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.
That there’s something inherently special about me that makes me able to program…
… Yes…patience and interest.
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.
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 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.
Learning more languages always helps understanding ime. I’d recommend learning C.
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
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
i don’t, l’ve met far too many
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.
I think that non-tech people think that tech just goes. Like you pull it out of a box and turn it on and it just works. They have no idea how much jenk is in everything and how much jenk was eradicated before a user came went anywhere near.
I’m not in IT but used to work with a very old terminal based data storage and retrieval system.
If the original programmers had implemented a particular feature, it was very easy to enter a command and have it spit out the relevant info.
But as times changed, the product outgrew its original boundaries, and on a regular basis clients would ask for specific info that would require printing out decades worth of data before searching and editing it to get what the client wanted.
I can not tell you how many times I heard the phrase, “Can’t you just push a button or something and get the information now??”
The thing that infuriated me the most was the idea that somehow we could do that, but didn’t want to, as if there was some secret button under the desk that we could push for our favourite clients. Ugh.
What do you mean by jenk? Is that a specific term used to refer to tech junk?
They mean jank:
jan·ky adjective, informal adjective: jank
of extremely poor or unreliable quality. "the software is pretty janky"Jank?
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I’m a programmer, so I must know how to get X done in Y software.
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I don’t use <social media app> or <messaging system> so I’m some kind of Luddite and can’t possibly know anything useful about computers.
One thing that fascinates me about #1 is that the absolute raw dependency people have on Google doesn’t seem to ever lead to searching for a tutorial.
I live in the second one. On purpose. I’ll never wear my debian tshirt.
Me too.
I found that my 2600 t-shirt keeps them at bay. First, they ask what 2600 is, then they make sure that nobody allows me near their computers.
I’ve lost all faith in tutorials as sources of relevant knowledge. If I’m searching about a specific problem, any from-the-top how-to might as well be Ben Stein reading it aloud at 50% speed, and then a year of my life later, it skips right over the place where something fucked up.
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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.
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After doing it for 15 years, I must be good at it and everything should be easy.
hidethepainharold.jpg
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.
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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.
fuck printers
Especially HP printers and honorable mention to Konica Minoltas.
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
fuck you. my uncle was a dot matrix.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just 2 days ago some friends thought that I could get any job from the huge pool of available jobs out there…
The files are IN the computer.
I was at a party explaining that we were finishing up a release trying to decide which bugs were critical to fix. The person that I was talking to was shocked that we would release software with known bugs.
When I explained that all software has bugs, known bugs, he didn’t believe me.
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.
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
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!
As a non-dev (tinker for fun) observer- it sounds like your friends and family think you’re working in IT, but their assumptions thereafter are fair. Is that accurate? That the misconception is software dev does not equal IT?
It goes a bit farther than that, even: IT work doesn’t always equal IT work. Someone can be an expert in managing Linux-based load sharing servers and have no idea how to help a family member troubleshoot why their windows install is slow. Sure, they might have a better idea about how to start, but they’d be essentially starting from scratch for that specific problem rather than being able to apply any of their expertise to it.
Think of it like a programmer is a car builder, some IT people drive them for a living, others are mechanics. Someone who specializes in driving F1 cars might not have any idea why your car is rattling. The programmer might be able to figure it out if they built that car or the cause is something similar to what they see in the ones they have built. But if they build semis, odds are that isn’t the case. But they might have a better idea than say a doctor.
I use the medecine analogy: you wouldn’t ask your dentist or even your GP to operate on your brain; doesn’t mean that they are not good at what they do though.
Yeah, I like that one better, too.
Yeah, sorry for oversimplifying. I worked in IT resellers for years and am acutely aware of all the different roles, and even specializations within that. The irony is back then (20 years) you’d get walked around the halls and introd to “the networking guy,” “procurement for paper and toner,” “Mike who needs components for the pbx; or the as400” - I had a thing for everyone from data centers to keyboards… but “oh, those are the software guys… they don’t buy stuff” - today it’s a devtools man’s world. Everything is for the software guys! (Having said that, my friends that grew into devops are finding new (old) opportunities managing actual on site data centers and co-los more often as the unit economics of AWS, gcp, azure, etc haven’t panned out as hoped)
100%
I program – yet I’ve been asked to fix a camera and Apple Maps.
I mean, I can fix them, but not because I’m a programmer. Makes it hard for normies to understand the difference.
