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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 8 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 1.07s | source | bottom
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greymalik ◴[21 Oct 25 17:55 UTC] No.45659146[source]▶
> One could only wonder why they became a programmer in the first place, given their seeming disinterest in coding.

To solve problems. Coding is the means to an end, not the end itself.

> careful configuration of our editor, tinkering with dot files, and dev environments

That may be fun for you, but it doesn’t add value. It’s accidental complexity that I am happy to delegate.

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codyb ◴[21 Oct 25 19:09 UTC] No.45660230[source]▶
Configuring editors, dot files, and dev environments consistently adds value by giving you familiarity with your working environment, honing your skills with your tools, and creating a more productive space tailored to your needs.

Who else becomes the go to person for modifying build scripts?

The amount of people I know who have no idea how to work with Git after decades in the field using it is pretty amazing. It's not helpful for everyone else when you're the one they're delegating their merge conflict bullshit too cause they've never bothered to learn anything about the tools they're using.

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1. mupuff1234 ◴[21 Oct 25 20:04 UTC] No.45660978[source]▶
Have you considered that the problem is with Git and not the users?
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2. rpcope1 ◴[21 Oct 25 21:37 UTC] No.45662044[source]▶
How dumbed down does everything need to be? Git has warts for sure, but this whole ideas guy no actual understanding of anything is how you get trainwrecks. There is no free lunch, and you're going to pay one way or another for not understanding the tools of the craft, and that not everything can be ridiculously simple.
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3. 1718627440 ◴[21 Oct 25 21:51 UTC] No.45662179[source]▶
Nah.

Maybe Git is too complicated for hobby users, because it has a steep learning curve. But after two weeks using you now enough to handle things, so it shouldn't be a problem in any professional environment.

4. mupuff1234 ◴[21 Oct 25 22:08 UTC] No.45662358[source]▶
But it's not that people don't grasp the concept of merge conflicts, it's just that the UX of git is bad.
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5. codyb ◴[21 Oct 25 22:23 UTC] No.45662487{3}[source]▶
It's pretty great if you understand how to do resets, interactive rebases, understand the differences between merges and rebases, keep your commit history fairly clean, and just work with the tool. I haven't had a problem with Git since I spent a day going through the git book something like 10 years ago.

Meanwhile this is in a discussion about tools which people spend incalculable amounts of hours tuning, for reference. The number of articles on Hacker News about how people have tuned their LLM setups is... grand to say the least.

6. dgunay ◴[21 Oct 25 23:15 UTC] No.45662993[source]▶
What about any tool, language, library, or codebase that is unnecessarily complex? Should we never bother to put in the effort to learn to use them? It doesn't mean they are without value to us as programmers. For better or worse, the hallmark of many good programmers I've met is a much higher than average tolerance for sitting down and just figuring out how something computer-related works instead of giving up and routing around it.
7. CuriouslyC ◴[22 Oct 25 10:28 UTC] No.45667090[source]▶
Git doesn't just have warts, its DX is actively bad. If it was good you wouldn't have so many tools designed to make it not suck to work with 20 years after release. The graph first and diff first design decisions are both bad choices that are probably burning millions of man hours per year fixing things that should just work (to be fair, they were the right decisions at the time, times have changed).
8. array_key_first ◴[22 Oct 25 12:21 UTC] No.45667948[source]▶
The issue is with the problem space - version control and reconciliation is hard. The fact we even have software to automate 99% of it is amazing.

Lawyers spend literally hundreds of hours doing just that. Well, their paralegals do.

Git is a legitimately amazing tool, but it can't magically make version control free. You still have to think because ultimately software can't decide which stuff is right and which is wrong.