this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Programming
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A huge yet underappreciated impact on the modern world. People don't realize how much work goes on behind the scenes to bring those apps/websites to life.
Thank you for all your contributions Simon. Rest in peace sir.
SELECT * FROM real_influencers WHERE name = 'Simon Riggs';
Being a developer I slowly noticed that 99% if the people in this world don't even think for a single milisec how anything in tech came to be. They use extremely advanced smartphones, apps, huge servers, games, everything. And no one ever thinks "huh, how did they made this?" They literally think making a whole OS is like making a pancake, 5 steps and 5 minutes and you are done. Or heck, they don't even think that, they don't think anything at all about it. They just... use it. Like it magically appeared there and they can now use it. They have absolutely zero idea how much effort the simplest things they use daily took. Some don't even think about the fact that stuff like Facebook is a company and needs to make money. They just know that Facebook is magically there and works. How does it work? "Well, you open the app and click buttons". But they never think about how the app and buttons came to be.
Stuff like "what is a cloud? What happens when you put something on the cloud, like Google drive?" They get absolutely broken and cant answer because they can't even understand what a cloud is and why the files are accesible from everywhere.
It gets to a point where people get "shocked" when you tell them that Android or macOS has hundreds or thousands of developers working on it daily. They literally think Android just happened to appear out there and brands just decided to pre-install it on the phone they sell, like it was something that you "just install".
Well, long story short, this eventually comes back to bite devs in the ass when we try but fail to explain to a client that "creating an AI that takes stuff from a database and magically creates new stuff" takes more than 2 days. Client gets mad when we say something is impossible in the hours budget that we got.
Simon Riggs like many other people literally make our world turn but people will never know who they are or why they are needed. This world biggest heroes often go unnoticed.
A similar dynamic applies to most professions.
Clients just don't understand the work involved, they have no way to estimate a reasonable cost.
I'm a very poor salesman, but sometimes it can help to ask a client what their budget is. Take web development for example. Whether it costs $100 or $100,000 depends mostly on what the client can afford, and they'll end up with a product that fits their price.
One of my biggest annoyances when talking to (especially older) people about my job as a software engineer is when they're like "but how are you still working on it? Don't you just like, make the app and you're done?" They don't realize the amount of work it takes to write everything, because they don't understand the complexity involved in writing software.
Though it's not as bad as "so I have an app idea... It's like Uber but for clothing"