After you have a good decade of experience under your belt, most programming is... easy. Sure maybe not if you're working on self driving cars or game engines or kernel modules, but then the programming is only half the point anyway - the rest is math and science.
But if you're not working on one of those but doing something more typical, and you're decently experienced and competent (and maybe also not compulsively chasing the bleeding edge), then programming is often just cranking out features, a steady drip of success. So of course the path of maximum pleasure is to crank out code.
What's harder than coding? Smartly balancing the stakeholders. Maintaining the discipline, motivation, and knowhow required to maintain the engineering process - testing, documentation, CI, etc. Herding the cats that are a group of programmers, managing the egos, ensuring that a team stays aligned on style and architecture, that's the hard stuff.
> ...for the issues you mention soft skills are a must have...
Only because technical decision making is poorly structured in most organizations. Or it's clear but evaluation of decisions and decision-makers is poor.
If it were:
- get feedback from these N<3 people
- here's how you do that
- they are required to give clear decisions
- within X days
...it wouldn't matter so much that Engineer McCodeface wasn't the best at attending happy hours, back-scratching, etc.
This only works if your organization actually hired at a certain minimum level of competency from EngineerMcCodeface[1..100].
In a hospital interns opinions do not carry the weight of residents, residents opinions do not carry weight of the attendings, and attending opinions do not carry weight of a Chief of Surgery.
But if you're not working on one of those but doing something more typical, and you're decently experienced and competent (and maybe also not compulsively chasing the bleeding edge), then programming is often just cranking out features, a steady drip of success. So of course the path of maximum pleasure is to crank out code.
What's harder than coding? Smartly balancing the stakeholders. Maintaining the discipline, motivation, and knowhow required to maintain the engineering process - testing, documentation, CI, etc. Herding the cats that are a group of programmers, managing the egos, ensuring that a team stays aligned on style and architecture, that's the hard stuff.