What is the result of a programmer's work?
What is the result of a programmer's work?
64 comments
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It puts food on your table so you don't fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.
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Someone needs a hug
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Cool it?
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Depression.
The end result of a programmer's work is depression.
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As a system admin.... Same.
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Just kicking technical debt down the road.
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While creating new debt for the next dev.
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An architect's building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
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Except when it doesn't. Then it becomes https://xkcd.com/2347/
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Oh, I've got awful code from 20+ years ago still in mine.
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Don't worry there'll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They're always is someone.
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I have some perl code still good after ~20 years. Personal accounting and bill prediction, command line with todo comments about a never made web interface
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You know those illustrated story books for children?
The ones with cute anthropomorphized animals going about their jobs in a fairytale animal society, posting letters and walking kids across the street and fixing cars in the garage?
If you can't accurately depict yourself doing your job as a drawing in one of those books, it's not a real job.
(I'm also a programmer, by the way.....)
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I was reading one of those books to my kid once and there was a pig butcher. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work in the lore of the book. Was he some halliburlector type or was he actually just a butcher. How deep does the analogue go?
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I feel like that's almost a macabre in-joke to the adults involved
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Dog hammering away at keyboard, in the other side off the wall an ATM is now working or a plane safely lands.
Am also a dev.
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I can hear this gif.
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So can I...
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One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol's film "Empire", which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.
I thought it'd be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer's work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering "why the fuck doesn't this work?"
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Severance ?
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ooooooohhhh... so that's the point of "Empire" ? showing the stark immobility of the nevralgic/symbolic center of Earth's most powerful military empire ?
I never saw the film, tbh. Maybe it would have stricken me
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A slight, but crucial reordering of electrons.
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
- Frederick Brooks
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The result in the end should be an organized series of events, a process, that takes or produces data. The data can be anything from a single number in a calculator, to a text message, to your entire social profile. The process can be anything from basic math, to advanced math (i.e. machine learning, rendering, cryptography, etc), to performing simple operations on that data like shuffling that data somewhere else.
These processes are stacked on top of each other and utilized with basic logic (if, else, loops, scope, etc) and combined together with a myriad of programming patterns and algorithms, to produce higher and higher orders of complexity, that eventually solve a real-world problem.
The result is an ever increasing complexity of useful tools and processes that can either solve specific problems directly or at least provide discovery for other useful tools and processes that might.
It's translating higher order problems from something understandable at the task level all the way down until a piece of specialized rock that only understands on and off can eventually spit out a meaningful result.
ok ok electrical engineers get the claim for the last sentence, and plenty of the real-world complexity, but hopefully it illustrates my point that 'nothing' is ... just wrong. We cannot discount the absolute importance of abstract things. Everything from "imaginary" numbers to completely abstract things like philosophy have real- world consequences. If programming produces nothing, then MOST jobs that aren't manual labor produce nothing.
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Wow get a load of this nerd
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If she would have wrote that on the last question I think the teacher might have deducted points due to parental ghostwriting.
The writing style kind of somehow doesnt fit with the previous answers style
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Yea… Tho I’d argue that’s true of most jobs nowadays. Nothing, or somehow less than. Joining the work force has been a very depressing experience so far. Any ambition of learning and or contributing getting annihilated. It’s a compromise that allows me to have a roof and food at the end of the month without living at my parents.
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- software
- other software
- more software
- software
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If me and my wife had a daughter, this could be funnier:
- I don't have a daddy
- See above
- See above
- The destruction of the patriarchy
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I mean, the questions could have been constructed for the student, because the teacher would know the kid has a dad.
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It's an issue but not the point of this.
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Have you tried coffee?
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The result is : nothing that as a market value, from which at least 2/3 goes to capitalists (shareholders and rent) and hopefully 1/3 to your wage.
aaand it cost energy with the pollution linked with
So, it's a nothing to be angry about
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That's a very optimistic split.
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Information
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Square pusher flipping bits, like George Jetson without the sprockets
64 comments
I'm not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I'm in university for tech, and i'm still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don't often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn't a software company decided they were now a "software company". I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.
You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It's like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you've got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I do industrial automation and despite all the difficulties I enjoy it.
What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing
And that's why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don't always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.
That's why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.
And that's why game developers are paid terribly
I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I'll be able to say "yeah, I worked on that". Needless to say it wasn't that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money's in my bank account, food is on the table, everything's fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
Full stack baby
I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That's the best part IMO!