Why you shouldn't be a developer

So, I just got through telling you to learn how to write a bit of code. Maybe you tried it out and thought, hey, this is easy! Developing is easy money!

Stop. Just... Stop.

Coding, like cooking, is easy to do when you're not doing much. Anyone can boil an egg, or slap together a cake from a mix. A developer worth his or her salt isn't doing that.

Coding is more than knowing python or C or Java. It's a way of thinking. You have to be able to break things down into their component parts. It's being able to put parts back together again in ways that still make sense.

The best developers I know may prefer one language, but if you held a gun to their head, they could pull a few more out of their hat. If you handed them a language they'd never seen before, most could get up to speed fairly quickly if they needed to. We have our favorites, but the dark truth of the good developers is that if you needed them to program in their most hated language... they probably could. Hell, they see career development as being able to take languages OFF their roster, and still land good jobs.

Back in the dot com heyday, I was in the 'make it or break it' course for computer science: Data Structures. It was required by all students, and was a requirement for all classes after it. You didn't pass it, well, there was always Communications... I made the acquaintance of a guy who was struggling. Badly. He didn't understand object oriented design, or design patterns, or reuse. He could write C++, but he couldn't think in it. All semester I babied him in exchange for free food and sodas, and somehow, by some miracle, he passed. He memorized all the procedures and right answers and, in Rainman style, spit them back out at test time.

The prof saw how much he struggled, and on the last day, pulled him aside.

"Why do you want to do programming?"

"Um... money?"

"Fair enough." He lowered his glasses and gave him that look they teach you in professoring school: the kind that bores through your skull.

"I hope you like Ramen."

He switched to communications.