I hate these broad sweeping titles on HN. Speak for yourself.<p>I love my job, I work from home in an amazing home office I designed. I filled it with plants, little bonzai trees, art on the wall, inderect lighting for the evenings, and all the best work equipment money can buy. My environment is pretty much an extension of me.<p>I have awesome clients that invite me out for events, I go to programming conferences and have a great time, I can buy pretty much anything I need to (not a rolls royce, or anything that expensive, but anything I realistically need is mine.)<p>and it even sounds cool. I tell people what I do and they're really interested.<p>I can travel whenever, wherever - as long as they have internet and I can bring my laptop.<p>And if you aren't known... then make yourself known. No brainer. It's tricky but not that bad to build a small network, just interact with the people you look up to in your career on twitter, go to events and network, build something that a lot of people use and love. If you love your job you may have quite a lot of failures building this 'thing' but eventually you'll hit on one that people really love.<p>Lastly but not least, its FUN. FUN FUN FUN. I wake up some days at 8am, eager to make some french press coffee, heat up a danish in the microwave and just look at some code. It's really probably the best job in the world I think.<p>Disclosure: I am not a corporate programmer -- I would imagine in that exact scenario you are treated less than you are really worth, so I'm not trying to downplay the frustration I'm sure many of you guys face. I'm talking from my point of view that the statement "programming isnt glamorous" is just silly.
Most lawyers don't fight exciting cases that expose a complex web of deceit.<p>Most police don't get into firefights with mastermind serial killers.<p>The families of martial arts masters have a homocide-by-mobsters rate that is in line with the general population.<p>Aliens do not invade very often.<p>None of these facts make for good entertainment.
Being a doctor is also super glamarous. You lead a team of extremely attractive individuals and identify diseases that are as rare as a narwhal.<p>Who the hell ever cared about how TV portrays a job anyways?
I get to work with highly intelligent people, doing work that impacts tens or hundreds of thousands of people.<p>My day-to-day involves taking the most powerful and complex invention in history, and bending it to my will in ever more elegant and sophisticated ways.<p>For my efforts I'm paid X times the average US wage and receive regular kudos from strangers on Twitter and blogs.<p>My friends and family assume I must be a genius to be able to do what I do. On my best, most satisfying days, I'm not so sure they're wrong.<p>I'm just an ordinary programmer at an ordinary startup, but from where I sit this job is amazingly glamorous.
I'm not so sure that public percepiton is different. Loads of people I know still think that because I'm a programmer I must be an expert in fixing printers, or formatting spreadsheets.
As someone who worked more than a dozen jobs that no movie has ever depicted as glamorous before becoming a professional programmer, I can say the pay, benefits, relative career security are amazing.<p>Not to mention, the feeling I get from solving problems and creating things others (and myself) find useful (and fun) for a living.<p>Quit programming for a month and work as a menial worker. See how you feel. I dare you.
Is this just another form of the lament of geek culture going mainstream? Because the idea that software engineering could or should be represented realistically in media is completely ridiculous. Of course they over-glamorize it because that's what media does. Point me to a profession that is not glamorized, villified or otherwise sensationalized by television and I'll show you a really boring job.<p>So no, programming is not glamorous, but it's a damn good job (at the right companies) if you can get it.
"Most of us are indie programmers"<p>I would think most career programmers work for corporate entities, but neither I nor the author have any statistical evidence presented.
Stop worrying so much about how other people perceive you and your profession. Anyone worth talking to is going to realize that what they see depicted in a Hollywood film and B(or C)-level shows on Bravo is probably not representative of the vast majority of real experiences in the field.<p>I say stop worrying, not because I simply don't care, but because no matter what we're needed now and will continue to be needed in the future. If public perception sways a bit and begins to define us as 'lazy slacker partiers', then we should just get back to the keyboard and create something. It's just a function of society trying to come to terms with something that many of them don't have the slightest clue about. We all try to categorize the new and unknown using simplistic stereotypes. It's part of how we build mental models of how the world works.<p>With time, people will begin to understand more realistically what we do. Until then, let's just enjoy our relatively high job security, satisfaction and compensation while continuing to push technology forward.
Well, so is being a lawyer or a doctor. Those jobs aren't what TV series and movies would have us believe either.<p>Most lawyers don't try high-profile murder cases. Most doctors don't save countless lives during their day-to-day work.<p>Even the most glamourous job of all - being a rock star - isn't really all that glamourous if you take a closer look at it. Those rock stars who ultimately love what they do and hence take their work seriously have to work very hard and be very disciplined to make it.<p>Same thing applies to programmers. Sure, most programming jobs are in a corporate environment and working in such an environment can suck quite a bit. However, the more your work sucks the more potential there is for actually changing something for the better, even more so if you're a programmer. Programmers can create wonderful designs and feats of engineering with little more than a bright mind and a computer.
My girlfriend worked in crime scene investigation. I think they probably have it way worse than programmers when it comes to public perception of the job based on shows and movies.
I agree that glamorizing programming is not particularly helpful, except that coder-entrepreneurs can get more attention from venture capital. Glamorizing programming, along with the app-stores, is pushing the independent programming business into a "blockbuster" mentality, a winner-take-all situation where a small number of practitioners do very well and most don't ever make their development money back. Thanks, Steve Jobs!
Could be worse. Could be an artist and therefore free to starve to death in a garret any where in the world, so that your agent can become rich when you're dead. Or as others have said, pick your profession. To paraphrase C&W, "What's glamour got to do with it?"
"Why a career in computer programming sucks"
<a href="http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html</a>
Most jobs are not glamorous in and of themselves, but can be glamorous for what you do with them. Programming is no different: it's the project, not the job, that makes the glamour.