# I hate bacon, kill me.

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2015/01/01/i-hate-bacon-kill-me/
- Published: 2015-01-01T16:16:08+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

Lately i keep seeing articles like the one [linked here](http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks).
This idea that we developers like to promote, that its all havoc and mess (like 
this article itself is) does two things, perfectly well:

 1. keeps people off this industry as a career option
 2. makes everyone else think we’re simply lucky that the first ones want more out 
    of life.

Number one is simply another form of brogramming while number two is a great risk
to each generation entering this field to have a really crappy life and a really
late retirement.

Its a funny article and i did laugh a lot. At first i thought about translating 
it but then i realized i’d be only sponsoring a state of fact which i really dislike:
greasy bacon. The bacon culture is eating out our craft, and I don’t like it. We
seem to somehow be proud of this. To quote someone I look up to, we’re flying a 
rocket and keep working at the engines and while for teenager adventure spirit this
sounds cool, in reality it is not.

![](https://draganescu.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/af199-1balcwuuxzekgyxnedwpbuq.
jpeg)

Aww, isn’t that cute? BUT IT’S WRONG!!! — Mr. Hollywood [http://9gag.com/gag/a9M4A7K](http://9gag.com/gag/a9M4A7K)

We live in a non critical world. We make project management software, email clients,
check in apps, messengers, shops, friend lists etcetera and we can live with all
these being flaky, down, unresponsive and what not and also we laugh at the funny“
we’re sorry the cat chewed our network plug” PR stunts at the end of a downtime.
But what will happen when the same code and the same programmers will make code 
running the electric grid? Your car? Nuclear power plants? We’re not far from that,
you know.

You’ve heard the crap that exploded at [healthcare.org](http://healthcare.org/) 
and you’ll see even more than that in the next fifty years. So far there is no technological
breakthrough that somehow magically takes care of our stupidity, so therefore we
need to manage it ourselves. What do we do instead? We make fun of how bad our code
is and feel like artists that create snowflakes. Its wrong! We’re artists that create
snow! You and I are part of the gigantic team that currently transforms the planet.
We are driving home the future. With every new feature you learn and use, with every
new tool you open source, with every new product that excels online, we’re building—
carving — our way into the future where the Internet will be that huge abyss of 
everything and we’ll use it to live forever, know everything, cure our diseases 
in 2 hours and have a lifetime of leisure.

You know its possible don’t you? You may think that your work doesn’t matter, that,
like everyone else, a “small cog” in the system is irrelevant. But its wrong! You
are a golden cog in the fanciest and most promising system humanity has built in
the last one million years! You are paid and catered for as if you were a golden
cog right? I mean you must see the difference between you awesome job as a programmer
and the people who, for example, do accounting work and go home after ten hours 
of pushing numbers into tables.

So while you’re being treated like a golden cog you behave — even feel — like a 
tin one. Why? Why would you consent to knowing a zillion tools and not a single 
one at expert level? Why when asked to support your choices you always revert to
personal subjective preference instead of building up a case for what you stand 
for? Why don’t you contribute back? ☺ Why do you actually “save” code that you _know_
to be wrong? Why don’t you ask for code reviews? Why don’t you do code reviews? 
Because you are lazy, you like eating bacon and coding with greasy hands and i hate
looking at your keyboard ☺But its cool, isn’t it? It is, until people’s life will
depend on it.

In the non critical world we can afford bridges held in place by strings we have
no clue about, but if it were a real bridge ran by our web software would you still
hack your solutions knowing your children go trough there every day to school?

I believe not. Actually the truth is that you may not be in a critical industry,
right? Without the free lunch, leisure like system that being a programmer nowadays
means, would you be still be sweating code?

I think we should be mindful when we compare to other lines of work. In general 
we do easy work, while filled with effort — from carpal to back problems and lower
fertility, to the endless hours of mind stress — yet compared to 99% of what’s out
there we are faring way better. So stop whining that programming sucks and get better
at it. Its your job and it should be your pleasure.