clifanatic

> You are only as old as you believe you are.

Well, I'm 42 and I believe I'm 20... until I spend any time hanging around 20 year olds.

> It was actually Steve Russel

I seem to recall reading that McCarthy was actually surprised to discover that Lisp _could_ be run by a real computer; he intended it to be a completely theoretical tool.

> most of the jobs are for senior roles.

They mean 3-5 years.

I really don’t think that’s what he’s saying, and if at least some of this doesn’t resonate with you, you’ve never looked for (programming) work after 40. The problem is that programming is, by it’s nature, “strange” work. In every other job, you perform some function for a long time, learn all the ins and outs of it, and then move on to manage other people who are performing that function: break their work down into tasks, assign different people to different tasks based on skill sets, suggest timeframes, etc.. That’s true from sandwich making up to neurosurgery. Programming work seems to defy that natural progression. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and I’m no better at breaking software development projects down into discrete tasks for _other people_ to carry out than I was when I started - and I’ve never met nor worked with anybody else who could, or even pretended they could. So we have this odd career where you start out as a programmer, and you stay a programmer until you retire. Couple that with the outsiders expectation that programming is getting easier when the reality is that the opposite is true, you have a _lot_ of people with a very low opinion of programmers as professionals - i.e. if you were actually any good, you wouldn’t have to be doing this any more.

Yeah, I've never really understood being _offended_ by being asked to do something relatively simple (and honestly, those are actually pretty good problems). I might consider it a little amusing if somebody asked me to write FizzBuzz or something really basic, but I would shrug my shoulders and do it.

> were started/ramped up under W. Bush

Assault on privacy and massive surveillance started as soon as the internet became a household word - which actually happened under Bill Clinton.

I think a lot of this religious behavior stems from an underlying belief, mostly by people who've never tried it themselves, that programming _must be_ easy and anything that makes it appear hard (and especially slow) means that somebody is making a mistake somewhere. So they go looking for a silver bullet, and the latest fad seems to fit the bill.

Jesus Christ, Scrooge, it was a joke. And not even remotely contrary to any of those guidelines.

> There is no union nor labour law in China (well technically they both exist but..).

Same thing in America.

> So labour abusing is normal.

Same thing in America.

> Many tech workers are 'voluntarily' working 996 on a 955 pay slip.

Same thing in America.

There's a great, fun, programmer-centric website called thedailywtf.com (sorry, I just scheduled the rest of your afternoon for you). Developers can submit WTF's that they've found in other's code - as the site admin says, "curious perversions in information technology".

One thing that strikes me about the majority of the submissions, as funny as they are, is that they mostly boil down to "so-and-so didn't know that such-and-such feature existed, so wrote reams of code to implement that feature in a complex way". It also strikes me that just this article's sort of analysis of "prolific" (aka "good") engineers/programmers drives this same sort of behavior. If every developer is supposed to be committing code all day, every day, there's no time left over to read the product documentation, try out a new feature, review a reference implementation, read a blog post: to be "good", you must be spending as much time as possible _typing_, because that's what you're paid to do. This (ubiquitous) management mentality is how we end up with roll-your-own crypto, or five competing Javascript frameworks, parsing using regular expressions... it's not so much that what they did was wrong - and trust me, if it works, it won't be removed - it's that it's pointless.