Coding Sucks: Why a Job in Programming Is Absolute Hell

I enjoyed the essay, but the truths it imparts are hardly confined to the coding profession. Any specialized field that looks contained, ordered, and routinized from the outside is going to look more porous, chaotic, and ephemeral from the inside. What this programmer says about Good Code is also true of Good Teaching, or Good Writing, or Good Theater, or Good Parenting.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

Coding Sucks: Why a Job in Programming Is Absolute Hell.