- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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A slight, but crucial reordering of electrons.
Rearranging entropy by moving heat from one place to somewhere else.
I’m a fire wizard??
Eh, it’s more like electromancy, but… yes.
“Minus 400 lines of code created today.”
“That’s less than nothing, kiddo ;)”
An architect’s building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
Oh, I’ve got awful code from 20+ years ago still in mine.
That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.
Don’t worry there’ll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They’re always is someone.
And the fools rushed code is still there a decade later…
You nailed it.
That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
Except when it doesn’t. Then it becomes https://xkcd.com/2347/
I feel like this needs to be one of those tshirts from old facebook ads that is like a skeleton riding a motorcycle. “I’m a programmer, that means I’m a machine that turns tea into nothing.”
im a machine that turns cold beer into warm piss
I always liked “I’m a machine that turns childhood trauma into profits for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Who,.that’s the next mother’s day gift sorted then.
Don’t know about you guys but I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it ain’t for nothing.
Depression.
The end result of a programmer’s work is depression.
As a system admin… Same.
No, a programmer’s reason for existence is to bring me the butter…
Which of course I haven’t received yet.
They keep promising it will be delivered next week or so for the past 5 years.
You got your butter. But first it wasn’t “green enough,” then you yelled at us when you found out it was made from cow milk because we should have known you wanted butter from bat milk, and after that it was inedible because it was wrapped in wax paper and you insisted on aluminium, and when we went into production you had us destroy an entire production run so you could print randomized Bible verses directly on every stick of butter, but then the text was the same shade as green butter so you had everyone start over again, and you haven’t paid anyone in weeks.
Tap for spoiler
This is all hyperbole, in the event that wasn’t obvious.
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…)
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?
I feel like that’s almost a macabre in-joke to the adults involved
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.
For real that standard just requires people be creative
I always thought those old scratch-n-sniff books were a better analogy. Scratch my code and smell the shit.
Isn’t everyone on lemmy?
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?”
I worked from home for a few years. The Pornhub sessions would need to be edited out.
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
Well it’s an art film. The purpose of art is to evoke emotions, to inspire dialogue. Yours is one possible interpretation. Ultimately, who’s to say it’s not valid?
That’s quite non-committal… of course art is supposed to evoke emotions… but that’s not getting me anywhere I wasn’t already… I was asking about the artist’s intent
You have stumbled into an art-philosophy debate that’s centuries old and will never end.
No I mean specifically this artwork, this author, not art in general. Am a professional artist myself so I have some notion what this debate entails, but I was curious about the specifics of this film
Ambiguity is often part of the intent.
Severance ?
It puts food on your table so you don’t fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.
My kid seems to get the connection between my job and our accommodations, but they’d still rather I play with them.
They once introduced me to a teacher by saying “this is my dad. He likes working. And money!”
The (quite young, probably barely in her twenties) teacher considered this for a moment, then said “well… I guess my parents do, too.”
You should explain to the little ones that your boss wants a certain amount of work every week, and if he doesn’t get it, he’ll get mad and won’t give you any money at all
They get the idea. They can even explain it back to me (though they’re as likely to say that the money is for toys as they are to say, for example, food).
They just know what they’d prefer over me working.
Someone needs a hug
Square pusher flipping bits, like George Jetson without the sprockets
“My dad does a programmer.”
“I did a programming… at the program factory.”
Perchance the mother is also a programmer
A professional programmer f… wow that is a job?
Well they don’t usually f… Exclusively programmers, but professionals do exist, yes.
As i understand it and what is interesting to me, is that they f… A programmer, not programmers and that exclusively and professionally.
Hmm, true. That is a curious job. I think it’s called programmer’s spouse.
They usually don’t do it professionally.
That sounds very unprofessional.
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.
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!
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 feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).
Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!
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 sounds much better than “push it to prod Friday” lol
That reminds me, I have a PR to merge.
LGTM
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.
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
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.
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.
I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.
Full stack baby
‘Bugs.’
And maybe some features as a side effect.
Sure, ‘features’… And then everyone clapped…
And nobody was unhappy that you estimated 3 sprints but took 12
Just kicking technical debt down the road.
While creating new debt for the next dev.
- software
- other software
- more software
- software
I can hear this gif.
So can I…
