I wonder what activity non-coders think coding is like? I remember having a conversation with a civil servant a few years ago, where he struggled to understand why we were talking about coding being “creative” etc. I think that his point of view is not uncommon—seeing coding as something that requires both intellectual vigilance and slog, but is fairly “flat” as an activity.

Perhaps people think of it as like indexing a book? Lots of focus and concentration is needed, and you need some level of knowledge, and it is definitely intellectual, “close work”. But, in the end, it doesn’t have its ups and downs, and isn’t typically that creative; it’s just a job that you get on with.

Perhaps they think it is like what they think mathematics is like? Lots of pattern-matching, finding which trick fits which problem, working through lots of line-by-line stuff that kinda rolls out, albeit slowly and carefully, once you know what to do. This isn’t entirely absent from the coding process, but it doesn’t have the ups and downs that doing maths or doing coding has.

If people have a social science background, perhaps they think of “coding” in the sense of “coding an interview”—going through, step by step, assigning labels to text (and often simultaneously coming up with or modifying that labelling scheme). Again, this has the focus that we associate with coding, but again it is rather “flat”.

Perhaps it would be interesting to do a survey on this?