this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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I wonder what percentage of the Linux users making these reports are already professional IT people in some capacity. I'm not convinced that it's "the open source way" causing this to happen, but instead suspect it's "the experienced engineer way".
While maybe not professional IT people but Linux users are quite known to be passionate about finding solutions. It's quite recent that you can have a hands off experience with Linux, it was always a tinkerer's OS before.
I remember in high school having friends who were going crazy at the chance to be the one who could solve an OS issue, like an IT medal of honor.
You could argue that these two are very closely related things.
That's exactly what I am arguing. If you have a Venn diagram of IT professionals and Linux users, I'm sure the overlap would be a lot greater than that of IT pros and Windows users. It follows that a Linux userbase is where you'd see a disproportionate number of people filing exceptional bug reports.
You reminded me about this crazy stuff where people with objdump made game 35% faster.
Holy shit, lol. I'll read that more closely later. My head's not in a space to appreciate assembly instructions right now. Somehow I'm not surprised it was Factorio people either.
They are so enlightened in optimizing processes, that they optimized factory optimization simulator.
IT professional here, can confirm, Linux is superior and my choice of os.
.... despite my work being mostly Windows Server.
Also: IT professionals usually have some experience and/or start out with Help Desk (hell), where you quickly learn what is and is not a good issue report.
This is pretty US centric thinking. Linux doesn't have licensing. That means it's used extensively in other countries, especially poorer ones. Some countries entire governments use it. It's pretty huge in India too. Africa. Places where common folk, not IT professionals, use it but either have rough or no Internet and aren't communicating in English, especially not GitHub.
A majority of the users being professionals doesn't mean your hypothetical kids in Ghana aren't using it, or that Indian developers aren't filing good bug reports. You're accusing me of advocating a problematic worldview you've created for me.
Wow, a bit touchy. I didn't indicate that your world view was problematic. Just US centric. Was not in any way implying some morals to the debate.
Simply stating facts that not all, arguably not even a majority are IT professionals, except perhaps in the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you know any Linux users that aren't IT professionals? If I know any, it's because they're the children of IT professionals
I've been using GNU+Linux since 9th grade because that's when I got a computer. My parents have absolutely nothing to do with computers. What got me there was simple lack of understanding. I barely knew what OS was, but I needed to get one. And soon after, I misunderstood Windows as another distribution, so I went with Linux Mint.
I just had good luck.
Since daycare. My dad had to do with computers.
I'm an actuarie and a Linux user at home. At work I'm forced to use excel but I do everything I can on python.
So your job is problem solving, you write code in Python, and you're a Linux user? My friend, you're one job change away from being a data scientist.
Actuaries probably get paid more than data scientists. But that's based on a sample of one: my brother is an actuary and I'm a software dev who works with a data scientist.
I think Microsoft recently introduced Python support in Excel, so maybe you can combine both.
It's tied up with their azure cloud service and I kinda combine both already with pandas.read_excel() and DataFrame.to_excel().
As far as I know, the only thing that the new python integration helps with is that users don't have to install Python or have to know how to use pip to install packages like pandas, because Python doesn't run locally. It is neat how you can visualize data and show it inline with the Excel document though. My industry is very regulated, so we won't be able to use it since the data you pass to Python goes to Azure for processing
They did
I ran across this in another thread yesterday. Sounds like you might think it's as cool as I do!
Myself. I'm just a hobbyist.
Teeeechnically I'm hobbyist too now.
Me ! I'm a more recent Ubuntu user . But used it alittle in highschool over 10 years ago . Both my parents can't even use a computer . But I had a really good tech teacher who handed out Ubuntu CDs to who ever wanted one and helped me learn to program .
I've been running Linux in one way or another since ~2007, a good 6 years before even considering working in software development. So I guess it was the other way around for me haha. Parents couldn't be further from the field.
Pilot turned woodworker here. Been using Linux for 10 years. Granted, my father was an IT guy...who's career had nothing to do with Linux, he's a Windows Server/AS400 guy.
A quantum physics professor, also I'm only a hobbyist.
I know 2 of them. Both are my grandparents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
I am not an IT professional and neither is my dad. I discovered linux through virtual machines on the cloud that you can connect through vnc and fell in love with the commandline.
Yes, I do.
Not an IT guy, just a dude that got tired of the Windows blue screen of death back in the day and discovered Linux many years ago as an alternative. I can’t code to save my life, but I know enough to use GitHub to report bugs I encounter. It can be time consuming and tedious but when I help alert others that know how to fix the problem I’ve helped in a way that gives me a little bit of pride that I always cherish knowing I’m giving back to the community.
The kind of people that would play a game called Delta V are probably engineers or people that like technical stuff.
It probably also helps the report rise to the level of "exceptional" if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don't know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically "X isn't working [picture of x not working]". Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS...I don't know any of that. I don't even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place... My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
If that means "row-level security" like I think it does and you're reporting a bug as an end user, it's ridiculous they'd even expect you to know that. It's not fun but when you're a programmer talking to a user, you need to ask the right questions to get at what you need to know, basically by inference, or by getting steps to reproduce the error yourself. That was not the right question. They fucked up, not you.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn't just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that's not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I'll probably disregard it if it doesn't have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
Software engieneering has engieneering in it, so... But also linux exposes a lot of useful stuff by default or really easy to enable.
Probably both culture and that people who use linux are literate part of humanity. Or have one in close proximity.
This matches at least my personal behaviour. I'm a programmer myself, so if a game or application has a bug I'll instantly start thinking about what could've caused it and what data would be useful. It's advantageous for me because the bug may be fixed, and (hopefully) advantageous to the Dev because they get the information they need to fix it. It doesn't always work though. At one point I sent an entire stack trace and all kinds of debug info to an app developer. I got the response that they'd look into it, but nothing ever comes of it. I'd accept it if they just admitted that it's not worth their time, but somehow that's also too hard to say.
Can you get a PE license in software engineering? Serious question
Edit: PE = professional engineer.
In most parts of the United States the title “engineer” or “professional engineer” is a title with legal requirements & responsibilities in the same way calling yourself a medical doctor or lawyer would be. Folks with the credentials to be a professional engineer are tested & licensed by the state to practice engineering, similar to the way the bar or medical board would vet lawyers & doctors.
The dude certifying the structural plans for the bridge you drive over every day is in this category. Same with other categories of critical engineering from the fields of chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, environmental, etc.
That said, TIL software “engineers” aren’t part of this group. Maybe they should be
Sorry, what's a "PE"?
A credentialed professional engineer.
I thoght about another kind of PE.
Reminds about scene from cartoon(EqG to be exact) where character that often perceived as light-headed or just dumb is asked while solving problem on a blackboard and replies "Advanced physics? I thought they really ruined PE".
Unfortunately, not unless you have a time machine to go back to 2018.
I'd argue that open source projects attract experienced engineers and give them a reason to report bugs