget that some people just have interest in the details of things that most other people don't really care about. Some of that work might not even be objectively that technically demanding, yet it somehow catches the attention of some people.

> It’s boring and people only do it because they’re too socially unsuccessful to participate in things that are actually fun,

To throw some bombs the other way, I think there's a legit feeling that a lot of the socialization/fun that humanity gets up to is frivolous, pointless, dis-engaged, solipsistic avoidance of how they are spending their lives. We are all engaged in distracting ourselves at some level (Terror Management Theory[1]), and while it is popularly accepted that being popular & social is how one wins, I think there have been a lot of folks who feel other callings, to do, to make, to explore, and often it's less than clear how to do these activities socially. Einstein only found two other people in the world when he made the Olympia Academy[1], but that was enough. Other people wouldn't call that social fun, but it engaged him, and I would judge more earnestly & wholly & to greater joy than most people's social fun.

> so they convince themselves spending hundreds of hours making boring stuff is actually a good use of their time. I understand that some programming is great, but since 99% of all software is not interesting, I don’t believe the amount of people who say they love it.

I'm much more sympathetic to this all. So much of my first post was about the split, the difficulty, of doing software development from within the confines of the corporate-industrial environment.

There are endless fun challenges & explorations to get up to (from within those confines). There's so many things that feel good about programming, about feeling like one has gotten on top of these confounding complex problems, & built a secure well structured coherent domain for oneself. I think there is fun here, genuine fun, but I also think it's distracting & shallow. It's the social gossip of software development. Decoupled from what one is doing.

Most software is, alas, built in corporate-industrial manner. Most programmers are merely producers, not imaginators, not true creators, very much by design of the corporate-industrial system, & it's accepted as 99.999% hard fact that programmers need the help of other people or else they will make horrible software that won't help users. Very little software that is written, I would say, is written by software. This wraps up into the whole corporate-industrial software problem, that software is always intent on being product, on consumerization, and I strongly feel it's the lack of trust & lack of exploration that keeps 99% of software in the not-interesting realm, that keeps computers as a whole impervious & uninteresting & uncompelling & unknown (the proverbial kids who know a couple apps really well but nothing more about computing).

Most of the programmers you meet, who you accuse of not being passionate: perhaps you are right. They're having fun, but how engaged are they? Are they avoiding the fear of death, engaging themselves in industrial fun? Or do they really have a passion, see the world truly, have some sense of place of it all, & feel a connection to something? Are they facing the terror of death earnestly, more genuinely; have they advanced beyond the socializing masses? I think your doubts are well founded. I think we ought be critical, try to keep a cosmic brain view & skepticism, of ourselves & our applications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_Academy

The consumerist cycle is indeed a vicious trap in some ways when we place it in the context of self-actualisation. I’d like to add that another component or alternative to Terror thinking is our scarcity thinking. We still all live like we need to hoard nuts like Scrat from Ice Age.

A reasonable solution is the Sublime from Schopenhauer, or an alternative enlightened moment in once life were one does indeed she ourselves part of a Cosmic whole. Or otherwise said from that movie “What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”

Sure there are people with higher callings, geniuses like Einstein or Newton. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity. For them work is not an excuse not to have friends or do “frivolous” things. Those frivolous things are what life are made of, so you better have a damn good reason if you avoid them. Being 10% of a team that is building some accounting software is not comparable to inventing calculus.

> We are talking about moderately intelligent people who will never contribute anything meaningful to humanity.

I have to disagree here. The bulk of humanity consists of minor contributions made by people few will ever remember.

Yes and the bulk of humanity manage to both make this minute contribution, and have a family and some friends.

You can be a software developer and have a family and friends. You're acting like there is only one choice when you are passionate about software : hunker down and be lonely with your computer as your only company.

That is the point _I_ am making.

I was romantic but jaded by many years experience plus the move from creation to glue code being what is needed for business

Maybe it's unique to me as a sysadmin previously and now as an SRE, but I quite enjoy gluing things together. Something about taking stuff that doesn't interoperate directly and forcing it to do so is elegant in its own right, without having to resort to scorching the earth and rebuilding everything from scratch.

I learned this the hard way. Thought I was special and passionate and hard working. Then I had a mental breakdown and could barely get anything done. All of a sudden money became the top priority I started seeing the world for what it really is.