Thank you to everyone who weighed in about the most frustrating part of software development in yesterday's discussion.
Let's flip the script, what's the best part about this work?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Latest comments (40)
The things that always jump out to me:
It's all the creative and technical satisfaction of engineering, but without many of the constraints of engineering in the physical world. It's hard to "refactor" a bridge after you build it or change the logic of a digital circuit once it's been etched into silicon. Software development is engineering and building and problem solving with a fluidity not found in most other engineering domains. We actually can (not that we always should) tear it down and start over or pull out a load bearing column(ar data store) just to see what happens and put it back together again just as easily.
It's truly a cross-domain/cross-industry career. While the fundamentals of software development remain fairly consistent or at least move slowly, we can pick up our skills and move to new industries on a whim. In the 20 years-ish I've been doing this, I've had the privilege of working on everything from Martian rovers and cloud computing infrastructure to cybersecurity tools and video games. It's amazing to be able to gain so much breadth of knowledge in so many areas.
That sense of accomplishment when it actually works like you designed it to. 20 years later and that's still one of the things that keeps me going. The "ah-ha!" moment of figuring out a complex bug or the satisfaction of stepping back from the keyboard and watching the complex virtual machinery do exactly what it's supposed to. It never gets old for me.
That feeling when someone uses your software and both enjoy the experience and saves them time and energy, every time.
I love seeing how the results of my work change people's lives for the better. How they save energy, time, and help with difficult and boring tasks.
From my perspective, best part of being a software developer is that, you never get bored, you never give up and you never stop learning in order to survive in the Industry. Coding to me is like a playing games.
what
If you truly want it, you can work from everywhere in the world that you like. Of course unless you go and work for a (stupid) company that insists on you showing up there every day from 8 to 5.
I think it is seeing things work from start to its best current condition, where you witness how it grow and also learning from the mistakes.
You can be lazy full time.
I get to read posts with cute dogs and learn from people more experienced than me.
The best thing is that you are offering really valuable solutions to problems that people have and you have the opportunity (time and budgets permitting) to decide how to solve it and offer not just a solution but something that solves the problem by offering more value, choice, convenience, etc.
Maybe not the best part, but a very cool part, I don't know how many other careers share this, but as a developer nowadays you can work almost everywhere from anywhere because of the combination of being able to work remotely and the high demand, so to be able to change your life on that level I think is noteworthy.
Uh free beer? In all seriousness, its probably that its a high demand job where employers will pay well enough with good benefits. Being part of something which is highly relevant in everyone's day to day (software in general) is also quite satisfying.
Creating something from nothing.
To help humanity
100%
For me, the best part of being a software developer is the fact that you have genius pieces of machinery at your mercy which you can talk to and command in order to improve, enrich, and empower the lives of people around you. That is what I love the most about being into software development.
For me it's the ability to create something. I.e. you can craft your own tools to use: browser extensions, programms, ad hoc scripts, etc. That's amazing! :)
yes exactly