This excellent video by Physics Girl breaks down some of the misconceptions about what we programmers actually do and why we do what we do, with a focus on women and femme people in the field. I could relate especially to the discussion about it being very much about enjoying problem solving.
A huge amount of what a developer is doing is in their head. As we write code we need to keep a mental model of how parts of the application that have already been written and are yet to be written interact with the part that we are writing at that moment. We need to have a solid picture of exactly how the code is working as a whole and maintain that picture. It’s not easy, it requires a lot of concentration and has to remain in place while we think of creative and efficient ways to solve the problem at hand.
Developers can appear very unproductive at times, sitting staring at the screen with our headphones on and very little in the way of keyboard clackety-tap. This however is when we are doing our thinking, when we are building up, adding to and rearranging the mental model of how our code will work. This is the biggest and hardest part of development.
Imagine how it feels to have that interrupted at random by a telephone call or somebody walking over to talk to you.
