As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren’t as familiar with it. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.
- I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.
The most I read and hear is “you’re a hacker”. And I get labeled as the computer nerd alot in school.
Not programming per se but my sister thinks it’s okay to have 300+ Chrome tabs open and just memorize the relative locations of them whenever she needs something. She’s lucky she has a beefy computer.
I might be your sister 😐
Stop that.
I use the tree tab extension and just leave several hundred of tabs open and use the “open upon restart” option to open everything again. Luckily firefox has automatic tab unloading, which means it only uses about 6-8 GiB of RAM. Sadly the mobile app seems to cope less well with this method (I only have 3GB of RAM on it), it sometimes randomly crashes or refuses to open a new tab.
I also leave every firefox tab open until I run out of RAM, at which point I use the “close tabs to left” button, moving some tabs that I still want to check out to the right beforehand. On firefox, one can simply use the list all tabs button to easily navigate or search through all tabs, so no memorization is needed (or just type the title of the document in the address bar and it will just switch to the tab if you have it open).
check out tab stash extension
High spec machines are a curse 🤔
This is horrifying lol
I found it useful when explaining programming to lay people to try to put various programming paradigms in everyday terms.
Imperative programming is like a cooking recipe. You need specific ingredients in certain amounts and you need to perform actions in a very specific order, or the recipe won’t turn out right.
OOP is like a bicycle. Lots of pieces interconnected and working together, hopefully interchangeable and standardized. It can also be used to explain unit testing to juniors. Clock mechanisms or engines can also work but people tend to relate better to bicycles.
Declarative programming (SQL) works like ordering at the restaurant. You still need to know how restaurants work and about meal courses and how to read the menu etc. but you don’t need to know how the sausage was made, only if it’s good or not.
SELECT food FROM menu WHERE name LIKE ‘Fried %’;
Lemme
cat menu | grep Friedreal quickgrep -i fried < menu
grep -i fried menuOf course! It’s amazing how this stuff just flows from the keyboard when you’re typing in a shell window, but feels awkward when typing in a Lemmy comment.
You don’t want to order from the cat menu.
That the business idea, the design, the architecture, and code for the next multimillion dollar app is just sitting in my head waiting for the next guy with enough motivation to extract from me.
I once had a friend who told me, that he finds it interesting that I think and write in 1s and 0s.
Every Hollywood programmer
Confuse him with “I used to do that but I’m nonbinary now”
Oh, my gender, sexuality, and base are also quantum
That might be true of VHDL / Verilog programmers I guess.
I had some dude here trying to tell me, a mathematician and data scientist who is developing AIs for fun and is a holder of an MA in Visual Effects specializing in procedural design, who has worked on algorithmic video game development, what AIs are or are going to be capable of in procedural/generative/algorithmic game design “because he has played a lot of games” and argued for days with me, cherry-picking everything I wrote attempting to use my words refuting him to support his arguments.
Just… Infuriating.
- You’re a hacker (only if you count the shit I program as hacks, being hack jobs)
- You can fix printers
- You’re some sort of super sherlock for guessing the reason behind problems (they’ll tell you “my computer is giving me an error”, fail to provide further details and fume at your inability to guess what’s wrong when they fail to replicate)
- If it’s on the screen, it’s production ready
If it’s on the screen, it’s production ready
“I gave you a PNG, why can’t you just make it work?”
I actually get that somewhat often, but for 3D printing. People think a photo of a 3D model is “the model”
Dude, I would just 2d print the png they sent and give them the piece of paper.
If they complained, I would say: “I literally printed the thing you told me to print.”
I’ve had questions like your 3rd bullet point in relation to why somebody’s friend is having trouble with connecting a headset to a TV.
No idea. I don’t know what kind of headset or what kind of TV. They are all different Grandma.
Can’t fault someone for trying to convert digital information into something tangible to visualize it better. Unfortunately peoples brains aren’t really built to comprehend a newspaper that weighs almost as much as the moon. (rough estimate I pulled out my ass)
If this were my grandma, then sure, I wouldn’t fault her. But if it’s someone making life-altering decisions based on their understanding of it, someone who has been doing so for a very long time, and who has support staff who ostensibly try to make sure that person understands the topic at hand, and yet after all these years of hearing about tech-related topics and deciding on them, the person — who has every ability to retire if the world is moving too fast for them to keep up, but has opted not to — asks a question as absurd as this… I actually am going to fault that person.
