We’ve all heard the tech evangelists touting the lucrative and intellectually stimulating world of coding. Friends in physically demanding jobs might scoff at our laptop-based professions, joking about their “real work” in comparison to our keyboard tapping. They might quip, “Bro, you don’t work hard until you’ve pulled a 4700-hour week excavating a tunnel with a teaspoon.” And yes, while digging tunnels under fictional hellscapes sounds physically grueling, let’s agree that mental anguish and a slow descent into madness aren’t exactly perks either. Welcome to the world of programming, where the challenges are less about muscle strain and more about mind-bending complexity and existential dread.
Built by the Bananas: The Reality of Programming Teams
Imagine you’re a fresh-faced engineer, brimming with textbook knowledge and visions of elegant, efficient designs. You land a gig on a major infrastructure project, say, a bridge. Excited, you meet the team. First, Mary, the project lead, seems competent enough. Then you’re introduced to Fred, who’s in charge of… wooden walkways? On a highway bridge? Apparently, Fred made a compelling argument for pedestrian paths, aesthetics trumping practicality. Then there’s Dave, the security fanatic, whose paranoia stems from a stolen sweater. And Phil from upper management, whose role is nebulous but powerful, enforcing bizarre rules like “no railings” on Fred’s walkways. Sara is pushing experimental paving techniques, each with unique structural implications, adding layers of unforeseen complexity. Finally, Tom and Harry are locked in a perpetual battle between metric and imperial units, a war waged across the bridge’s blueprints, leaving the construction crew to improvise with whatever fits (or can be hammered into place). Oh, and the suspension bridge design? Turns out, nobody actually knew how to build one, so halfway through, they just bolted on extra support columns, leaving the suspension cables dangling like vestigial organs.
Would you confidently drive across this bridge? Probably not. In any sane world, this project would be shut down, and heads would roll. Yet, a chaotic symphony of similar dynamics is the invisible hand behind almost every piece of software you use. From your banking app to your favorite website, and even that security software that was supposed to, you know, secure things – all born from similar, slightly unhinged processes.
The Myth of “Good Code”: A Programmer’s Dark Secret
Every programmer has a sacred file. Late at night, lights dimmed, perhaps with a glass of something strong and melancholic electronica playing softly, they open it. It’s a different file for everyone. Some wrote it, some stumbled upon it, recognizing its inherent perfection. They read the lines, a tear tracing a path through the dust on their cheek, marveling at its elegance. Then the bitterness creeps in, remembering the vast, sprawling mess of other files, the inevitable decay of all coding ideals.
This is Good Code. Variables and functions named with clarity and purpose. Concise, efficient, and blessedly free of obvious idiocy. It’s code untouched by the chaos of real-world demands, untainted by sales targets or marketing whims. It performs one specific, mundane task, and it executes it flawlessly. Written by a single, focused mind, never defiled by committee. It reads like poetry penned by a seasoned soul.
Every programmer starts with aspirations of crafting such pristine snowflakes. Then reality hits. “Six hundred snowflakes by Tuesday!” the project manager barks. Corners are cut. Code is copied, pasted, and Frankenstein-ed together. Coworkers, each with their own coding style (and quirks), contribute, melting and reshaping the delicate snowflakes into amorphous blobs. The beautiful, individual creations are lost in a blizzard of compromises and hacks. Someone slaps a fancy framework on top – a digital Picasso – to distract from the underlying chaos of melting, urine-soaked snow. And next week? More snow, more layers of complexity, just to keep the Picasso from toppling over.
There’s the mythical cure: “standards!” But there are more “standards” in programming than there are actual lines of working code. And each standard is lovingly (or hatefully) tweaked and interpreted by individual programmers, ensuring no two codebases ever implement the same thing in remotely the same way. Your first few weeks at any new coding job are a crash course in deciphering the unique dialect of crazy that is this particular project, regardless of your fluency in languages, frameworks, and those unicorn “standards.”
