but i use ddg btw
Doctors
You still need doctors, because Dr Google just thinks everyone has cancer.
Every fucking time. “Cancer or an autoimmune disease.”
See a doctor: Oh, it’s a pinched nerve / sprain / hemorrhoid.
Fuck Google.
Imagine graduating in medecine and your employer respects you to be an expert at everything all at once that is related to the human body and being able to perform open heart and brain surgery and doing x-ray imaging and MRIs and being a gynecologist and an an optometrist and a pharmacist all at once.
That’s what being in IT is like. You’re expected to know how to program microcontrollers to mainframes to fucking VCRs and knowing every programming language ever created since electronic computers exist as well as networking and cloud technology and databases, etc. AND you have to be certified in all these things to prove you know them on top of your degree.
And vaginas, and MRI machines, and hearts change dramatically every couple of years. Plus the human body grows new organs and limbs every few months and you’re expected to immediately have 5 years experience with these new organs and limbs that have only existed for 2 months. Perfectly healthy suddenly people fall unconscious for no reason, despite all of their organs operating perfectly. When you check your human body documentation you discover that the lungs no longer work as of today, and you now need to use the sclurtleplussy instead. You have no idea what a sclurtleplussy, but you better figure it out immediately, or all these patients will die.
Why do programmers complain about expectations all the time? Just say “It needs more time” or “that’s not possible unless we change a lot of things”. Set the expectations, don’t accept them. You’re the expert. What are they gonna do? Do it themselves?
If they have inconvenient expectations, simply tell them to not have those! If your boss pushes back, just tell them in a calm but assertive tone that you tell them how things are gonna go, not the other way around.
I don’t understand why more people who have not been fired don’t do this.
We do set the expectations as best as we can, but the people who have these expectations really don’t like that - to some, it’s like we’re offending them, and to many others, there’s almost always some other developer they either know or heard about (they never do, in fact) that, allegedly, can do whatever we’re being asked, but 10x cheaper and 100x faster, and he’s also at a lower expertise level so we should be happy to have the job in the first place, oh and also update the documentation in 4 seconds in a way that doesn’t take away these 4 seconds from the “main work”.
Many of us love their job, or at least are very grateful to be able to have it, but we complain for the same reasons other people complain - ridiculous and/or hilarious clients, colleagues, and employers.
Well first, the big problem is they make promises based off of the estimates we give them, which they then cut down and over promise. It’s a careful dance between giving yourself the padding you need for if something goes wrong, and not letting them think they can cut down on that necessary padding if they find out you didn’t use it.
For us, we under promise and over deliver… Sales over promise, and project managers bid as low as they can to win contracts, and panic when the numbers aren’t working because they cut it too close or didn’t push back/renegotiate scope creep
So then, when the numbers don’t work and their boss tells them to fix it, they go to their team and tell them to make it work. And the only thing they can do is set meetings, make demands, and yell… Sure, you can tell them to go fuck themselves, but at that point you all look bad - if the technical and functional chains of command aren’t separated (more common), they just point at you as the problem to whoever signs your paychecks… Since talking to that person is part of their week and you’re busy working, that’s probably not a fight you’ll win.
If they’re any good, they do exactly what you said - they come over, say “hey, I’ve got this problem… This guy wants this, what will it do to our timeline?” And, by being proactive and trusting the experts, they can just go back to the customer and say “sorry, we went over the numbers and it blows out the budget, these are our options based on my expert and the contract vehicle”
Unfortunately, most people aren’t that good at their jobs. A lot of project managers have an ego and like to do handshake deals… once they start agreeing to things on their own, they put the whole team in a no-win situation
It’s not that things aren’t possible, it’s that there’s always more, and often better, options to pick from. Going back to medicine, it’s like surgeons have to learn new techniques, but with the difference there there isn’t anywhere near the same degree of specialization.
