this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
187 points (95.6% liked)

Programming

17511 readers
77 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jadero@programming.dev 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,

I think this is the root cause of the absolute mess that is produced when the wrong people are in charge. I call it the "nerd equivalency" problem, the idea that you can just hire what are effectively random people with "IT" or "computer" in their background and get good results.

From car software to government websites to IoT, there are too many people with often very good ideas, but with only money and authority, not the awareness that it takes a collection of specialists working in collaboration to actually do things right. They are further hampered by their own background in that "doing it right" is measurable only by some combination of quarterly financial results and the money flowing into their own pockets.

[–] PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 3 points 9 months ago

Doesn't help that most software devs don't have the social IQ to feel comfortable saying "no" when they're offered something that they don't feel comfortable with and just try making it work by learning it on the fly, even learning a company enforced format of code layout is often left for new hires to just figure out. If it weren't for how notepad++ has an option to replace tabs with spaces, I'd have screwed my internship over when I figured out that IBM coding (at least at the time) requires all spaces instead of any tabs after a stern talking to from my supervisor!