Doesn’t happen as much, but family and non tech friends would present me to other people that “worked with computers” thinking I could take new job opportunities. They were always wildly unrelated to my field.
I know I know,… they acted in good faith, and probably could have adapted a bit, but like 30 years ago there was a lot of overlap and systems where somewhat similar, but now somebody trained in Linux kernel maintenance isn’t going to learn how to create SharePoint SPFx webparts. Development is very specific now!
deleted by creator
The speed at which it takes to make something. We had a vulnerability with a JavaScript library in an old app that I do minimal support on, I said that it only uses like 3 or 4 libraries, so depending on what it is the whole frontend may need to be re-written. IT: “Ok well we have to get that expensed.” Sure bro let me just bill the client that is paying for it and error support 20k for new dev time. Nah, the fix is gonna have to be a workaround on your end, we do not have the bandwidth and they don’t have the capital.
Nah, the fix is gonna have to be a workaround
Ah, yes. The “do nothing but cross your fingers and pray it doesn’t bite you in the ass” workaround.
No, one part of the fix would be an access policy limited to their network or via VPN. Security is part IT and part dev
The worst and most common misconception is that I can fix their Windows issues from a vague description they give me at a party.
Lol! My mum still asks both me and my husband (“techy” jobs according to her) to solve all her problems with computers/printers/ the internet at large/ any app that doesn’t work… the list is endless. I take it as a statement of how proud she is of me that she would still ask us first, even if we haven’t succeeded in fixing a single issue since the time the problem was an old cartridge in the printer some 5-6 years ago.
Or some stupid Facebook “””issue”””
At least that’s an easy one, you just convince them to delete their account. \s
My favorite is “and there was some kind of error message.” There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?
What did it say?
I’ve had users who legitimately did not understand this question.
“What do you mean, what did it say? I clicked on it but it still didn’t work.”Then you set up an appointment to remote in, ask them to show you what they tried to do, and when the error message appears, they instantly close it and say “See, it still doesn’t work. What do we even pay you for?”
I’ve had remote sessions where this was repeated multiple times, even after telling them specifically not to close the message. It’s an instinctive reflex.Or it won’t happen when you’re watching, because then they’re thinking about what they’re doing and they don’t make the same unconscious mistake they did that brought up the error message. Then they get mad that “it never happens when you’re around. Why do you have to see the problem anyway? I described it to you.”
When that happens, I’m happy. Cause there is no error when the task is done right.
I mail them a quick step-by-step manual with what they just did while I watched.
When the error happens the next time I can tell them to RTFM and get back to me if that doesn’t solve the issue.
Isn’t the solution to send them this link? ;-)
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=majorWon’t solve their problem, but they won’t be your friend anymore :)
You Don’t Win Friends with
SaladLinuxThis does solve the problem for you though
Windows bad. Linux good. No need for nuance, just follow the hivemind.
Oh you have an issue on Linux? Just try a different distro
(this one hurts more because it technically usually works)
Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?
Don’t you mean Linux Torvalds?
that hurt to type
No, it’s this link:
My answer: “I don’t play Windows”.
Just 2 days ago some friends thought that I could get any job from the huge pool of available jobs out there…
That it’s mostly sitting behind a computer writing code. More than half my time is spent in the exploration phase: math, research, communication and developing a concept. The actual writing of code is typically less than 1/3.
Also as someone mentioned before, that it’s considered something ‘dry’. I honestly wouldn’t be able to code properly without my intuition. Take for example code smell. I don’t know why the code is bad, I just feel that it’s off somehow, and I keep chipping away until it feels just right.
I really like the word you used, code smell. I often have a hard time expressing to co-workers in code reviews why something feels off, it just does.
deleted by creator
After doing it for 15 years, I must be good at it and everything should be easy.
hidethepainharold.jpg
