What I like to do: write code. What I wind up doing...
Writing cover letters. Editing my resume endlessly *. Answering the phone every time it rings and talking to a lot of telemarketers. Trying to explain small, unimportant technical decisions to people who don't understand. Trying to explain the basics of software development to people who don't understand. Sit through endless meetings where people fuss over organizational stuff and never even get to specs. Posting whiny rants on here. Ask friends about the places they work. Ask for work on IRC. Go to interviews. Make lots and lots of calls usually to people who don't answer their phones. Spend time talking to people trying to make sure I didn't inadvertently offend them. Write verbose reports for management. Explain the same thing to clients over and over and over again. Process countless feature requests disguised as bug reports.
If I were a doctor, my company would try really, really hard to keep me from ever having to do anything but... er, doct. I've worked at Mayo. Stenographers type up voice recorded notes. Nurses do all of the prep and briefing (and a lot of the medicine, too). There are support people of every stripe and color. I don't want or need all of that -- but it would be damn cool if I could actually write some code for once!
It's kind of been the story of my life... or one of them. When I was a kid, my mother would yell at me, try to bang the phone to knock me off the modem, and do anything she could to get me off the computer. I lost net access and went looking for it, and hung out at strange, random universities, where security would sometimes catch me and throw me out. I was homeless for a while. Settled down a bit, but then got clients and various ill fated work arrangements where the clients are far more interested in talking about work and yanking my chain to make sure my subservience is complete rather than actually getting from me what they requested -- and employers are the same. Girlfriend, bless her. I feel like Jim Carey in The Truman Show -- why does everyone not want me to program? I assume that hu-mans must be wired for fuss and bluster and power plays so I attempt it in the name of getting work done. Retaliation is quick and complete. The only thing worse than sneaking off and doing some work when no one is looking is to joyously declaring that you're going to go do some work, and skip and sing off to the keyboard. Like so many things with hu-mans, it's the ritual, not the practice, and the ritual that's practiced all day long is domination and subservience.
-scott
* It was first page on Google for "computer programmer resume" for years apparently as a side-effect of this, when I was job hunting during the lean post-dot-com boom years.
