Honestly, the reason that programming is getting a reputation for being easy is because it is easy. That's entirely the point of computer programming. If writing a program was harder than doing it by hand, we would just do it by hand.
Honestly, any other profession would love to have it as easy as we have it. A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation.
Compared to everything else I do at work, programming is by far the easiest task. It's also the easiest to learn. Yes, a lot of those programers are pretty terrible, but there's a lot of terrible drivers, too.
> A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation.
You don't get these things either, unless you do the hard work to learn them and integrate them into your process. This isn't easy. Some of us are lucky enough to work in shops with this stuff already integrated, but for the rest of us we have to do it ourselves.
At my job, my biggest codebase was split up into three repos, with a lot of nasty and brittle glue code written to make deployment work. It took a solid week's worth of after-hours work to get rid of all that brokeness and make deployment sane again.
The advantages tooling brings to software development are often silently lost, only to be found out when your cloud provider loses your server and none of your backups work, and spinning up a new server from the repo takes, if you're lucky, all weekend to get working.
Programming is easy in the sense that you can get huge results from modest effort. So a clever, hard-working individual can quickly build software much faster than that same individual can build a bridge.
The thing is, what actually happens is that this individual, working at their full capacity will produce much more software, much faster than they could bridges. That doesn't mean that their job is easier in practice, because in both cases the individual will stretch themselves to do the best they can.
Honestly, any other profession would love to have it as easy as we have it. A surgeon doesn't get to mount the backup after a surgery fails. The engineers of the Mississippi river bridge couldn't checkout a standing bridge from their git repo. When a physicist wants to study particle physics, she can't download her own, personal LHC and start smashing protons. CEO's don't get separate development and testing companies where they can try out their business plans before it gets promoted to the actual corporation.
Compared to everything else I do at work, programming is by far the easiest task. It's also the easiest to learn. Yes, a lot of those programers are pretty terrible, but there's a lot of terrible drivers, too.