![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackHow much time do you spend living outside your comfort zone? Some jobs, you basically have to do what you've done before. If you're building a house, there's an amount of creative work, but also, you have to put more and more bricks on top of each other, and once you've decided where they're going to go, you need a level of skill (which you may have greater or lesser) but to some extent you have to do what you've done before, but more so.
Whereas with, say, maths research, or writing non-formulaic fiction, you are doing to a high extent stuff you've NOT done before. There are many higher-level organisations that are the same (you investigate new maths the new way with the same set of skills whatever it is), but you are constantly doing new stuff.
Programming falls somewhere in the middle. Note, I'm not making a value judgement about which end is better. But inherently, with programming, in some sense, if it's been done before, it's DONE. Not as much as maths, where you can just quote it, but you can often reuse it, or if you've done it before, you can probably hammer it out again in boilerplate code in not very long. Whereas when you're figuring out how to do something you've not done before, figuring out how it all works takes a long time.
But that means, for some tasks you already know how to do, you do very quickly, and for some, you have to learn as you go, you'll spend much more time on the latter (because if you get all sorts of tasks, it's the latter that will take longer to complete). So you will ALWAYS feel like you're constantly managing stuff you're not quite on top of.
Whereas with, say, maths research, or writing non-formulaic fiction, you are doing to a high extent stuff you've NOT done before. There are many higher-level organisations that are the same (you investigate new maths the new way with the same set of skills whatever it is), but you are constantly doing new stuff.
Programming falls somewhere in the middle. Note, I'm not making a value judgement about which end is better. But inherently, with programming, in some sense, if it's been done before, it's DONE. Not as much as maths, where you can just quote it, but you can often reuse it, or if you've done it before, you can probably hammer it out again in boilerplate code in not very long. Whereas when you're figuring out how to do something you've not done before, figuring out how it all works takes a long time.
But that means, for some tasks you already know how to do, you do very quickly, and for some, you have to learn as you go, you'll spend much more time on the latter (because if you get all sorts of tasks, it's the latter that will take longer to complete). So you will ALWAYS feel like you're constantly managing stuff you're not quite on top of.