The Ever-Expanding Abyss of Knowledge: Welcome to the Darkness
Imagine a childhood bedroom with a seemingly normal closet. You step inside, only to discover an alcove, a hidden shelf. Then, peering upwards, you find another opening, a crawlspace leading into absolute, lightless nothingness. In your childhood imagination, this was the daytime lair of monsters held at bay only by your nightlight and stuffed animal army.
Learning to program is a similar descent. You master the basics, feeling confident with your tools. Then you glimpse the alcove, the vast landscape of libraries and frameworks. And beyond that, the crawlspace – the endless, terrifying depth of computer science, the constant updates, the legacy systems, the bugs lurking in the dark corners of code written decades ago.
Take the average web developer. Fluent in a dozen languages, armed with countless libraries, standards, and protocols. Yet, they must learn something new every week just to keep pace. They must constantly revisit their existing knowledge, checking for updates, patches, vulnerabilities, ensuring everything still plays nicely together, and praying that some “fix” hasn’t inadvertently broken something else they relied on. They stay current, feel momentarily in control, and then… everything implodes.
“WTF?” is the programmer’s universal cry. The hunt for the culprit begins. Perhaps it’s the legacy code, or a dependency update gone rogue. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because some long-forgotten “genius” decided that since some other “genius” thought 1/0 should equal infinity, they’d use that as shorthand for “Infinity” throughout their codebase. Then, a non-idiot, rightfully horrified, decided to make this an error in their new compiler. But, being a special kind of jerk, they didn’t bother to announce this breaking change. Now, your perfectly crafted code is spewing errors, and you’re lost in a sea of digital urine, frantically searching for the metaphorical cat.
Your expertise, painstakingly acquired, saves the day. Instead of losing your job, you only lose six hours of sleep debugging this absurdity. Another obscure fact crammed into the millions you must memorize, all because the digital world is built on the whims of “geniuses,” idiots, and dicks.
And this is just within your chosen niche, a tiny speck in the vast ocean of computer science. No single human understands how every component of your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to “turn it off and on again?” Because we are genuinely clueless about the root cause, and rebooting is a desperate attempt to induce a digital coma, hoping the computer’s internal self-repair mechanisms can sort it out for us. The only reason programmers’ computers seem to function better is that we understand they are temperamental, unpredictable entities, and we’ve learned to coax them, not beat them, when they misbehave.
The Internet: A Special Kind of Hellscape
Remember the crazy teams and bad code? The internet is that, amplified a billion times. Websites that are essentially glorified online shopping carts, with maybe a handful of dynamic pages, are maintained by entire teams, around the clock. The truth is, everything is perpetually on the verge of collapse, everywhere, for everyone. Right now, as you read this, someone at Facebook is drowning in error messages, desperately trying to avert a global social media meltdown. A team at Google hasn’t slept in days, chasing a critical system failure. Somewhere, a database administrator, fueled by lukewarm Mountain Dew and sheer willpower, is single-handedly holding back the digital apocalypse, while her family mistakenly believes she’s joined the witness protection program. If these unsung heroes falter, the digital world as we know it crumbles.
Most people have no idea what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all simultaneously decided to take a lunch break, society would devolve into Mad Max levels of chaos before they could even order a sandwich.
You can’t simply “restart” the internet. Trillions of dollars, global communication, and essential services hinge on a precarious web of unofficial agreements, duct-tape solutions, and “good enough for now” code, riddled with comments like “TODO: FIX THIS TERRIBLE HACK – SERIOUSLY DANGEROUS – BUT NO IDEA HOW” written a decade ago. And that’s before we even consider the armies of hackers, nation-state actors, and bored teenagers constantly probing and attacking every corner of the digital realm. Ever heard of 4chan? A collective of internet chaos agents capable of derailing your life and business on a whim, and they’re just a minor blip on the radar compared to the larger systemic vulnerabilities.
