I'm not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.

After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I'm in university for tech, and i'm still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don't often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.

It puts food on your table so you don't fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.

Depression.

The end result of a programmer's work is depression.

Just kicking technical debt down the road.

An architect's building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.

'Bugs.'

You know those illustrated story books for children?

The ones with cute anthropomorphized animals going about their jobs in a fairytale animal society, posting letters and walking kids across the street and fixing cars in the garage?

If you can't accurately depict yourself doing your job as a drawing in one of those books, it's not a real job.

(I'm also a programmer, by the way.....)

One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol's film "Empire", which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.

I thought it'd be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer's work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering "why the fuck doesn't this work?"

A slight, but crucial reordering of electrons.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

• Frederick Brooks

The result in the end should be an organized series of events, a process, that takes or produces data. The data can be anything from a single number in a calculator, to a text message, to your entire social profile. The process can be anything from basic math, to advanced math (i.e. machine learning, rendering, cryptography, etc), to performing simple operations on that data like shuffling that data somewhere else.

These processes are stacked on top of each other and utilized with basic logic (if, else, loops, scope, etc) and combined together with a myriad of programming patterns and algorithms, to produce higher and higher orders of complexity, that eventually solve a real-world problem.

The result is an ever increasing complexity of useful tools and processes that can either solve specific problems directly or at least provide discovery for other useful tools and processes that might.

It's translating higher order problems from something understandable at the task level all the way down until a piece of specialized rock that only understands on and off can eventually spit out a meaningful result.

ok ok electrical engineers get the claim for the last sentence, and plenty of the real-world complexity, but hopefully it illustrates my point that 'nothing' is ... just wrong. We cannot discount the absolute importance of abstract things. Everything from "imaginary" numbers to completely abstract things like philosophy have real- world consequences. If programming produces nothing, then MOST jobs that aren't manual labor produce nothing.

"My dad does a programmer."

Yea… Tho I’d argue that’s true of most jobs nowadays. Nothing, or somehow less than. Joining the work force has been a very depressing experience so far. Any ambition of learning and or contributing getting annihilated. It’s a compromise that allows me to have a roof and food at the end of the month without living at my parents.

• software
• other software
• more software
• software

If me and my wife had a daughter, this could be funnier:

• I don't have a daddy
• See above
• See above
• The destruction of the patriarchy

Have you tried coffee?