this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Programming

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As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

  • I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago

That you can mix and match bugfixes like lego blocks an hour before release.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I think that non-tech people think that tech just goes. Like you pull it out of a box and turn it on and it just works. They have no idea how much jenk is in everything and how much jenk was eradicated before a user came went anywhere near.

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

I'm not in IT but used to work with a very old terminal based data storage and retrieval system.

If the original programmers had implemented a particular feature, it was very easy to enter a command and have it spit out the relevant info.

But as times changed, the product outgrew its original boundaries, and on a regular basis clients would ask for specific info that would require printing out decades worth of data before searching and editing it to get what the client wanted.

I can not tell you how many times I heard the phrase, "Can't you just push a button or something and get the information now??"

The thing that infuriated me the most was the idea that somehow we could do that, but didn't want to, as if there was some secret button under the desk that we could push for our favourite clients. Ugh.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Just 2 days ago some friends thought that I could get any job from the huge pool of available jobs out there...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

That I'm in any way smart or good at math

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

I was at a party explaining that we were finishing up a release trying to decide which bugs were critical to fix. The person that I was talking to was shocked that we would release software with known bugs.

When I explained that all software has bugs, known bugs, he didn't believe me.

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

The files are IN the computer.

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