Programming is a craft

Good answers to a Quora question: Are Google software engineers really doing anything extraordinary day-to-day than simply coding/fixing some quite trivial software stuff?

One of them deserves to be read. By a Google engineer:

"The joke at Google is, “Other engineers are working on things that are going to change the world, but I’m just sitting here moving protocol buffers around.”

Then you open up the Deep Mind code and take a look at it, and it’s just method after method that’s full of code that’s just moving protocol buffers around.

It turns out that the most extraordinary code is really ordinary if you look at it closely enough. Not just at Google. Look at the code that Richard Stallmann wrote for GNU bash, like the glob processor. Was that extraordinary? Absolutely. It’s also just awful, tedious code, frustrating to write and boring to read.

It goes the other way, too. I’m working on a project that I’m finding really exciting and interesting, and anyone I describe it to quickly changes the subject and walks away so that they won’t be bored into insensibility. But I’m close enough to it that I’m finding it fascinating. There are so many ways for it to go wrong! And I have to find and fix them all!"