zlacker

>most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways

Not commenting on other points, but may be you are looking at it from an angle of an expert who has mastered it, so everything looks trivial. As, clearly its much more than that. It is like building extension for machines - the brains and the controls and also pure information management. That's why projects run into millions of lines of code. And the complexity is still growing, as we have new fields like ML emerging on top of it.

>>aws_ls+(OP)
Seriously. I regret that I only have one upvote to give. Things that we here take for granted are nigh impossible, or look like magic to 90% of the population. Even among the subset of people that are employed as software engineers, it can be sobering to realize how many of them struggle and flail at "just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways."

>>megama+T
It’s not that this stuff isn’t challenging. It’s that it’s not particularly more challenging than abstract statistics or organic chemistry or tax accounting, fields where you see lots of women.

>>aws_ls+(OP)
I think one important thing that is easily overlooked is that while the technical part of wiring form fields to databases is something a lot of people do (and can trivialise), all of the processes behind it - what to put in, and where it fits in with the domain of the application and company, is probably the harder part. If that makes any sense.

Technical implementation details vs the big picture / domain.

>>aws_ls+(OP)
I agree with tptacek here. Based on just my experience (contractor then corporate programmer for the last decade), probably 99% of programming work out there in the world is mechanical rote that just involves reading comprehension and the ability to mechanically execute steps in some order. Calling this type of work complex only means someone fucked up somewhere.

Certainly there are specializations that are pushing the edge of research, but we are talking about an industry here, not the few research-y jobs that still exist.

>>weeelv+c6
15 years in I have built systems from scratch and done menial janitor work. I don't think its fair to say that that it isn't complex, some shitty work can be really complex due to subtleties and it would take someone with a fair bit of experience to fix. If it was so easy there wouldn't be a shortage of tech workers and our wages would be way lower.

>>rayine+u5
Yeah, I'm not sure why we have to take the approach of crapping on one or the other. I happen to think things like construction are probably pretty complicated too.

>>weeelv+c6
I always find it interesting that game programmers have to be so much more technically skilled (well, until the age of game engine middle-ware) than full-stack CRUD jockeys, and yet are compensated much worse.

Science is fucking hard, and biology is fucking complicated. Trying to make this transition now, and ermahgerd I thought I dealt with complex system. Not!

>>megama+T
Well, I certainly hope so.

>>collyw+ea
Im not saying this type of work cant be complex (again, usually because “someone fucked up somewhere”), but it certainly doesn’t have to be.

>>Jabavu+sj
Agree 100%, although the same could be said of UI developers back before “middleware” (browsers, decent ui frameworks, etc). That shit was hard and required geometry and matrices. Occasionally your CSS guru today will touch on that stuff (that is the 1%), but with thousands of libraries or working implementations at their disposal. I think this will happen eventually in all specializations - you will eventually have your “ML devs” that invoke a library to recognize a hotdog in an image etc.