A semi-satiricle note about professional programming.

When your time becomes limited in life, for instance, when you are no longer a child (maybe still a manchild) or student, it becomes a lot harder to be the type of programmer that companies want. Putting in long hours, designing complex systems, leading a team of developers - I constantly wonder how much this is actually worth to me. In fact, I am actively looking to reduce my responsibilities under someone else so much that I am willing to reduce my lifestyle to the point where I only have money for food and health. Entertainment? I will look at the sky, read the news or tell myself jokes.

It's much nicer to be a Professional Bugfixer and spend your entire day hunting down bugs and creating concise, non-obtrusive fixes for them. I'm talking about really sexy fixes that look like you're doing absolutely nothing when you put up a +7/-250 pull-request. +6000/0'ers shake their heads or fume when they see it, but then they quickly get back to their extremely valuable features and refactors.

But I want to design really cool picoservices that sync up all their logs (with analytics and weather prediction backed by AI technology) and uses AWS's Cobgobbler service!

OK, you can do that. Have fun doing it for Them till ya rot! It will be really cool when everything works so well then everyone is cheering your name and throwing roses at you. Too bad your back will be so crooked up by 45 years of age that you will look like you fell off a chairlift in Aspen at the company retreat (no one called 911 cause they were too drunk to dial).

I will be listening to podcasts and hunting buggies, receiving a small dopamine hit every time I squash one and put up a pull-request. "That guy is really keeping the project afloat", they'll say.

"He's the only one who never broke prod...how does he do it?". They will never know the best kept secret...just add if-statements.