Hey, Michael. I’ve been a developer myself and I have a PhD in computer science. So I get your point. Plenty of people crank out spaghetti code even after a decade. Still, from my experience it just isn’t the same as in a purely creative endeavor like writing where you have to appeal to audiences and there are no real objective measures.

I think the main difficulty developers face is continuously changing technologies, clients who keep changing requirements, or being thrust into an environment where you have to solve problems you’ve never faced before.

But if you’ve learned how to do one particular thing reasonably well (e.g., implement a shopping website with PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, or whatever framework people are using nowadays), you won’t have too much trouble doing that again. And with time most people willing to learn will get better at doing it.

As a writer, on the other hand, you might specialize in just one very specific thing (e.g., blog posts about writing + silly pictures), be totally devoted to improving your craft, and still unexpectedly completely turn your audience off with your 500th post — without having seen that coming at all.

So I still maintain that in other fields, maybe not in all, but in most, it’s much harder to fool yourself into believing that something you’ve come up with is great when in other people’s eyes it’s quite obviously terrible.

But I didn’t mean to imply that for everyone else it’s a Zuckerschlecken (German for sugar licking, meaning, easy peasy ;)