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 notion that creating a half-decent application is quick and easy enough that I would be willing to transform their idea into reality for free.
I’m pretty sure that government software always blows because they think software can be written according to a fixed schedule and budget
It’s tempting to think it’s like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it’ll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule
But no, in software, the “wood” is always shape shifting, the land you’re building on is shape shifting, some dude in Romania is tryna break in, and the blueprints forgot that you also need plumbing and electric lines
Well, that’s probably true for the most part but by far the reality is that it comes down to lowest bidder 9/10 times. Unrealistic budgets and unrealistic time frames with as cheap labor they can find gets you a large amount of government funded projects throughout all the years.
One of the most common problems of government or other big organisation software is that they don’t scale, either “not well” or “not at all”.
Some guy hacks up a demo that looks nice and seems to do what customer wants, but then it turns out a) that it only allows for (number of open ports on one machine) users at the same time, and b) it only works if everything runs on one machine. Or worse, one core.
It’s tempting to think it’s like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it’ll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule
it never goes according to schedule eve if there is blueprint & wood
Building a house (or any construction project) is notoriously impossible to be on schedule and on budget too.
I have a hypothesis that a factor is that government needs to work for everyone.
A private company can be like “we only really support chrome”, but even people running ie6 at a tiny resolution need to renew their license.
I believe this is usually covered by the fact that you can do just about anything you need to do over mail. I once ran into a government site that only worked on Edge.
That’s absolutely true. What’s hard and what’s easy in programming is so completely foreign to non-programmers.
Wait, you can guess my password in under a week but you can’t figure out how to pack a knapsack?
What’s worse is them insisting that you build it in Rust and Mongodb only.
I once had this and ended up paying for the meeting room cuz he was broke.
That just because I’m a programmer that must mean I’m a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.
“Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?”
“Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird”
“My mobile data isn’t working. Fix this.”
My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn’t work and everyone was disappointed.
And everyone expects you to know how to make phone apps.
Like, I think I know what to google in order to start learning how.
If you know Java or Javascript you can easily build apps.
But like in every other software field, design is often more important.
He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways.
Uh, I’ve been present when such a thing happened. Not in the military, though. Guy should install driver on a telephone system, despite not being a software guy (he was the guy running the wires). Result: About as bad as expected. The company then sent two specialists on Saturday/Sunday to re-install everything.
Ironically, most of those things are true, but only with effort. We are better than most people at solving technical problems, or even problems in general, because being a programmer requires the person to be good at research, reading documentation, creative problem solving, and following instructions. Apparently those aren’t traits that are common among average people, which is baffling to me.
Sometimes I’ll solve a computer problem for someone in an area that I know nothing about by just googling it. After telling them that all I had to do was google the problem and follow the instructions they’ll respond by saying that they wouldn’t know what to google.
Just being experienced at searching the web and having the basic vocabulary to express your problems can get you far in many situations, and a fair bit of people don’t have that.
My neighbour asked me to take a look at her refrigerator because it wasn’t working. I am a software developer.
I used to get a lot of people asking for help with their printer. No, just because I am a software developer doesn’t mean I know how why your printer isn’t working. But, yes, I can probably help you…
“Sometimes when somebody called it shows up up here but normally it covers the screen and I can see the name.” Like I have no idea how those businesses fix people’s phones, when they hear this kind of instructions. Makes me tear my hair out.
Don’t pretend you suck at these things. You know very well you are fucking equipped to fix this kind of thing when you work with programming. Unless you’re, like a web developer or something ofc
You are part of the problem
Nope
Why should I fix any of those peasant problems if I can order the lowly technician to fix my computer which I use to make crappy SQL queries? 🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐🧐
Because you are a nice person to your relatives???
Thankfully dad knows how to troubleshoot stuff or go to the technician. I just tell him that I haven’t used windows In ages
The worst and most common misconception is that I can fix their Windows issues from a vague description they give me at a party.
