> I think I understand the intuition behind that... in other words... coding an os kernel seems to have less entropy, less degrees-of-freedom, less subjectivity ... than frontend programming like painting GUI pixels and Javascript-framework-of-the-month.
I don't think that's the right takeaway. A decade ago I worked as an SAP consultant, and did some payroll projects in it. The display part of it was easy. All they wanted was a great big table display, the moral equivalent of a read-only Excel spreadsheet. No faffing about with CSS or Javascript or whatever.
No, the real complexity was the freaking business logic. Office workers, executives, contractors all had different rules for how their pay was calculated, there were all sorts of line items that applied to different classes of employee differently. The company had spent years building those reports by hand and there was a whole lot of organisational knowledge hidden in their heads, corner cases and exceptions all over the place. The sort of thing you can navigate in your head relatively easily if you've been doing it for years on end, but a newcomer has no chance of understanding - so a lot of iteration was involved in getting where we needed to be.
Put fiddly business logic and rapid iteration together, and you're burying yourself under a massive pile of spaghetti code in no time, flat. Trying to keep all of that sane both for myself and for whomever came after me was challenging in ways that none of the more systems-y work I've done since has ever replicated.
I don't think that's the right takeaway. A decade ago I worked as an SAP consultant, and did some payroll projects in it. The display part of it was easy. All they wanted was a great big table display, the moral equivalent of a read-only Excel spreadsheet. No faffing about with CSS or Javascript or whatever.
No, the real complexity was the freaking business logic. Office workers, executives, contractors all had different rules for how their pay was calculated, there were all sorts of line items that applied to different classes of employee differently. The company had spent years building those reports by hand and there was a whole lot of organisational knowledge hidden in their heads, corner cases and exceptions all over the place. The sort of thing you can navigate in your head relatively easily if you've been doing it for years on end, but a newcomer has no chance of understanding - so a lot of iteration was involved in getting where we needed to be.
Put fiddly business logic and rapid iteration together, and you're burying yourself under a massive pile of spaghetti code in no time, flat. Trying to keep all of that sane both for myself and for whomever came after me was challenging in ways that none of the more systems-y work I've done since has ever replicated.