What is it like to be a Programmer?

Programmer, as the word defines is someone who programs, who creates solutions to the problems at hand.

Lets go a little dipper into this, what exactly are the problems. Are the problems first of its kind OR its just imitation of another problem solved already by someone at some other corner of the globe(possibly even in your own city). Later being the case, you are not creating any new solution rather re-programming the already programmed solution, provided you discover a better solution for it. But, in most of the cases, it is quite possible that the existing solution itself is even better than the solution you are working on. Do you really think, the work you are doing in that case is programming. Come on, its not even re-programming, since you are not even finding a better way to do it.

Thinking on this particular topic, my attention automatically gets dragged towards the words of dean of electronics engineering at my university. Lets have a brief overview of that incident as well. Being a student of electronics, we were supposed to dedicate more of our time into that but some of us were more keen towards computer. Justifying electronics over computer, electronics dean came with a point which more or less said that software programming is nothing but copy and paste. At that time, we took it as just one of those accusation you get from your professors which you get used to in the course of 4 years. But now, after spending almost 5 years in IT, those lines really seem to be relevant as more than 90% of IT professionals are into this copy and paste task.

Most of us in IT domain, concentrate more on satisfying clients at the earliest, keeping aside innovation. This will definitely achieve short term goals for us but for a while think about long term. What new you achieved with that on a given day, which can make life easier or smoother than before. The answer is NULL(as we say), i.e. nothing. If your answer is any-thing different, you are one among few of those, lucky enough to get into those kinds of work, which can be considered as programming in real sense.

The bottom-line is unless you design something unique or at least better than earlier works, the job you are doing is more like that of a clerk than of a programmer.