On the internet, the bar for entry is astonishingly low. “You know, this kind of works some of the time if you’re using the right technology,” is often enough to launch a new “feature” that becomes an integral part of the digital infrastructure. Anyone with a few hundred dollars and a rudimentary understanding of code can stake their claim in this digital wild west, adding their own poorly written, insecure patch to the already crumbling edifice. Even the “good” coders often ignore the labyrinthine specifications of official standards bodies, leading to a constant state of interoperability nightmares. We spend half our time battling inconsistencies, deciphering illogical systems, and praying nothing spontaneously combusts, all while frantically patching the cracks and hoping nobody notices the digital house of cards we’ve built.
The secret, unspoken rules of the internet? Within five minutes of opening a web browser for the first time, a kid in Minsk probably has your social security number. Sign up for anything online? The NSA now tracks your grocery shopping habits for the rest of your natural life. Send an email? Your address is instantly added to a spammer’s mailing list in Lagos.
These aren’t conspiracy theories. They aren’t the result of apathy or negligence. They are the inevitable consequences of a system built on shaky foundations, held together by “good enough” code, and perpetually on the brink of collapse. If you work with the internet, your job is a constant tightrope walk: hoping your latest code patch holds up for a few hours so you can grab dinner and maybe, just maybe, steal a few hours of sleep before the next digital firestorm erupts.
Driven to the Brink: The Mental Toll of Coding
Funny, right? No? How about this programmer exchange:
“Is that function called arrayReverse?”
“s/camel/_/”
“Cool, thanks.”
Helpful, wasn’t he? The camel? Does that seem like a perfectly normal, logical response? No? Good. There’s still hope for you. You haven’t yet spent so much time immersed in code that you’ve begun to speak in code. The human brain isn’t naturally wired for complex logic puzzles, yet coding demands precisely that, all day, every day. You navigate vast, intricate webs of abstract conditions, hunting for missing semicolons and off-by-one errors. This constant mental contortion leaves you in a state of mild aphasia, staring blankly at people as they speak, your brain subconsciously parsing their sentences for syntax errors and missing logical terminators. You become fluent in a world of pure, distilled meaninglessness, where the only thing that matters is whether a series of numbers fed into a labyrinth of symbols produces the correct series of numbers, or, perhaps, a picture of a kitten.
The brain-altering effects of this profession are evident in the very languages programmers create. Behold, a program:
++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>+++++++.>++.+++++++..+++.>+++++++.++++++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++++++++.>++++++++++.This cryptic incantation does the exact same thing as this program:
print("Hello World!")And this program:
console.log("Hello World!");And this one:
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}And then there’s the legendary example of programmerly madness:
push(@{$_[0]}, pack('C*', map { ord } split //, $_[1])) for(pop,pop);According to the author, this program is “two lines of code that parse two lines of embedded comments in the code to read the Mayan numbers representing the individual ASCII characters that make up the magazine title, rendered in 90-degree rotated ASCII art.” It won a programming contest, because of course it did.
Do you want to live in a world like this? No. This is a world where chain-smoking is considered not just acceptable, but practically a job requirement. “Of course he smokes a pack a day, wouldn’t you?” Eventually, every programmer has that moment: waking up, still half-asleep, and perceiving the entire world, every relationship, every interaction, as chunks of code. They swap stories about these sleep-deprived, acid-trip-esque hallucinations as if they were normal, everyday occurrences. This is a world where people willingly sacrifice sleep, social lives, and even sex to design a new programming language for orangutans. Programmers are forcing their brains to perform unnatural acts, in a situation they can never truly “fix,” for ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week. And every single one of them is, in their own way, slowly going mad.
So, no, I might not be required to lift fifty-pound boxes. But I traded that physical strain for the “privilege” of trimming Satan’s pubic hair with dull scissors while he dines out of my open skull, all so a few bits of the internet will keep sputtering along for a few more hours. Is it worth it? Maybe. But let’s not pretend a career in coding is all sunshine and rainbows; sometimes, it just plain sucks.
This post was inspired by the original article from Still Drinking by Peter Welch.
