"No, it's less effort than that"

There’s a consistent belief here that Programming Isn’t Like Other Work™ and that you can’t estimate it, it’s so mentally taxing that you can’t do it for more than a few minutes at a time in complete silence, and that it’s closer to Da Vinci sculpting the Sistine Chapel than kludging together a few APIs.

It’s fun to think you’re special and easy to do when you’re paid a shitload of money.

Programming is like some kinds of work.

It is very much unlike operating an established manufacturing facility. But, about two thirds of dev work has a lot of parallels with creating a new manufacturing facility that manufactures a new kind of thing using new materials and techniques. The primary parallel is that a new facility requires a lot of discovery. Whereas if operating an existing facility constantly required a lot of discovery that disrupted operations it is likely the business team would pivot to something more lucrative.

Sadly most developers work in companies that have a manufacturing management system, which is inappropriate for managing development work, primarily because of pressure+timeline patterns typically applied via silo on silo kingdom building.

This is a bitter exaggeration. Programming is indeed distinctly unlike almost all other work that we have built experience managing as a society. It might be more accurate to say that it combines properties from other existing types of work that are not seen combined in any other type of work.

Again, a very exaggerated/sarcastic version of the quoted sentence. It's impossible to engage if you don't have realistically worded questions.

Go to any thread here on HN about WFH, open offices, 8-hour work days, etc. and tell me I’m wrong.

Yes, this keeps coming up and people respond rather reasonably but people insist on not understanding. In software if something is similar to "cleaning out clogged sewer pipes for the 999,999th time" then it has to be possible to automate it. If I have a task to clean up my code, I'll automate it then it'll take <1 sec to do it. When people say "software is hard" this is not some sociological argument, it literally is a mathematical argument and the reaction should be either acceptance or automating it. If I cannot automate something I need to sit down and think about it the same I think about "Columbus setting out for the New World" or "building the Sistine Chapel" or whatever, i.e. as deeply as my neurological faculties allow me.

For "it's just kluding APIs bro" kind of arguments, I invite you to look at no-code and low-code products and report us how well they work. Is it easy to "kludge together APIs" in this fashion and does it produce viable products? Why? Why not? If it's so easy that it's close to being automated, why can't we have a UI like Photoshop to create API consumer apps?

What cannot be automated has to be exhaustively thought by someone.

One thing to watch out for is confusing IT work for dev work. I see this a lot with business folks.

An example of IT work is installing MS Office on a laptop by hand.

An example of dev work is integrating VBA into excel so that office users can automate excel using VBA.

Regarding open offices. The Fed commissioned MIT to do a study on the effect of public observation and found that it significantly reduced people's effectiveness at solving puzzles.

Just proving my point. Significantly reducing some tech bros ability to do puzzles doesn’t mean that private offices are needed to make the 10,000,000th Rails app.

But yeah thats kinda my point. Integrating VBA into excel isn’t the Manhattan Project. Unless it’s your first job you can probably break the project down into steps and give a decent estimate of time on each.

Hell, business types confuse data entry work for dev work.

It's Computer Stuff. It's all the same.

Integrating VBA into excel was an interesting one as the excel team refused to just pull it in as a dynamic dependency but wanted it embedded straight into the deployment to avoid the DLL hell that was common on the windows platform. In addition going from having no automation via something like VBA to having automation required some pretty complex work.

As for the Manhattan Project, you might want to think on the difference between the words complexity and difficulty. And then you might consider that when working with nuclear material to create the world's first nuclear bomb, you would want to keep the complexity as low as possible, sheerly out of self preservation.

Neat!

Yep, this sounds like the kind of project you make a guess, write up, and it works in that amount of time on your machine.

Then you push it out into the field and you get flooded with calls on it not working. Turns out it only works in your version of Excel on Windows without some particular set of patches installed. Manhattan Project was easy, they didn't have to worry about any backwards/multi-platform compatibility.

Exactly, I’m glad you’re on my side with this. It’s great to have your support.

That entirely depends on whether or not the team is making something that is going to fulfill an unmet market need.

If they are in the majority of developers being mismanaged to crank out software that nobody wants, then have them code in an open office space with bullhorn wielding circa 1890s speed bosses yelling at them to type faster. It really makes no difference as most legacy business teams shirk their responsibility to get out of the building and figure out the real needs anyway, so might as well let the devs work on their craft until a real opportunity to make a difference comes along.

Yes, that’s exactly my point.

lol, I'm just thinking of how awful the Manhattan project would have turned out if it had half the invisible things that can go wrong in software deployments.

If software caused mushroom clouds each time it had a problem in the field, nobody would let MBAs run software projects!