You’re expected to know how to program microcontrollers to mainframes to fucking VCRs and knowing every programming language ever created since electronic computers exist as well as networking and cloud technology and databases, etc. AND you have to be certified in all these things to prove you know them on top of your degree.
So there’s a problem even worse than this: When you have all those skills and more (I do 👍) employers expect to pay you the salary of someone who knows just one of those things.
Like, I was a professional hacker, a systems administrator (both Unix/Linux and Windows), I know networking, have administered/maintained databases, I’m also an award-winning web developer (I know the usual web stuff plus Python, Rust, and a few other things), an embedded developer (C, C++, and Rust), and I can even engineer, design, and program an entire product from scratch that didn’t exist before (see: https://youtu.be/iv6Rh8UNWlI?si=dG15yQlQpfNGCDal ). That includes designing/engineering the circuit board.
Do I get paid for knowing all these things? No. If I apply for any job you know what employers say when they reject me?
Overqualified
You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t!
You dumb down your resume. Leave a bunch of that shit off. Only put what applies for the job you are looking for.
Yeah, that’ll get me the job but it’ll still have the same problem: Only getting paid to have knowledge of just one thing.
Companies don’t hire generalists that can get a lot of different work done. They hire specialists that are like cogs in a machine. That way they’re much easier to replace and a lot cheaper too.
The number of people who simply don’t know how to effectively use a web search is absurd. If you can sit down to a search engine and find what you’re looking for within 5 minutes or less, you’re probably the go-to troubleshooting person for your family. The general population is almost dangerously tech-illiterate.
I don’t know what pissed me off more, watching my mom write a book into the google search bar because she refuses to just use the key words or the fact that it gave her the exact info she wanted immediately despite being somewhat niche.
Using a different example, would “apple pie recipe” be less complex of a search than “What do I need to cook an apple pie and how do I do it?”
Edit - As far as a search engine cares.
Shameless plug for Kagi. It’s a subscription search service but you get unlimited searches for $10/month (and a few hundred I think for $5), and it’s generally much better than Google – especially since you can customize which sites are shown higher in the results and which ones are shown lower or blocked entirely.
The reason why it’s a subscription service is that they don’t have to rely on ad revenue, meaning they don’t track or profile you at all (so no search history either, although I think they’re working on an optional history feature)
Most of genz get it pretty intuitively because they grow up with Google searching. I didn’t realise until recently how much more important it is you understand the answers than find them especially if you’re getting a niche error.
Yep people who try to copy paste code without understanding it are not programmers.
Even though, I admit I do that myself with new languages. I tried to build a Rust async application and it worked but didn’t properly work… I just put code in there and got something running.
But now I went back and read the docs and realized I’m doing things wrongly.
There are actually only 12 people in the world who know how to code. The rest of us copy some variation of their code or their derived code.
Not much different to a doctor reading through clinical trials and then recommending the best treatment based on the use case. They didn’t design, develop or manufacture the treatment. They were not involved in the trials. The majority are just expected to know enough to make an educated decision based on specific, individual circumstances.
I want my doctors to use tried and tested treatments. Not reinvent the wheel. A good doctor is one who has a high success rate.
Yet the industry acts as though you’re not a good dev if you can’t reinvented the wheel from scratch… coz… Ignorance? Ego? Delusions of grandeur?
Hey now… if you reinvent the wheel you can make it your own.
…in a way that no one else will appreciate or understand, necessitating that the next person that comes along will also have to reinvent the wheel…
This holds true no matter how well you try to make it simple, modular (so changes only have to touch the small relevant piece instead of understanding the whole thing), documented by good code comments and multiple external docs for different audiences.
Drives me up a wall. Would be so much easier to just slap-dash whack it together, but I’ve been the one to come back to something a year later with no clue too many times.
the industry acts as though you’re not a good dev if you can’t reinvent the wheel from scratch
My experience in the industry was that you’re not considered a good dev if you ever try to reinvent the wheel from scratch.
