Yeah I’m confused about that as well. Programming has among the shortest feedback cycles of all! Heck, you can get your editor hooked up so that you get near-realtime feedback as you type.

Now imagine being a particle physicist or something and waiting years or even decades just to have a chance to run your experiment!

This one confused me. Software has some of the tightest feedback cycles in day to day work of any profession I can really think of.

Absolutely. I think this is why many people basically become addicted to it. You don’t need much discipline in many cases to get things done, you can just ride the dopamine (etc) hits.

For me it's less the dopamine hits and more the assurance. I don't need to invest 3 months testing something, I spend (maybe) 3 weeks. Instead of a full day of setup and testing something small, I can try and check within minutes.

I moved out of a scientist role into software engineering specifically because I hated the long feedback cycles. My research feedback cycle would be 5-10 years.