In my peak programming years in Germany, about 5-6 years ago, every company that ever tried to hire me, wanted to do some sort of CRM for xyz. It’s fun when you build it once, but then you change the domain, and realize you’re essentially building the same thing, but for different people. I’d gotten so bored of it all by 2020 that I’d approach them right away, asking “are you building yet another CRM for xyz?” They didn’t like it, because it would undermine their work. But it’s true - thousands of highly-educated, well-paid people in Munich at the time, were essentially paid to build and maintain glorified sheets software for managing people and resources.

You can guess which companies and people were hit the hardest, when it turned out that all that software could eventually be generated by a machine.

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

My take on that question is that programmers were in high demand because, for the last 60 or so years, it has been cheaper to write software for general purpose computers to automate things that were done by people and more rudimentary machines, e.g. accounting, manufacturing, music production, etc than it was to pay the people to continue doing those jobs. So, it continues a trend for programmers to be replaced by software, at least until something in the process breaks.

At its core, there is something difficult about programming. Fred Brooks talked about the need for perfection, Don Knuth about there being about 1 in 50 persons who had the mindset for computer science. But we haven't really been paid because it's difficult, we've been paid because we're cheaper than the alternative.

For me the hard part is remembering the "long tail" of the stuff I don't use long enough for my brain to consider it worth putting in the permastore. So I just spend a lot of time googling stuff I already "know" how to do, because the frequency is too low.

It's not hard, it's just bloody annoying. And that's my favorite use of AI so far. Telling it what the code should do, and it translates that into language X's stdlib incantations.

I also find this to be the optimal level of AI usage. If I let the AI run around the codebase doing other stuff, then I need to spend more time and energy later catching up. Whereas, if I stay "in the driver's seat", ask for tiny changes, and approve them manually, the mental model doesn't never gets desynced.

LLMs are the invention of the loom. Code is being industrialized.

Yes, there always will be artisanal weavers and a smaller number of them get paid a lot more money to do this by people who can afford it. Everyone else either started operating a loom or did something else.

Automated looms are now making mass amounts of textiles but the artisans are no longer doing the physical act of weaving. The artisans come up with cool designs, get feedback from customers, solve people's problems and outsource the rest (physical labor).

We are in the loom moment. Are you designing things people want? Are you doing the weaving? These two paths can coexist but they are diverging disciplines with diverging difficulties and diverging value.

Typing code into a computer is rapidly becoming physical labor now. The layer of creativity and problem solving is quickly rising to a level above the code since the code is a fluid now that comes and goes easily.

Coding is not programming.

Typing code is indeed not the hard part, programming is.

it's kind of like people talking about what makes a business successful: the idea or putting it in to practice

some say ideas a "a dime a dozen"; the prevailing message that "code was never the hard part" is kind of the reverse of this

In truth the top comment reports correctly that it probably varies from person to person; obviously for people working on intricate algorithms to solve cutting-edge problems, "code is the hard part"; for those who simply make use of existing algorithms like that but to maybe solve an existing problem for themselves or others, it's more about knowing that algorithm exists and making use of it and "code isn't the hard part" (for them)

hence you can probably identify where code is and isn't the hard part with different pursuits

Well it's easy to come up with code, not hard at all. But what kind of code? Does it work? And more importantly, can it be maintained and adjusted to evolving requirements?

Coding is easy just like writing is easy. What makes the difference is what you write.

> Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it's so easy?

Because companies resent that they have to take on risk and pay people to extract value from the market.

Ugh, why do we have to pay people to code, maintenance, etc. Lets pay people to extract more value for our bonuses and shareholders. Lets try to only hire heavyweights so that we don't get hung up on that difficult-to-measure coding process, knowledge transfer, messy human-ness. Oooh how nice, we can hire a fewer employees that know how to leverage code agents that free them up to think about that what REALLY matters...

The 8 hour work day was quite a victory but since it happened long ago i would really like to see how health and productivity in each occupation declines over time and by task. I expect not just the obvious jobs to have quite absurd numbers and vary a lot from person to person. One might imagine a gradually increasing hourly rate, a decreasing one or a combination of the two. Writing code i could probably do 2x an hour per day. Much respect for those who can do full days. If we imagine there to be roughly 500 defined occupations it seems quite doable to measure how "easy" coding really is.

There’s too many dimensions to make broad claims like this and it always makes me wince a little.

In my career code was the hard part for the first few years. Then I got over the hump and everything else about my job was harder. Today code is the easiest and least interesting part. But I’ve also experienced in 13 years maybe… I’m going to say 2% of the world of professional coding. I bet if tomorrow I was asked to do some kernel optimization or make Postgres better or reverse engineer an emulator for some PLC something something, I would be deep into a land where code is the hard part.