To those not in the IT industry, what do you think programming is like?

8 hours of meetings and 10 minutes of writing code.

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.

Ctrl+C

Ctrl+V

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.

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

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

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.

It’s like building the NY subway system—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 “language” aspect. I could be 100% wrong on this—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.

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

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

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

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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?"

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

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

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.

A cross between Latin and algebra.

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.

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

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.)

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

When things get 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 animated singing viruses.

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.

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

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)

Endless logic puzzles.

Enhance...
Enhance...
Enhance...

Saved for later – someone remind me to check back in on this in a day or two.

Well, I'm not really the truly blind here, I used to do some BASIC back in the eighties. Just introductory level shit, though. I'm talking a course taken over a summer for "gifted" kids, not even an actual full on course at a serious level. And I wasn't very good at it lol

But, I still have no clue what modern languages are like, or how they're used professionally. I've always assumed, you guys are busy entering lines of code, then compiling and testing, then punching things because you have to go back and fuck up with the code again.

I figure there may be ways to streamline the coding itself, maybe chunks of prefab that can be copy/pasted, or whatever.

Other than that, I suppose there's lots of coffee, coke and/or meth, and a lot of waifu pillows.

Its like that movie Swordfish

I'm not in IT and I'm a programmer / software engineer. I don't get why people always equate the two.

@httpjames Back in the day I liked to dabble in Linux, and I always liked the IT people in the larger firms I worked at so I imagine it's understanding basics of code, and then a lot of googling for fixes to problems people have already dealt with, composting code with templates and tweaking it to work with the specifics of the job at hand and then taking credit for saving everything because people are dumb.

Some people don't think it be like it is, but it do.

These two phrases primarily "works as designed/expected" and "works on my machine"

The realisation of what my career would be like if I programmed professionally is why I don't have a career in IT :P

Putting text in green font colour on a terminal. During crunch time, blowjobs help finish the programming within a minute. If you're an expert, you don't actually type code, you become one with the CRT screen and gaze deep into the pixels, while your hands create code automatically at a super fast pace. Sometimes you stop for a sip of a carbonated beverage.

It's straight up magic gibberish to me. I'm a decently bright dude and have a highly technical job in a different field, but goddamn, that shit makes no sense to me. I am, however, very grateful for the enchanters and wizards in the art of digital tongue, for without them, I my be forced to sit in silence with my own thoughts rubbing two rocks together in a tree.

Magic

Actual programming is punished by your boss, the IP lawyer, and the customer.

Backup backup backup. If anything breaks rollback till it works again.

Implement machine learning for the business process. You can afford you one raspberry pi.

Tedious af.

Copy/paste someone else's code into your own project then play games/watch anime for a while.

I took programming in highschool with Turing. As far as I know that's how every computer program works

I think programming can be a pretty dull task, where you spend hours over hours copy-pasting fragments of code from former projects and/or from other sources, adjust it to your needs, run it, remove the bug, run it again and find the new ten bugs over and over again.

But you get to wear a black hoodie and a mask.

I guess you write a bunch of gibberish, press execute and hope something happens?

Just turning it off and on again until a game pops out.

Stressful as shit. Because if you're not overworked then you're laid off

One minute coming up with a feature, ten minutes coding the most basic version, potentially infinute minutes improving/fixing bugs, -6 hours despairing over time zones. (I had an IT class in my last 2 years of school)

whack-a-mole, but in the Matrix

that's why i stuck with the creative side :P the only IT i do is at home.