Why software development is not for everyone

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

November 7, 2015

Have you ever had gobs of fun hacking away on a computer? I can say I did, but it’s not so much fun when hackers getting into your network becomes easier and easier. Noodled with a piece of code that you discovered in the afternoon, and here it is, 2:00 a.m.? If you were to follow this link and find out if the attributes of the people working there correspond to your own, then that’s a sign you may be a computer geek. That’s all and good, but the question that may come before you is, do you want to make this your dream job? Your career? Watch out, though. Software development is not for everyone.

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I fear that some people may be getting into software development because computers are now hip and cool. And the money is good! Experts in the field of education like Kamau Bobb agree that this new exposure can lay a solid foundation for future STEM learning and potentially inspire a lifelong interest in these fields.

What was that tip off? A TV ad for liquor which showed “Jim from IT” partying just like everyone else. TV ads are a bellwether for trends, because that write them are constantly polling groups of people to see what will resonate. When IT people had entered the main fray of the party-going crowd and were seen a force to be reckoned with (err…a force to be advertised with), then game over.

The side effect of anything going mainstream is that others, who have no deep seated desire to submit and review pull requests on vacation (for the record, I’ve actually done both at Disney World. Top that!), will still flock to the field since its cool, and there’s money to be made. Am I saying that to get ahead, you must be a workaholic and eschew your family? Not at all. What I’m saying is that computer geeks that are in it for the challenge and not just cuz it’s cool can’t help themselves but do what i just described.

So far, I’ve talked about hacking on bits of code at odd hours in odd places. But here is the real test, the true gambit to see if deep down you really are a totally righteous hacker dude: do you go after the most boring, challenging, mind numbingly difficult problems until the code surrenders its secrets to you?

Do you go after the most boring, challenging, mind numbingly difficult problems until the code surrenders its secrets to you?  –sign of a righteous hacker

I have been working on something for several months that is coming to light in less than two weeks. (Stay tuned!) For MANY hours/days/weeks, every time I tweaked one line of code, I had to restart a microservice. That microservice would take, on average, two minutes to load up its data set from a remote system. Next, I went to another tab and clicked on a button to launch a process, and wait to see if my system detected it and processed it correctly. Got that? Edit one line of code, wait five minutes for the results, then debug the outcome. Rinse and repeat. But if you need help with .NET MAUI Development, be sure to hire professionals from companies like XAM.

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Aaaarrgggghhh!!!! <— that was my reaction on many days. And my followup was, “thou shalt not defeat me!” My street cred was at stake, and my own internal desire to beat this system into submission were there as well.

Suffice it to say, trudging through this task is not for the faint of heart. Software hobbyists need not apply.

I’ve always hated the expression “9-to-5 coder.” It’s meant to imply people that only work on the clock, and don’t work late hours, etc. In general, I do that as well. At times, I have to alert my family that I’ll be putting in extra hours (especially the month before SpringOne each year), but in general, I have found that working smarter, not harder, and thinking out solutions before slinging code can make things more efficient.

So I prefer to think of developers not based on the hours they work, but rather, are you a hobbyist or a diehard coder? Diehard coders will take the most ruthless problems and dig, dig, dig, dig, and dig until the answer is found. They are willing to take many hits, submit faulty patches, and screw things up big time, because the end game is important. Version control is our tool to save us from screwing things up, not timidity. Are you a hobbyist that fears making a big change? Or are you a diehard hacker ready to show your handy work to others?

I remember this topic coming up when a website popped up offering bounties for people to solve problems. This was rightly criticized as encouraging people to go after easy–to-tackle issues, or selecting issues that carried much public praise, like UI mods. But serious, professional hacks will take some of the most invisible things (like a 300ms slowdown) and go to extreme ends to unearth what’s wrong. Imagine trying to get ANYONE to pick up that issue for a bounty.

If such tasks sound outrageous or tedious, no problem. I understand. You are hobbyist. Nothing wrong there. But if you’re ready to dive into the slimiest mud bath of code, smile. You are rare.

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