I think most programmers don't realize how much vision holds them back. I've been coding blindfolded for over a month and I'm never going back. If you are a touch typist what do you need to see? Not looking at things helps me to focus.
I do take the blindfold off while checking my work an during some parts of debugging.
Not so strange. We talked about getting blindfolds for accessibility testing and talked about maybe trying to program with them so we can empathize better with users.
VoiceOver is pretty good. If you're already a touch typist and no-mouse person it's not as big a stretch as you think. Hearing your code read back to you helps with some things.
(I posted the following in a reddit discussion of this, but am reposting here because your comment seems relevant to some of the speculation I raised)
Not to take anything away from this, because it is impressive, but a lot of people overestimate how much you need to look at your code while writing it. That's because we've gotten used to (if we are older programmers) or grown up with (if we are younger programmers) editors on big screens or in big windows that always show us a lot of our code.
There was a time when that was not the norm. Many programmed on teletype terminals or on 24x80 character CRTs that did not have cursor addressing (AKA "glass TTYs"), usually connected to the computer over a slow serial line (300 baud for a hardcopy terminal was typical). Text editors worked a line at a time. You could see whatever previous lines had not scrolled off the top yet. Best case, that would show you the line you were typing and 23 prior lines, although usually some of those lines would be showing editing commands you typed rather than lines of your code. If you wanted to see more lines, you had to type a command to tell the editor to show them, and they would come in from the bottom, scrolling prior stuff off the top.
In that kind of environment programmers tended to do a lot more of their work in their heads than we do now. Not as much as a blind person has to do, of course, but a lot more than seems feasible to the average programmer nowadays. Heck, it often seems infeasible nowadays to many of us who programmed back then. I know I wrote a lot of code in such environments, but nowadays I cannot figure out how the heck I actually was able to do that.
I'm not sure if we are actually better off now or not. We don't have to keep track of us much in our heads because our editors do it for us, so perhaps that frees up some brainpower to concentrate on more important things. On the other hand, maybe by keeping more of our code in our heads back then, we were able to understand it better.
I tried this once as an experiment. I can't say it worked very well or would try it in production, but then again, I tried only once as a random idea. I've always wanted to try it a second time to improve some things I did wrong, but never got around to. Sounds like I should!
None of the things in that list were themselves decisions. They were causes of poor decisions. Do you dispute that mental illness can be a cause of poor decision making?
That's exactly it, and why I don't have the, "Facebook = Bad" mindset. It just seems to be bad for most people, in practice, over the long term. Once I found any lost friends I would try to move it over to a better forum for extended contact.
Only if this "more rewarding work" is available and at above subsistence level (nothing rewarding about doing what you like but barely being able to make ends meet and/or not being appreciated for it, which in the end destroys your enjoyment of your line of work too).
And only as long as people aren't hammered 24/7 with ads and consumption imperatives -- a lot of people believe those can be easily resisted and that they never buy anything because of these etc, but statistically most of them are overestimating themselves, they are as susceptible as anyone to consumerism persuasion which includes ads, fashion, peer pressure, status signals, being more attractive to potential partners and tons of other things besides.
Yes in theory but most work is organized around salary and freelance work is usually more work instead of a salary, so worse. The salary structure forces the type of logic I am writing about above. Every company wants to make as much profit and remain competitive. Therefore they don't really have the opportunity to provide easier or better work. Or even signal that with the amount of money they pay for via a salary. The economy does not do this at all. Read all job descriptions, they are all filled with terms like tight deadlines, etc.
In a way they go up because they can. If you look at it from their point of view. It is an event which they can point to and justify and say "sorry, this is our policy" and just raise the rates.
Now of course if they charge too high, then you could go to a competitor. But there is this CLUE database (I just learned about in a sibling comment here) which apparently is shared among insurers and depending on what is there (or what is not there! -- such as, it was really just an accident) you get labeled and dropped. So even a competitor might decide it is safe to stay away from you.
