Repeating the same year is just how jobs work
I keep seeing articles about developers who are just repeating the same year over and over again. This is intended as an insult, where the writer obviously feels they are a “real” developer, as if their career is somehow so much better. I don’t know about you, but here are six words I never want to hear at any company I ever work for:
We have very creative payroll accountants
No thanks, I would rather just have the usual payroll accountants ensuring everyone gets paid on time with the correct amount of money — accountants who keep doing the same thing every year. Same goes for plumbers, and many other jobs — I need people who keep doing the same thing, and eventually reach a stage where they are as good as they ever get. These people enable me to have a variety of things I need in my daily life, such as:
- Internet service
- Phone service
- Insurance of various kinds
- Organizing volleyball games
- The job I currently hold
- Car repairs
- Gas stations
- Grocery stores
If you took any two successive years of my developer career, they are probably quite similar. Every now and then, I change companies, but within a given company as long as I am on the same project, I am pretty much doing the same thing from month to month.
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Every now and then I get an interesting challenge. One project I worked on needed to use a map. We were using a JS map library to render objects overlaid on the map, and we were using PostGIS to do things like search for the airport nearest a geocoordinate. We needed to generate objects to be rendered on the map. Since we already had two GIS libraries in use, we did want to introduce a third. So we decided to use PL/pgSQL functions to generate these objects.
Generating these objects required revisiting some high school trigonometry I had not used in years of for loops, OOP, reflection, REST, SQL, JSP, HTML, and all kinds of other stuff I can’t even remember anymore. I knew how that trig worked off the top of my head. However, it was a case of using it in the right way, so the generated object would look correct on a map (eg, lines that are supposed to be parallel actually look parallel when zooming in, measured distances are correct, etc). It was a bit of a pain, but I got it right. It was a bit of fun once I got the first one working.
Even though GIS and mapping problems (namely making straight lines on a curved earth) sounds like some new challenge, was it really? In the end I used for loops, grade 11 math, and manual testing using geojson.io. The resulting SQL functions were simply part of the same scripts used to create tables and stuff.
Is debugging Java really different from debugging an SQL function? Is writing JSP code to generate HTML really different from some client side library? Arguably, I’ve been using the same underlying process all along for the last 19 years of writing software professionally. The languages change, the approaches change, but debugging is the same — there are still situations where I don’t have a debugger, and still situations where I do. Determining the best course of action is also the same, try the approach that seems best, and if it doesn’t work out, modify it, or try something else.
The point being, that computer programming is just another job. It isn’t special in any real way — we have managers, coworkers, and tasks we need to perform. We don’t always get along with our coworkers, we don’t always agree with our managers. Some programmers are arrogant and think they are god’s gift to programming. Some say stupid things like a programming language isn’t ready for a given approach. Some do dumb things like use a caching library from the get go, when it is clearly not needed for the small amount of yearly data being added to the system, and small number of
relatively simple queries being performed.
We make the same mistakes as every other kind of job at our company, and grow the same way as every other kind of job. We’re not special. So when one of us writes about some other dev as “repeating the same year” as an insult, they have simply described themselves and everyone else, and virtually every other job on this planet.
