Every friend I have who works a job that requires more physical exertion than lifting a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to say something along the lines of: “Dude, you don’t actually work hard. I just spent 4700 hours this week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a spoon.”
They have a point, of course. Mordor sounds terrible, and digging tunnels is definitely more physically demanding than typing on a keyboard, unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of argument, can we all agree that stress and insanity are generally undesirable? Great. Welcome to the world of programming.
Programming Teams: A Breeding Ground for Chaos
Imagine joining a software engineering team. You’re excited, brimming with fresh ideas, probably straight out of university with a head full of elegant, clean designs – models of aesthetic unity, efficiency, and robustness. Your first task is to meet Sarah, the project lead for a critical e-commerce platform migration. Sarah introduces you to Mark, after you navigate through the fifteen security protocols implemented by David, ever since David had his ergonomic keyboard stolen from his desk… Never Forget. Mark exclusively works with legacy COBOL systems, so you wonder why he’s involved in a modern JavaScript project. Don’t worry, Sarah reassures you, Mark is handling the data migration scripts. What data migration scripts? Well, Mark made a compelling case for a complete database overhaul using a system from 1970, arguing it’s “battle-tested”. Of course, these scripts will have to be built without using any modern ORM tools, due to a strict “no ORM” rule enforced by Phil, who isn’t an engineer. Nobody is quite sure what Phil does, but it involves a lot of “synergy” and “alignment,” and he reports directly to upper management, whom the engineers avoid at all costs, so Phil’s rules are law. Meanwhile, Jessica has discovered several “bleeding-edge” front-end frameworks and insisted on incorporating all of them into the platform redesign, so you’ll have to architect around each one as the project progresses, each framework introducing its own unique set of dependencies and compatibility issues. Tom and Harry have been working together for years but are locked in a perpetual battle over tabs versus spaces for code indentation, a conflict so intense it’s become a matter of “whoever coded that module first dictates the style.” This has become such a nightmare for the junior developers trying to maintain consistency, they’ve given up and just format their code with whatever the linter randomly suggests each day. Also, the platform was initially envisioned as a microservices architecture, but nobody on the team actually had experience with microservices, so halfway through development, they just deployed everything as a monolithic application on a single server, but they kept the microservice project structure because “it looks more organized.” Nobody is entirely sure how the application actually functions, but everyone is reasonably confident that critical features are probably working. After these insightful introductions, you’re encouraged to contribute fresh perspectives, but you’re drawing a blank because you were hired as a React front-end specialist and this project seems to be a bizarre Frankensteinian creation.
Would you trust your multi-million dollar e-commerce transactions to this platform? Probably not. If it were a physical product, it would be recalled and everyone involved would be facing serious lawsuits. Yet, some version of this chaotic scenario is behind almost every piece of software you use, from banking apps to social media platforms, including that widely used security protocol that was supposed to safeguard internet communications but had a critical vulnerability for years.
Navigating the Labyrinth of Code: A visual representation of the confusing and often illogical nature of software projects, highlighting the potential for code to become a source of stress and frustration for programmers.
The Myth of “Good Code”
Every programmer, at some point, when the house is quiet, the lights are dim, and maybe with a glass of something strong and some ambient music playing, opens up a specific file on their computer. This file is unique to each programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they stumbled upon it and knew they had to preserve it. They scroll through the lines, and a tear might well up at its elegance, but the tears quickly turn bitter as they remember the thousands of other files and the inevitable decay of everything pure and beautiful in their coding world.
This file embodies “Good Code.” It features clear, consistent naming conventions for functions and variables. It’s concise and efficient. It avoids any obvious logical fallacies. It has never had to endure the harsh realities of production or bend to the whims of a marketing team. It performs one, simple, specific task, and it excels at it. It was crafted by a single author and never touched by another hand. It reads like poetry written by someone who has actually lived a bit.
Every programmer begins their journey by crafting these perfect little snowflakes of code. Then reality hits: they’re told on Friday they need six hundred snowflakes completed by Tuesday. Corners are cut, shortcuts are taken, code is duplicated and tweaked, or they have to collaborate with a coworker whose coding style is… different. Soon, all these individual snowflakes are thrown into a massive, incomprehensible heap, and someone slaps a trendy framework on top to make it look presentable because no one wants to confront the messy, melting chaos underneath. Next week, everyone adds more layers of code to keep the shaky framework from collapsing.
There’s a persistent myth that following coding standards will solve this problem. However, there are more “standards” than there are tasks computers can actually perform, and these standards are constantly being refined and debated based on the personal preferences of developers. As a result, no real-world codebase has ever existed without implementing dozens of identical functionalities in dozens of wildly different ways. The first few weeks at any new programming job are often spent deciphering how a system works, even if you are fluent in every language, framework, and standard involved, because “standards” in practice are more like guidelines, and often, completely ignored.
