this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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I've always been curious as to what "normal" people think programming is like. The wildest theory I've heard is "typing ones and zeroes" (I'm a software engineer)

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 10 months ago (4 children)

8 hours of meetings and 10 minutes of writing code.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 months ago
[–] NOT_RICK 27 points 10 months ago (2 children)

When I was an associate level all I did was grind out tickets and write code. Now I run from meeting to meeting as a senior.

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[–] dgmib 19 points 10 months ago

That’s surprising accurate for many developers.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 10 months ago (5 children)

It involves a lot of tall girls in thigh high socks, sometimes they wear cat ears too. And they do a lot of typing on extra clackity keyboards.

[–] Rognaut 19 points 10 months ago

College recruiters be like ^

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago (3 children)

That sounds ridiculous. It 2024, I'm pretty sure programmers just use voice input and say the ones and zeros instead of sitting there and doing all that typing. Still not sure why they have to wear black hoodies though.

[–] kaffiene 32 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There's a dress code. Very strictly enforced

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yes, and under the hoodies there are t-shirts that were given out at conferences. That or memes. Strict.

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] puppy 51 points 10 months ago

You just revealed yourself as a programmer.

[–] AdamEatsAss 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] NightAuthor 62 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Can’t be that many on Lemmy at this point.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There are ones of us! Ones!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm not in IT...

...but I did earn a degree in Computer Science.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You learn a special type of Spanish and somehow you make MS Word come out

[–] 200ok 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This one is the closest, IMO!

Is it common knowledge that programmers write code in different "languages" (e.g. Java and C++)?

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[–] xkforce 48 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Reads code, spends too much time figuring out what it does and why the compiler is complaining about it, find out who wrote it, open drawer of voodoo dolls, rummage through them and pull out the relevant doll and stick another pin into it. A faint scream echoes through the cubicle farm. Place voodoo doll back in the drawer, close drawer, leave for lunch

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There's a reason we have a tool called git blame.

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[–] NickwithaC 46 points 10 months ago
  1. Type some algebraic equations into a text file.

  2. Run it through something called a "compiler"

  3. Suddenly everyone knows what the fucking weather is.

[–] Sekrayray 45 points 10 months ago (2 children)

It’s like building the NY subway systemβ€”you’re constantly adding on new bypasses and trying to maintenance old tunnels in order to account for new features/population. It ultimately ends up working most of the time and the daily commuters get to move from Point A to Point B with minimal interruption, but if you viewed the subway as a whole it’s a cobbled mess with lots of redundancy. Some of the architects who are currently around don’t even know where the oldest tunnels go, or why they’re there.

Wanted to give a take on it that didn’t focus on the obvious β€œlanguage” aspect. I could be 100% wrong on thisβ€”I’m sort of basing it off of comments I’ve seen here or there. I know very few folks who work in tech and I work in healthcare.

[–] c0mbatbag3l 18 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Honestly that's more like network engineering than programming, but you're surprisingly accurate.

[–] Jeremyward 16 points 10 months ago

This is an accurate representation of tech debt.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago

I don't know if Lemmy is the best place to ask, lol

[–] TIMMAY 38 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think its like trying to get a toddler to accomplish a task and it keeps technically doing what you said but in an annoying and counterproductive way you didnt even think of yet and you have to just become insanely specific about what you want the toddler to do and when and in what order with what timing

[–] spongebue 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's actually really accurate when first learning to program. Eventually you figure out how to think like a toddler.

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[–] gothic_lemons 33 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Well idk about all programming, but I imagine hackers go through at least one keyboard a month and suffer serious finger strain injuries from typing so fast and furious.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (9 children)

I'm a hacker. You don't even want to know what my monthly budget for balaclavas and fingerless gloves is.

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[–] Linuto 32 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Swinging between feeling like you're a computer god, and then feeling like you're horrible at your job.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Given that I stole this from a programming community, it shouldn't be too far off from true.

(Caveat lector: I'm not in the IT industry but I'm often messing with bash scripts and decompiled python code.)

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Playing with imaginary Legos to put together a rickety tower.

Edit: though on reflection, a systems approach to nursing the acutely ill is exactly the same but we're maintaining "God's" legacy code while we try to keep someone with kidney, heart, and lung problems functioning with judicious application of fluid management, drugs, and dialysis.

Maybe what we do is closer to Jenga.

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[–] MrVilliam 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

A laughably small team is expected to do tasks that take triple the team size to do properly, and then the team gets endlessly shit on for Facebook looking different now for unrelated reasons while getting zero recognition for somehow finding a way to get some massive project done on an absurd timeline with no additional resources.

I have been in power plants for many years now. Nobody notices us until we fuck up, and then nobody ever forgets. For example, Three Mile Island.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I would imagine it is as follows:

  1. Come up with ideas or goal to accomplish /be given said goal

  2. spend large amount of time looking at existing code or prior implementation of your stated goal.

  3. attempt to write or import some code tailored to your specific needs

  4. test and identify problem areas

  5. find everything fails spectacularly and start over +/- tears.

  6. repeat until successful or dead

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago

They said people outside the tech industry

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I assume it’s looking for that one space that should be a semi-colon in a sea of garbled letters.

[–] Subverb 16 points 10 months ago

This is 100% accurate.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Imagine a poorly lit room. The smell of coffee permeates every inch while the Baba is You soundtrack is played on repeat. Five to fifty monkeys sit in desks and attempt to bind whatever devils are necessary to invoke the magic their leader demands. sixty three percent of their effort is actually just browsing social media and posting memes in niche online communities, but they still manage to get stuff done.

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[–] StereoTrespasser 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Judging by the amount of their nonsense posted on Lemmy, I imagine programmers sitting around all day creating memes about how hard their job is.

Seriously, this is the most Lemmy-ish post I have ever seen. "I see there are people not in programming discussing non-programming topics...what question can I ask to steer the question back to programming?"

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (3 children)

A cross between Latin and algebra.

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[–] boatsnhos931 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You have super cool sunglasses and a chair where a needle goes in your brain... right?...

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I figure it’s like what I used to do in grade school to make the turtle draw shapes in Logowriter, on an Apple IIe.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

And you say you're not a programmer πŸ™„

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[–] FollyDolly 16 points 10 months ago (3 children)

You guys talk to computers in the language of computers. You are trying to get the computer to do something you want. However the computer doesn't help you out, you have to tell it explicitly what to do down to the tinyist detail or it won't work and you will be sad.

To the outside observer this looks like typing gibberish and copying in chunks of more gibberish. With occasional swearing.

How'd I do? (I know very little about programming and computers, I've worked manual labor for something like 20 years.)

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

I'm pretty sure most of these comments are written by programmers 🀣 reciting CSI stuff...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

When things gets really tough, two of you will double up on the same keyboard.

1 in 6 have multiple personalities and substance abuse daemons.

Your bosses ride little skateboards everywhere, when they're not busy programming disaster.

The FBI watches you code, but has no idea what they're looking at.

A significant fraction of you can type with your feet, proficiently.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

I don't think about programming at all, no offense.

[–] sunbrrnslapper 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Playing ping pong in an office that looks like a spaceship, while chat GPT writes code for you. πŸ˜‰ Just kidding! I assume it is lots of problem solving and work around to make some feature your leadership put in the roadmap.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What about us who are not in the IT industry but our job is being programmers (I'm an actuarie, on the insurance industry, and I spend 90% of my time programming scripts on python and SQL)

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