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Do you really want to continue doing this when you turn 50?

When I was still a professional programmer, my colleague once asked me: “Do you really want to continue doing this work when you are 50 years old?”.



I have to say, it made me stop and think.



I am a little disappointed in programming. Not because you have to work on solving complex problems. It requires careful thought, but it is just like a writer structures a story or writes a dialogue that sounds believable. Solving problems of this kind is fun and even fun.



But, unfortunately, programming is different. This is an attempt to create a working solution for problems that you do not fully understand and you do not have time to understand.

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This is an attempt to cover the vast ocean of API, the study of which can take years, but the market is moving forward, driving you, so you copy and paste the code from the examples and try to make it work without having a complete picture of the architecture of the application that you support.



This reading of documentation between the lines and attempts to predict how extreme cases will be handled, and whether your assumptions will be true in two months or two years.



These are constant evolutionary changes in the language, compiler, libraries, framework, and underlying OS. This whole snowball keeps you in maintenance mode, not allowing you to make real improvements.



This is when all the work can stop due to a minor bug in seemingly reliable tools. And you are the first person who faced the fact that a PNG image with four bits per pixel and an alpha channel crash decoder and you need to somehow get around it.



One of the approaches is to go deep into the problem and by all means wade through obstacles. If you are young, the office has an unlimited supply of coffee and all your friends are also still at the office at 2 am, then ... of course, this is an option. But then, you need to do it again. And again. It is always like a skid at a speed of 200 km / h, in which the brakes smoke and tires break, determining success or failure. But you miraculously stay alive to do it again.



I still like to do different things, and if there is no one else to do it, I will do it myself. I continue to improve my little Perl script that builds this site, because this little script is unobtrusive and reliable, and allows me to focus on writing articles. I have a handy little image processing tool that is written in C and Erlang, and its source code takes less than 28 kilobytes. I know how it works inside and outside, and it’s faster for me to make changes to it than to make ImageMagick do what I want.



Is there more stress on a large scale development? I have to admit, yes. Still, this is the lot of young.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/153515/



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