http://briancarper.net/tag/126/workSome guy's blog about programming and Linux and cows.http://briancarper.net/blog/workhttp://briancarper.net/blog/workThu, 05 Jun 2008 20:32:39 -0700<p>When I was in college, one of the guys in one of my classes was an older fellow who'd been working in the Real World for a while, and he asked me one day what kind of job I wanted after I graduated. I remember saying "I have no idea. Pretty much anything. If Microsoft drove up to my house with a truck full of money, I'd go work for them."</p> <p>Looking back now, I was wrong. There really are more important things than money. I couldn't do a job I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Not for long anyways. I don't make as much money doing what I'm doing right now as I could be making elsewhere, but I like it. I like the atmosphere of working in a research setting. I can't imagine working in a corporate setting.</p> <p>I feel really bad for people who work jobs that they hate. When I got out of college I worked for six months doing tech support over the phone for a residential satellite dish company. If not for the fact that I needed money to survive, I wouldn't have. Near the end I was considering going to live under a bridge somewhere. If faced with the choice, I'd probably rather dig ditches for a living than do that again.</p> <p>If hell existed, for me hell would consist of being eternally bored. I've had jobs that required no thought, just mindless repetition of tasks that were slightly too complicated to get a computer or machine to do. I can't imagine a worse fate. I can feel my brains start to leak out of my ears after an hour of a boring task.</p> <p>When you have a job where you have to play with data, as I do at times, it can sometimes start turning into that kind of boredom. But then I start writing programs to do all the mindless repetition for me. Instead of spending lots of time solving little problems and doing little tasks, I solve bigger, harder, much more interesting problems that incidentally solve lots of little problems at the same time.</p> <p>Computers are useful tools for everyone. But in one sense, a computer is often a waste in the hands of anyone but a programmer. The way most people use computers is like using a powerful microscope as a hammer to pound in a nail. Any time you find yourself copying and pasting a bunch of things over and over for an hour, there's something wrong. Any time a human being is forced to do a linear search through a long list of ANYTHING on a computer screen, someone along the line has failed. There are so many of these little problems in most people's lives that a programmer can solve for people.</p>