The author does a poor job at connecting several themes in his article that remain quite unrelated to the reader:

1. Programming isn’t “easy” (whatever the definition of easy is)
2. An attempt to create categories for “easy” and “hard” programming: a toy website is the former, a large/complex piece of software is the latter
3. There are people who aren’t as technical as the others, undeserving of being called a programmer (the people with 2 years of experience who “play the diversity card” and oversell their experience, selling programming as a lifestyle, etc)

(1) and (2) pop up all the time in programming communities, and I believe it’s due to how geniune encouragement is expected to be like in certain cultures (“it’s easy! you can do it!” vs “it’s hard work, but it will pay off”). One of these sentiments wouldn’t serve its intended purpose in the anglosphere, the other wouldn’t work in Eastern Europe. There is a definite cultural aspect that we’re not considering in these discussions, and it applies to most communication online. However, it’s especially apparent when more abstract issues are discussed, such as whether or not programming is easy, what exactly is programming (also touched upon by the author when he ranted about HTML), and who exactly is a programmer.

This opens a whole other can of worms: programming gives people a lot of power (being in demand, mobility, financial independence, opportunities, relatively safe work) at a relatively low cost (being accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, or a computer comfortable enough for programming, provided they have the time to have a hobby). As per our current dominant cultural values in the programming community - where we believe ourselves to be intelligent and rational -, it would be a taboo to believe that someone is undeserving of this autonomy or even prestige, therefore when “programming is easy” meaning “it’s accessible, in general, to everyone with a will and some free time, providing massive rewards in return” is met with criticism using an underlying disdain for the influx of “a different type” of programmer (or someone who works with programmers), it’s apparent that sometimes other programmers want to keep this prestige, freedom, and autonomy only to themselves, or a select “elite”.

The programming elite does the “harder” work; there is more prestige since there’s a higher barrier to entry/recognition (years of study of theoretical CS, mathematics, low-level stuff, etc). It seems unaesthetic, therefore, to be associated with people who can become successful through utilizing more social and marketing skills. There is no strong reason to believe that most people who promote their blogs or are “promoting” themselves using the “diversity card” are less technical than the other programmers who sit quietly behind their desk. There might be some, but overall, I belive there’s a strong bias against them from the self-proclaimed old-school, hardcore programmers.

There is a disdain for the more social, more entrepreneurial, more marketing-and-sales aligned technical person who knows how to utilize current social media trends to their benefit. It might stem from the belief that the better technical person is the more quiet one, the one who spends years programming their OS alone instead of engaging or even collaborating with other people (that’s a bit of an extreme example, though).

Another reason why more and more people are hyping themselves up is because it’s necessary. Not everyone receives a high salary or has a great boss. There’s plenty of people who work for free or very little money, having skills that would be much more valuable if they worked for someone else. But not everyone has the same network (which is incredibly important - imagine being all alone in this) or word-of-mouth recommendations. They might be acting proactively to get a better offer somewhere else. Sending in your CV without any online presence doesn’t always work for everyone. I think we should be more empathic towards people we don’t understand, instead of feeling immediate disgust and throwing them outside of the community, so to speak.

Either way, any discussion around “is the field XYZ hard or easy?” doesn’t exist in a vacuum. We’re dancing around status. If something is harder, especially intellectually, we believe it deserves more respect and perhaps even higher status, higher ranking in the professional world. If something is highly compensated, we also assign higher status to it, naturally. There can be many different types of programming that can be in either the easy or hard categories at any time - and the low barriers to entry make it much harder to judge someone’s status, and our relative standing.

Doctors and lawyers are considered to be higher-status not only because what they’re doing is “hard”, but also mostly because of the gatekeeping, the qualifications and licenses needed to be called one.

This discussion keeps popping up because a lot of programmers want the confirmation that they’re high-status, but it’s not that easy.