Subj : Re: do serious programmers have a life?
To   : comp.lang.c++,comp.programming
From : gds
Date : Wed Sep 28 2005 06:45 am

amanda992004@yahoo.com wrote:
>Well, in my experience, programming is more time consuming compared to
>Chemistry (talking about grad school study of Chemistry) . If I get
>stuck, I get stuck for a long time. Back then, when I wa staking Java
>in Srping 2002, I didn't know about asking for help in ngs.  So some
>bad memory (of losing time unnecessarily) stayed with me.

I've never held a full-time position in any other field except
software engineering so I can't really say what other fields are
like.  However, to compare software engineering with another thing I
do on the side (unpaid), perform with a chorus, I find that the
results I get from chorus tends to scale linearly with the effort I
put into it.  OTOH, I find that it takes much more effort to achieve
the same kind of result in a software engineering effort (unless I am
the only developer and the things I depend upon change rarely if
ever).  I find that there are often unseen complexities and also
annoying bugs that need to be fixed.  These annoying bugs aren't very
interesting from a computer science standpoint but the customers/users
feel they should be fixed.

Sometimes, if people have early success they can get put on a fast
track and get to work on the high-level architecture of software
rather than be forced to fix the annoying bugs.

Read Frederick Brooks' THE MYTHICAL MAN-MONTH for more thoughts of
this type.

--gregbo
gds at best dot com

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