Depression.
The end result of a programmer’s work is depression.
As a system admin… Same.
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
Cool it?
- software
- other software
- more software
- software
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.
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.
An architect’s building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
And the fools rushed code is still there a decade later…
You nailed it.
Don’t worry there’ll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They’re always is someone.
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
Except when it doesn’t. Then it becomes https://xkcd.com/2347/
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
I can hear this gif.
Yeah once i realized that nothing lasts very long in it, it started to feel like a pointless job. But it makes good money. But in the end, its just new frameworks and languages to learn forever so you never feel like you actually are an expert at anything.
Networking is a good field though. If you are an expert in networking and devops, it really helps with a lot of troubleshooting and networking so you can easily run a homelab. Those skills actually last and are useful every day.
I cant bring myself to be interested in Ai though. Im just not excited about training models.
I feel sorry for 1990s people doing my job. When they moved a paper process to a highly automated IT solution they halved our workforce. When we do the same we get people moved to more valuable work
Government IT is rewarding but is also so dependent on political processes.
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.
Just kicking technical debt down the road.
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?”
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
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.
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
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
I mean, the questions could have been constructed for the student, because the teacher would know the kid has a dad.
