I just want to code (2023)

Because having your own product is something that on paper sounds extremely rewarding. If you do it well, the maintenance might be less than the work you put in your actual job.

Some people want to break out of the cycle, and you can't really blame them for it when the economy is hurting working people (ofcourse excluding that writing software is relative to other jobs a cushion job)

It's not a cushion job. At least not when you are working on a huge codebase together with lots of other developers.

What other jobs have you had? I have been a photo lab assistant, a sign maker apprentice, a graphic designer, an insurance agent, a financial advisor, a construction worker and manual laborer, an inner-city math teacher, a software developer turned manager turn developer, now at the staff level.

Software is the most cush job I have had. More money for less work. Better perks. Less stress overall. Constantly learning, yes. Often frustrating, yes. But having financial resources beyond what the other jobs could provide is a thing. Other jobs I could leave at work, sure, but others I couldn't. I would never go back to being a public high school teacher; that shit was the suck. So was selling stocks. Software is a dream in comparison.

That is from the viewpoint of the top 10% earners if you look at the european market or small / local business than you are looking at people doing the job of multiple departments and getting blamed if something does not work or for their salary if everything works.

And the salary is most of the time lower than anyone from the HR or Marketing department whose job if you are unlucky you also have to do because the tools they use are too complicated for them.

And if take the freelancer / remote work market into consideration everyone wants to pass all the work to the lowest bidder and some of them get lucky with skilled workers whose salary may be in the median considering their location after substracting the share of the middleman.

100% - my friends who have only ever written code think it's a "hard" job in the objective sense. That among all possible jobs, it is on the difficult side of the spectrum.

I've been an EMT, a line cook, a dishwasher, a waiter, sold insurance, and worked on political campaigns. The easiest of all those is 10x harder than the hardest day of writing code.

It's frustrating at times, sure. There's office politics, sure. We probably have to deal with a disproportionate percentage of weaponized autism, sure.

But it is a cushy job and the "money per unit of effort" metric is off the charts compared to basically every other job I can think of, and definitely every other job I've ever had.

I don't have much experience in jobs like those, but a family member who jumped between whole different professions for years does. He always got bored of them because, at least according to him, all of them had one failing: you learn everything you need in a couple of months or so, then it's pretty much just getting better at doing those things repeatedly.

Eventually he tried out programming and found there's no real end to the amount of things to learn. It was the only job he found that he wouldn't get bored on. He only eventually left because of bad bosses.

I think that might be the factor that makes it hard vs easy compared to others - that for a lot of people, continual learning (which they thought they'd left behind when they finished school) is why it might be harder than the other jobs ones you listed. Though I know I'd find those ones harder for other different reasons.

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Any time you see someone saying how hard it is to write code as a job, you can tell they've never had a "real" job. I grew up working on a farm every day - I would take programming every day of the week. Even on the days when I'm frustrated or dealing with difficult people, it's better than hard physical labor which wears down your body, is fairly gross (lots of poop!), and doesn't even pay 1/2 of what programming does.

> Software is the most cush job I have had. More money for less work. Better perks. Less stress overall. Constantly learning, yes. Often frustrating, yes. But having financial resources beyond what the other jobs could provide is a thing. Other jobs I could leave at work, sure, but others I couldn't. I would never go back to being a public high school teacher; that shit was the suck. So was selling stocks. Software is a dream in comparison.

The problem is: there exists a very specific group of people who do software development as a job who are really passionate and idealistic about software (that's why they actually got interested in software development and decided to do this professionally). For these people, the whole "politics" about software devlopment, bullshit project management processes, not being allowed to make use of their full potential and skills, and office politics is (thus) hell on earth.

I thus very plausibly do believe that exactly for people who are incredibly passionate about software development, other jobs (that are outside their passion) can actually (paradoxically!) be more convenient.