"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

Re:"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all progra... by woopah on Saturday August 08, 2026 @03:35PM (#49225120)

I think people also have a natural tendency to assume that the amount you are paid is correlated to how difficult the job is, which isn't quite true. The market value of a role has a lot of additional factors besides how intrinsically difficult the actual job is such as supply and demand and the funding source. Programmers may have been able to demand high salaries partially because the explosion in demand came faster than the explosion in supply.

While it is true that a programmer's job is a lot more than writing code, I also wonder to what extent that businesses will actually be able to tell a good programmer from a bad one. For example, a lot of folks at big companies can honestly get away with being a ticket-taking code monkey because so much of the responsibility has been abstracted away so that they don't actually get punished for not caring about the customer. It's sort of similar to how many schools realistically wouldn't care to distinguish between a teacher who puts in extra effort into their classroom versus one who clocks in and clocks out as long as some bare minimums were being met.

I think strong programmers will get rewarded in the right companies that need them, but it's still an open question as to how many companies exist that have their bottom lines actually depend on a programmer doing a good job at wearing all those extra hats.

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Re:"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all progra... by frgturpwd on Sunday August 09, 2026 @06:34AM (#49230154)

So you're saying a lead/manager that recognizes good programmers from bad programmers should be paid the most... rubs hands together

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Re:"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all progra... by Valakas_ on Monday August 10, 2026 @02:59AM (#49240255)

This is the correct answer. Of all the engineering fields, SWE is by far the one with highest salary compared to how difficult it is. SWE lucked out on the fact that we have been going through a technological revolution, and naturally the demand for the people who work in this field is huge. Hence the pay. In my university SWE bachelors + masters degree has been seen as the easiest one as far as i can remember. Mechanical, bio, aerospace and electrical as the most difficult.

It's always been funny to see the arrogance of some SWE who think that since they're the highest paid, they are also the most difficult and most important jobs, while it has zero to do with either of these two. Just luck of supply/demand. Otherwise mathematicians and physics would be sitting at the top with the highest paid careers and they... are not even close to that.

For this reason I don't really feel sorry for AI replacing programmers/SWE, at least the ones that were arrogant enough to think in the way i explained.

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