The Constant Shadow of the Unknown
I grew up with a peculiar closet in my bedroom. At first glance, it seemed normal. But upon entering, you’d discover that the wall on your right opened into a hidden alcove, creating a convenient little shelf. Then, looking up in the alcove, you’d see another opening in the back wall, leading into a dark, inaccessible crawlspace – a void where light couldn’t reach and which your childhood imagination instantly identified as the daytime lair of every monster lurking in your nightmares.
Learning to program is much like this closet. You familiarize yourself with your primary tools, then you explore a bit, and discover new, seemingly helpful tools. But these new tools inevitably reveal deeper layers of complexity and hidden horrors that were always lurking just beyond your grasp.
For example, consider the average web developer. They are proficient in multiple programming languages, numerous helpful libraries, established standards, and communication protocols. Yet, they must learn something new practically every week, and constantly revisit the hundreds of technologies they already know to check for updates, breaking changes, and ensure everything still integrates smoothly. They also need to be vigilant for security vulnerabilities and remember to patch that clever workaround they implemented while slightly intoxicated one weekend. You manage to stay up-to-date, feeling somewhat competent, and then… everything inexplicably breaks.
“WTF?” you mutter, and the debugging process begins. You eventually discover that some developer, somewhere, decided that because another developer, somewhere else, thought 1/0 should equal infinity, they could use “Infinity” as a string literal in their code for simplicity. Then, a more sensible developer correctly determined this was idiotic (as the original developer should have), but instead of simply fixing the code, decided to be subtly malicious and make this an unannounced breaking change in a new compiler version. Now, all your beautifully crafted code is a mess, and you can’t even pinpoint the root cause quickly.
Your extensive expertise in these technologies is precisely what allows you to spend only six hours troubleshooting this obscure issue, instead of losing your job entirely. You’ve now gained another obscure factoid to add to the millions you must keep in your memory, because so many of the systems you rely on are built by a combination of geniuses, idiots, and everything in between.
And this is just within your specific area of expertise, which represents a minuscule fraction of the vast field of computer science. No single person alive fully understands how every component in your five-year-old laptop actually works. Why do tech support guides always tell you to “turn it off and on again?” Because we honestly have no idea what’s wrong with it, and it’s easier to force a system reboot and hope the built-in self-repair mechanisms can sort it out for us. The only reason programmers’ computers seem to malfunction less often than non-programmers’ computers is that programmers understand computers are like temperamental, slightly unstable children with autoimmune disorders, and we’ve learned not to punish them too harshly when they act up.
The Internet: A Special Kind of Chaos
Remember the earlier points about chaotic teams and flawed code? The internet is that, amplified a billion times. Websites that are essentially glorified online catalogs with a few dynamic pages are maintained by entire teams around the clock because the underlying reality is: everything is constantly breaking, everywhere, for everyone. Right now, someone working at a major social media company is likely staring at tens of thousands of error messages, desperately trying to find the critical failure before the entire platform crumbles. There’s probably a team at a major search engine’s headquarters that hasn’t slept properly in days. Somewhere, a database administrator, surrounded by empty energy drink cans, is so engrossed in resolving a critical database corruption issue that their family probably thinks they’ve vanished. And if these people falter, even for a moment, parts of the digital world could grind to a halt. Most people have no idea what systems administrators actually do, but trust me, if every sysadmin in the world decided to take a lunch break simultaneously, society would descend into digital anarchy before they even reached the sandwich shop.
You can’t simply “restart” the internet. Trillions of dollars in global commerce depend on a fragile, interwoven network of unofficial agreements, “good enough for now” code, and comments like “// TODO: FIX THIS HORRIBLE HACK ASAP – VERY DANGEROUS BUT NO TIME TO REFACTOR RIGHT NOW” that were written a decade ago. And this doesn’t even account for the countless individuals and organizations constantly probing, attacking, and exploiting vulnerabilities across the internet for espionage, financial gain, or just for the sheer thrill of disruption. Ever heard of anonymous online groups? They could potentially cripple your business or online presence simply because they decided to target you for an afternoon, and in the grand scheme of internet chaos, such attacks are just minor disturbances in an already turbulent environment.
