Re:Why can’t you design noise in frequency space?
by whatshisface on Thursday December 30, 2021 @08:39PM
(#29743871)
I personally have experienced the more-money-less-difficulty science-to-coding gradient. You can say that programming can be arbitrarily difficult, which is true, the reality is that it usually isn't arbitrarily difficult, and corporations are happy to pay non-geniuses lots and lots of money to reliably design systems that work with zero marginal cost, whereas if you want to make $160k as a ground-level researcher, making 1% improvements to products with very substantial marginal costs, using million-dollar equipment to do your job, you'd have to be a rare intellect indeed, and beyond that be great at selling your own value.
In software, there's no such thing as marginal cost, the only tool you need is a $300 laptop, and all you need to know can be read for free online. That's an amazing world, from an economic standpoint, and it's no surprise at all that it's so much easier to make money that way.
That just reads as “I am better than you”.
Programming is arbitrarily difficult, and it rarely has an objective reality to measure against. I have some kind of “Peter Principle” in mind where people continuously reach their own personal limits of complexity. However they then expand their skills in an ill-defined problem space to level up and beat their prior limits. Programmers display a massive variety of talent, and most of the talent is invisible because the problem space is heinously deeply complex and outside observers only see glimmers on the surface.
Or is your implication that idiots and/or lazy people choose to be programmers? Certainly there is a share of them in the discipline too: perhaps smart for chasing money and perhaps even content with the challenges they face personally.
Regardless, you are being very judgmental towards programming.
Your own descriptions of your discipline could be perceived as rote work or make work, on the same level as making another CRUD app for a business, that doesn’t require deep applied intelligence. How people apply their skills and intellect to the problem defines how hard the problem is.
Then I think of https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... which I read as a study in applied intuition in Chemistry at a genius level (with some survivor bias to boot!).