Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.
- 20 years of work
- x years of study
- being born with the right nature/nurture mix for computer work
…to get to this point. That’s a very significant initial hump in difficulty that restaurant work doesn’t have.
Go work 20 years of Friday and Saturday nights in a popular restaurant. Does not have to be the same one, as the expectation is the same.
The level of effort I need to put into coding dropped off exponentially.
As one ages the level of effort out into restaurant work goes up.
Let’s rely on science and not bias. Programming is still not sweatshop work on the regular. I work 4 solid hours a day.
Why isn’t there a flood of ex-restaurant workers becoming software engineers? Because getting over that hump is really hard, statistically speaking.
I've worked in a factory as a machine operator, and in a company as a programmer, and they're not comparable in either difficulty or compensation.
people with engineering degree struggle to find job as SE.
let alone that you need to put hundreds/thousands of hours into it in your free time
and then still learn a lot as dev in order to move up
i'm not saying that it makes SE harder, just different.
After a certain point, programming becomes less hard. It becomes a set of very familiar syntax snippets to copy/paste around.
Rushing around a kitchen in the heat, and often toxic, juvenile environment all week never changes… versus programming in your house?
Give me a break. You’re not coming close to putting the same real pressure on your body.