On the internet, it’s perfectly acceptable to launch something with the disclaimer, “Well, it kind of works sometimes, if you’re using the right browser version, on the right operating system, and haven’t accidentally clicked this specific button sequence,” and BAM! – it’s now an integral part of the internet infrastructure. Anyone with a few hundred dollars and a basic computer can grab a slice of the internet pie, deploy any dreadful piece of hacked-together code they want, and connect it to the vast network, making the whole system incrementally worse. Even experienced programmers often disregard the complex specifications set out by standards organizations, so everyone ends up spending half their time trying to cope with the fact that nothing quite aligns, nothing really makes logical sense, and everything is perpetually on the verge of catastrophic failure. We just try to patch the cracks and hope no one notices the underlying instability.
Here are the unspoken rules of the internet: within five minutes of your first online browsing session, someone in a distant country probably has already harvested your personal data. Did you create an online account? A server at a shadowy intelligence agency now automatically tracks your online activity and possibly your physical location indefinitely. Sent an email? Your email address has likely been added to countless marketing databases and spam lists within seconds.
These aren’t unavoidable realities because we are apathetic or unwilling to prevent them; they are inherent consequences because the entire system is fundamentally flawed, built on layers of imperfect code, and everyone is just frantically trying to keep it operational. That’s your daily reality if you work with internet-connected systems: hoping the last piece of code you deployed is robust enough to survive for a few hours so you can grab a meal and maybe a short nap.
We Were Not Born Crazy, Programming Makes Us Crazy
ERROR: Attempted to parse HTML with regular expression; system returned Cthulhu.Funny, right? No? How about this cryptic exchange:
“Is that function called arrayReverse?”
“s/camel/_/”
“Cool, thanks.”
Did that seem like a helpful and perfectly normal response? No? Good. There might still be hope for you. You haven’t yet spent so much of your life immersed in code that you’ve started communicating in code syntax. The human brain isn’t naturally adept at complex logic, and programming is essentially a career dedicated to performing incredibly intricate logic operations all day, every day. You have to sift through vast, interconnected chains of abstract conditions and requirements to identify errors as subtle as a missing semicolon. Doing this constantly can leave you in a state of mild aphasia, where you look at someone speaking to you and you don’t register they’ve finished their sentence because there’s no terminating symbol like a semicolon. You become deeply entrenched in a world devoid of inherent meaning, where the only thing that matters is that a specific sequence of numbers entered a labyrinth of symbols and a different sequence of numbers, or perhaps a picture of a cat, emerged at the other end.
The potentially damaging impact on the human mind is reflected in the programming languages humans create. Consider this program:
#include <iostream>
int main( int argc, char** argv ) {
std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl;
}That program achieves precisely the same outcome as this program:
`r```````````.H.e.l.l.o. .w.o.r.l.diAnd this program:
>+++++++++[-]<.>+++++++[-]++++++++[-<.>+++++++++++[-]++++++++[-
]<-.><-.>>++++++++++.[-]<<<<<<<<<.>+++++++[->+++++++<-]>+.>++++++++++[->++++++++++<-]>+.<+++++++++++++++[->+++++++++++++++<-]>++.>++++++++++++++[->++++++++++++++<-]>+.[-]>+++++++++++++++.And even this one:
Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook? Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook. Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook! Ook? Ook! Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook. Ook! Ook.And once, someone even created a programming language that allowed someone else to write this:
#:: ::-| ::-| .-. :||-:: 0-| .-| ::||-| .:|-. :||
open(Q,$0);while(<q>){if(/^#(.*)$/){for(split('-',$1)){$q=0;for(split){s/| /:.:/xg;s/:/../g;$Q=$_?length:$_;$q+=$q?$Q:$Q*20;}print chr($q);}}}print"n";
#.: ::||-| .||-| :|||-| ::||-| ||-:: :|||-| .:|
</q>According to its author, that 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.”
That program actually won a coding contest, because, of course, it did. Do you really want to exist in a world like this? Probably not. This is a world where smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is considered almost normal. “Of course, he smokes a pack a day, who wouldn’t?” Eventually, every programmer wakes up and before they’re fully conscious, they perceive their entire world and every relationship within it as interconnected blocks of code. They share anecdotes about these experiences as if sleep deprivation triggering hallucinatory coding visions is a perfectly ordinary occurrence. This is a profession where individuals might forgo personal relationships to dedicate themselves to creating a programming language specifically designed for orangutans. Programmers are constantly pushing their brains to perform tasks they were never biologically designed for, in environments they can never fully optimize, for ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and each one is slowly, inexorably, losing their grip on sanity.
So no, I may not be required to lift fifty-pound objects as part of my job description. But I traded that physical demand for the privilege of meticulously trimming Satan’s pubic hair while he dines out of my cranium, all so that a few small parts of the internet will continue functioning for a few more hours.
