Programming as craft

confirmed for never working a day for someone else

Contrary to popular belief, I do mostly enjoy my work.
And I do feel satisfied and accomplished when I finish a project.

Quit my job last year. Just started programming again and looking at is as a craft has made me such a better programmer. What used to take weeks is now an afternoon. Fuck working for people, I'm just gonna keep freelancing and shit.

Businesses don't want craftsmanship, they want cheap and good enough. And they want it yesterday, by preference. Besides, it's hard to care about craftsmanship when the problem you're working on is inherently uninteresting. The same thing a thousand people at a thousand companies have done a thousand times before, just this time with a different logo on the top. No kid ever writes his first hello world program and then thinks "Sweet! I might get to make some random business' shopping-cart web page when I grow up! Or maybe maintain the Oracle monstrosity that prints payroll checks for some multinational! Cool!"

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Programming as a craft is only fun when you're writing interesting software you're actually passionate about.
Nearly all career codemonkeys will spend their entire career shitting out CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) code to maintain their company's main source of income.

>Here's your database, now write an SQL query to pull out recent orders and display them when the user asks for it.
>now make sure the backend is sanitizing inputs in order to prevent skiddie retards from crashing our website by sending 6GB of garbage data instead of their FIRST NAME
And that's if you're lucky.
You won't ever be rewarded for making the site run better, only for fixing the mistakes other people have made, and adding more user-facing functionality at the expense of making the project an unmaintainable mess.
It doesn't matter anyway, it's the next guy's problem.
And then you are that guy. And you can't simply ask what the previous retard did because he's been fired.

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If you worked as a builder all day you're not gonna come home and build a new house.

this is becoming more and more accepted because for some reason being passionate and good at software engineering is somehow seen as a white male thing. so sjw's (many white males included) deride those who do, and make those who don't feel validated and "equal" to those that do.

the truth is they aren't

Because at the end of the day, programming is nothing more than colorful text on a screen.
Hobbyists are impressed by it simply because they haven't delved deep into the profession.

I program for 8 hours a day on projects with strict deadlines and (((agile))) development cycles. Whenever I program in my spare time I like to use all kinds of different languages and work on projects with no deadlines or commitment. Whenever I feel it is in a reasonable state I put it up on my Github.

It's problematic that so many programmers go home and contribute to open source etc. It's created an industry where such out of hours free labour is expected. Now to get a job not only do you need experience but also a github with contributions so that you can compete against no life turbo nerds. You wouldn't expect this behaviour of any other profession.

literally what the fuck are you saying

Well that depends on the job... Doing CRUD shit or devops crap can be pretty boring work but someone has to do it. If you have to do that all day, you probably won’t feel like looking at code when you get home. On the other hand if you’re developing a new product or building a company with your mates then yeah you have to let your passion consume you and actively refine your craft in order to succeed.

If I was hiring an artist, I would ask to see their portfolio first.
If you don't have a degree, how else are you supposed to prove competency?
There's no such thing as certification for programmers in the traditional sense.

You could just do freelance work and get paid for it...

Open source projects make my dayjob so much easier and pleasant. The stuff I learn from doing open source projects can most of the time be applied in future client work.

In other professional industries you are also judged by what you do in your spare time and especially what you are doing to expand your knowledge.

And you're gonna do that without any evidence that you know how to program?
If you were actually competent you would have some toy projects to point to.
Do you really hate this line of work so much you would never even think of doing it for free, or for fun?

>doing it for free, or for fun?
Programming is a tool and nothing more. I don't sharpen knives for fun, either.

>do it for free
Time is money, if you can get paid for it you should. Also saying that you got paid for it shows that you have business smarts which is worth much more to a potential employer.

I suppose you would lose your shit if you got asked to do a whiteboard question during an in-person interview?
Would you bill them for your time too?

The sheer amount of entitlement is astounding.

>Would you bill them for your time too?
That'd be in the form of next month's paycheck.
>entitlement
Uh hello? These job positions are made for us. Companies need workers more than workers need companies.

>he thinks he's entitled to a job after just one interview
lmao
>Companies need workers more than workers need companies.
If you don't need the company why are you applying to work there then?
Besides, they don't NEED you either.
If you're not cutting it, there's 2000 more applicants thirsty as fuck for that job opening alone, and there's easily 20 more people after you during interview day.

I'm interested in it.

Its very easy to learn a new language and its syntax and its basic functions. However its hard to learn new concepts, techniques, theories.
I could say that programmers learn new things simply by programming, however I've met people with an inability to change.
I've watched tons of videos and presentations on different and newer languages and I didnt feel like I got much out of them, my job requires me to write in language XY&Z so why would I spend what little free time I seem to have to learn AB&C?

The more people apply, the more time the company expects to spend looking for personnel, hence waste money in the process, risking shitty workers.
Me, I can work freelance indefinitely.

A degree doesn't prove competency.

because they have other stuff to do

I don't think about my job outside of work hours because I got other stuff to do like go to the gym, play the piano, plan my house rewire and go hiking

>Why aren't majority of programmers interested in their job as a craft?
They code something that works from what few tests they actually run against it and then become highly opinionated about their own styles and practices. As far as most of them are concerned, they are craftsmen.

>Why do majority of programmers just come into work. Code for 8 hours. And then go home.
They want to get as much done as possible and fail to realize that work never actually ends

>Why don't they learn new practices and techniques?
They do, technically, but only when some new library or something comes out that's said to be the answer to all of their problems. Then they'll fumble around and half-assedly implement it everywhere. When it fails to work properly in production, either the library or someone else will be what gets blamed.

HR doesn't care.
They literally pick and choose people based on what college they went to.

>If you're not cutting it, there's 2000 more applicants thirsty as fuck for that job opening alone, and there's easily 20 more people after you during interview day.
Not sure where you live.
But here, it is hard to get even 1 interview per day. People with actual skills are rare as fuck.

they do? otherwise why would someone with actual job contribute to open source software in his spare time?

Those kind of people work on open source projects or their own hobby.