Subj : Re: do serious programmers have a life?
To   : comp.lang.c++,comp.programming
From : Duane Bozarth
Date : Wed Sep 28 2005 11:28 am

gds@best.cut.here.com wrote:
> 
> 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.

Being an engineer who has also written a lot of software of various
types, I don't see any real difference other than in the details of the
effort.  Engineering is fraught w/ complexities as is, I suspect, any
other technical field.

.