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 :)
This does solve the problem for you though
You Don’t Win Friends with
SaladLinux
No, it’s this link:
Windows bad. Linux good. No need for nuance, just follow the hivemind.
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
Oh you have an issue on Linux? Just try a different distro
(this one hurts more because it technically usually works)
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.
My answer: “I don’t play Windows”.
I once had a friend who told me, that he finds it interesting that I think and write in 1s and 0s.
Confuse him with “I used to do that but I’m nonbinary now”
Oh, my gender, sexuality, and base are also quantum
Every Hollywood programmer
That might be true of VHDL / Verilog programmers I guess.
“Just”
That one word has done a fuck ton of lifting over my career.
“Can’t you just make it do this”
I can’t “just” do anything you fuck head! It takes time and lots of effort!
It’s a meme to say “can’t you just” at my workplace
“Would you kindly”…
Also “simple”. “It’s a simple feature.”
Simple features are often complex to make, and complex features are often way too simple to make.
I believe that it’s not for nothing that simplicity is considered more sophisticated. Many, many cycles of refinement.
Removed by mod
I like to say:
We have a half finished skyscraper, and you’re asking me to Just add a new basement between the second and third floor. Do you see how that might be difficult? If we want to do it, we have to tear down the entire building floor by floor, then build up again from the second floor. Are you prepared to spend the money and push back the release date for that new feature?
“Just” is a keyword that I’m going to triple my estimates. “Just” signifies the product owner has no idea what they are requesting, and it always becomes a dance of explaining why they are wrong.
I would have written that comment if you hadn’t already done it.
I don’t know exactly why people think that we can “just” do whatever they ask for.
Maybe it has something to do with how invisible software is to the tech-illiterate person but I’m not convinced. I’m sure there are other professions that get similar treatment.
I know you built the bridge to support 40 ton vehicles, but I think if we just add a beam across the middle here, we should be able to get 200 tons across this no problem? Seems simple, please have it done by Monday!
I get that from our product owners a lot, and I usually say “yes!”, followed by an explanation of how much time it will take and why it’s not the path we want to take. People respond well to you agreeing with them, and then explaining why it’s probably not the best approach.
A lot people compleatly overrate the amount of math required. Like its probably a week since I used a aritmetic operator.
Sometimes when people see me struggle with a bit of mental maths or use a calculator for something that is usually easy to do mentally, they remark “aren’t you a programmer?”
I always respond with “I tell computers how to do maths, I don’t do the maths”
On the other hand in certain applications you can replace a significant amount of programming ability with a good undertstanding of vector maths.
We must do different sorts of programming…
Tbf, that’s probably because most CS majors at T20 schools get a math minor as well because of the obscene amount of math they have to take.
They can’t possibly judge what is trivial to achieve and what’s a serious, very hard problem.
As always, there is an XKCD for that.
The example given in the comic has moved from one category to the other. Determining whether an image contains a bird is a fairly simple “two hour” task now.
Plot twist: The woman in the comic is Fei-Fei Li, she got the research team and five years and succeeded 🤯
Well that’s after thousands of people and 100s of millions in money
Of course, but I still find it remarkable that the task that was picked as an example for something extremely difficult is now trivially easy just a few years later
That is a pretty hard thing to do, to be fair. And the list of things that are easy sometimes makes big jumps forward and the effect of details on the final effort can be massive.
You’re right! Even for programmers.
- 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
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.
People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services
A friend asked me to atempt data recovery on some photos which ‘vanished’ off an USB stick.
Plugged it in, checked for potential hidden trash folders, then called it a day. Firstly I havenever done data forensic and secondly: No backup? No mercy.
There are tools for that fyi
Well, here’s the important part:
I have never done data forensic
So yeah, I didn’t know that at the time. Anyway: Which tools are you talking about in particular?
Windows File Recovery, WinfrGUI, Easeus, Aomei, DiskGenius, etc.
