My Journey

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?
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.
- Sick keyboard!!!
  
  At the point you're at with all your skills, have you thought of starting your own company? No employer will know how to use your talents as well as you do.
- Hey, I saw the stellar review of your keyboard, is it possible to buy somewhere?

Doctors

Lol
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.
"Just because my medical school was in the Cayman islands doesn't mean I'm not a real doctor."

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.
- Well, using a more complex search does improve results...
Work with tech with the elderly.

God love a web search. The amount of people who think I am magic because of it is too high.
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?
- Ignorance? Ego? Delusions of grandeur?
  
  So you have met top programmers? Then why are you asking?
- 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...
- 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.
And that’s why everything sucks.

Doctors do that, too.

Somebody told me a story once about how they went to a doctor in Sweden. They told him their symptoms and the dude started googling them.

My doc is also googling stuff very often.

Probably not bad. If I could have memorized the entire dotnet framework documentation, I would. Until then I will keep googling, and I will usually recognize if the solution is sound. Probably the same with doctors and health.
- Agreed, I’m simply pointing out that the comic makes it seem like programming is something you can always just Google the answers for, instead of a skill that requires honing and a basal foundation, similar to medical science or law.
- I would love to have a doc who googles instead of just trying to sound smart based on their limited knowledge
You try memorising every known disease and alment in history.
- And you try memorizing every Python library
Happened to me once so I guess it's not as weird as I thought.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn_ZkI7-IZ4

ddg unironically giving me better results than google these days.

I only ever use Google when ddg fails me and it's maybe a 5% hit rate on that long tail
- Yeah, and then I still use ddg to search Google (with !g).

Lol, this also my journey. Decades in the workforce, zero formal training.

stackoverflow.com helped me retire

I know this is just a meme but school is an excellent way to have a foundational understanding of how things work, and learning to problem solve including googling.

a foundational understanding of how things work

Yeah! Kids these days are learning (in school) all about containers, service discovery, AWS, production deployment strategies, password vaulting solutions, cryptographic key/password management, and most importantly: politically defensive email practices.

Oh wait: No they aren't, LOL.

I just interviewed dozens of fresh (CS) college grads a few months ago and only one of them even knew what SSH was let alone anything remotely resembling basic command line stuff, Linux skills, or any of the above mentioned things.

They sure could write a mean linked list though! 😁
- This is why more places need to split software engineering into it's own thing, apart from cs.
  
  Never had an intern worry about sorting algorithms, but if I could get one who knew how to use git and write tests, we're off to the races.

Definitely how I got through all my classes.

Give kagi a try, if you haven't yet.

Definitely worth the money imo. No ads is a weird experience.

This + ChatGPT

Edit: IDK why I exactly got the dislikes, but I can assure you that I was able to quickly get into Python 3 thanks to ChatGPT's help. I didn't even know what was a Python class when I started and now the most complex (yet still shitty) script that I have is full of them.