Someone else already named some tools, so I won’t repeat. But the reason this works is that even once you clear out those trash files, the OS usually only removes the pointer to where the data lives on the disk, and the disk space itself isn’t overwritten until it’s needed to save another file. This is why these tools have a much higher chance of success sooner after file deletion.
That there’s something inherently special about me that makes me able to program…
… Yes…patience and interest.
The things that make me a good programmer:
- I read error messages
- I put those errors in Google
- I read the results that come up
Even among my peers, that gives me a leg up apparently.
Don’t underestimate what having the necessary intuitions do engage with mathematics does for you. A significant portion of the population is incapable of that, mostly because we have a very poor way of teaching it as a subject.
Funny you should say that as I was thinking that the idea that math has anything to do with programming is the biggest misconprehension I encounter.
Hey we did all sort of crazy shit with linear algebra, vectors matrices and shit in college programmlng. Now I sometimes do some basic arithmetic in work life. E.g:
n = n + 1
Sometimes, very rarely, I tell my squad that today’s our unlucky day and we’re actually going to have to do math to the problem.
This is very fair. Math has always come fairly easily to me. So math intuition plays a part in my interest and ability to learn to program.
I think most people, even smart people, assume they couldn’t do it though because I’m some kind of genius, which only a few programmers actually are.
Agreed. Few geniuses, it’s mostly driven people with slightly above average intelligence and a good bit of opportunity.
I can’t do math for shit and I failed formal logic in uni. I’m not built for math. I just… Don’t care and can’t make myself care. I’ve taught myself python over the past year and amd have become fairly comfortable with bash. Which has weirdly helped me with python?
Anyway I’m not very good at either yet. And there are huge gaps in my knowledge. But I’m learning every day.
I’ve done it on my own, and dove right into the fucking deep end with it which is probably the hardest way. But if I can do it then anyone can. You just need to want it. Why do I want it? I have no idea. If go crazy doing it for a living.
Learning more languages always helps understanding ime. I’d recommend learning C.
Learning python isn’t jumping in at the deep end. Learning assembly or C would be the deep end. Also programming has little to do with maths anymore, and the maths you use for programming isn’t the kind most people are taught in school.
You’re misunderstanding my use of the phrase.
I’m using it in the context or immersing in something you have no understanding of. I just dove right into and skipped most of the intro type stuff.
You’re using the phrase to talk about relative complexity / difficulty not how I’ve usually heard it used but it makes sense.
Like. Most people learning python start with hello world. I spent too many hours learning to own hot encode a 500gb dataset of reddit porn and tweak stylegan 3 a bit to train it on porn. None of which is remarkable objectively but there were a lot of very basic things I needed to learn to finish the task. That’s what I mean by jumping in the deep end - throwing yourself into something you are probably poorly or il equipped for and just figuring it out as you go.
There is a deep end of coding complexity of course, but, different kind of deep end.
I met a friend of a friend recently and they asked what I did and I told them I’m a computer systems engineer and they were like “oh you must be smart” and I was like “I like to think that I’m good at what I do, but trust me. I am not smart”
Like stoly said above, I think programmers are probably slightly above average intelligence overall, so don’t sell yourself short there. But yeah. We’re not geniuses
That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,
At least my dad was the one who bore the brunt of that mistake, and now I have a shiny master’s degree to show to all the recruiters that still don’t give my resume a second glance!
“But why? It both has to do with computers!” - literally a project manager at my current software project.
That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,
I think this is the root cause of the absolute mess that is produced when the wrong people are in charge. I call it the “nerd equivalency” problem, the idea that you can just hire what are effectively random people with “IT” or “computer” in their background and get good results.
From car software to government websites to IoT, there are too many people with often very good ideas, but with only money and authority, not the awareness that it takes a collection of specialists working in collaboration to actually do things right. They are further hampered by their own background in that “doing it right” is measurable only by some combination of quarterly financial results and the money flowing into their own pockets.
Doesn’t help that most software devs don’t have the social IQ to feel comfortable saying “no” when they’re offered something that they don’t feel comfortable with and just try making it work by learning it on the fly, even learning a company enforced format of code layout is often left for new hires to just figure out. If it weren’t for how notepad++ has an option to replace tabs with spaces, I’d have screwed my internship over when I figured out that IBM coding (at least at the time) requires all spaces instead of any tabs after a stern talking to from my supervisor!
I mean the classic is that you must be “really good at computers” like I’m okay at debugging, just by being methodical, but if you plop me in front of a Windows desktop and ask me to fix your printer; brother, I haven’t fucked with any of those 3 things in over a decade.
I would be as a baby, learning everything anew, to solve your problem.
fuck printers
fuck you. my uncle was a dot matrix.
That reminds me of one of those shit jokes from the eighties:
“There’s two new ladies in the typing pool who do a hundred times the work of anyone else.”
“What’re they called?”
“Daisy Wheel and Dot Matrix.”
Oh man love it. In the 80s, I used to go to my grandmother’s work after school. She was a stenographer at the neighborhood newspaper in Brooklyn. If she was alive she’d probably love this. My mom ran a copy room for a high school but I think it would go over her head.
Yeah I feel this. Fucking huge mechanical boxes of fucking shite that should he lobbed down the stairs and anyone who wants to print should be beaten with toner cartridges till they are black and blue, or cymk
Especially HP printers and honorable mention to Konica Minoltas.
I enjoy your comment so much because your methodical and patient approach to debugging code is exactly what’s required to fix a printer. You literally are really good at computers even if your aren’t armed with a lot of specific knowledge. It’s the absolutely worst because troubleshooting without knowledge and experience is painfully slow and the whole time I’m thinking"they know so much more about this than I do! If they’d just slow down and read what’s on the screen …" But many people struggle to do even basic troubleshooting. Their lack of what you have makes them inept.
I was gonna say, the OP here sounds perfectly good at computers. Most people either have so little knowledge they can’t even start on solving their printer problem no matter what, or don’t have the problem solving mindset needed to search for and try different things until they find the actual solution.
There’s a reason why specific knowledge beyond the basic concepts is rarely a hard requirement in software. The learning and problem solving abilities are way more important.
I can definitely solve their problems, but I’d have to go through all of the same research they would have to. They’re basically just being lazy and asking us to do their work for them.
I go to excuse now is “I haven’t used windows in 10 years”, when people call me for tech support.
I literally can’t help them lol
“I don’t know anything about your apple device, I prefer to own my devices and not have somone else dictate what I can use it for”
I think the difference is that they don’t know where to even start, and we clearly do and that’s the way to differentiate from perfectly working computer and a basically brick in their minds.
I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I’m an engineer (coder.) They’re both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.
Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.
Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it’ll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.
Well the person just wants a solution that works. They didn’t say it has to be the best solution of all solutions.
It’s funny how soon they realize they want a good one.
I work in service design and delivery. It’s my job to understand how devices actually function and interact. Can confirm that dev types can learn the stuff if they want to but most have not. Knowing how to set up your fancy computer with all the IDEs in the world is great but not the same as doing that for 5,000 people at once.
That they have any business telling me how complicated something is or how long something should take for me to implement.
Yeah like “Just add a simple button here”. Yeah of course, the button is not the difficult part.
Its like they think we just tell the computer what they asked us to do and we’re done.
I was coming here to talk about that recent post saying how easy it is to make a GUI and every program should already have one…
Command line is a GUI, change my mind
That it’s dry and boring and even I must hate it because there’s no place for creativity in a technical field.
The best programmers I know are all super creative. You can’t solve real world problems with the limited tools available to us without creativity.
I’ve been listening to stuff you missed in history class pod from the beginning and whenever something about computers, science or tech comes up they start being like hush hush don’t worry we won’t actually talk about it; as if the mere mention will scare away listeners
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.
