To those not in the IT industry, what do you think programming is like?

8 hours of meetings and 10 minutes of writing code.

Nailed it!
When I was an associate level all I did was grind out tickets and write code. Now I run from meeting to meeting as a senior.
- That's no fucking joke. Please just send me an email about this meeting because it's not really worthwhile and I just want to crank out code.
- As a principal, I default ignore all meetings that’s more then 2 people, review other people’s terrible code, then refactor large swaths of the code base when I get bored.
That’s surprising accurate for many developers.
This should have been an email so I could ignore it and get work done.
Oof! So accurate it hurts.

It involves a lot of tall girls in thigh high socks, sometimes they wear cat ears too. And they do a lot of typing on extra clackity keyboards.

College recruiters be like ^
I need to get back in the industry. Oh, for an extra clack keyboard.
Clacky keyboard... checks out

Ctrl+C

Ctrl+V

You just revealed yourself as a programmer.
Printf("here 1");
- That’s what a real programmer does.

That sounds ridiculous. It 2024, I'm pretty sure programmers just use voice input and say the ones and zeros instead of sitting there and doing all that typing. Still not sure why they have to wear black hoodies though.

There's a dress code. Very strictly enforced
- Yes, and under the hoodies there are t-shirts that were given out at conferences. That or memes. Strict.
The guys in the hoods are cybersecurity devs
You young'uns don't know how good you have it! In my day we had to chisel the ones and zeros by hand!

Can’t be that many on Lemmy at this point.

There are ones of us! Ones!
- ... and zeroes ! ones and zeroes !
I'm not in IT...

...but I did earn a degree in Computer Science.
- I, too, thought it was interesting they considered programming as the IT industry. I mean, sure, you may use scripts once and a while, but that's very different from a software developer, or someone else who works with/writes code for a living.
There's a decent number actually, going by Lemmy.ca census results (which will be posted as soon as we can).

The largest group is programmer/IT, but there's lots of variety nonetheless

You learn a special type of Spanish and somehow you make MS Word come out

This one is the closest, IMO!

Is it common knowledge that programmers write code in different "languages" (e.g. Java and C++)?
- My god, that's terrible. Programmers from different countries must never understand each other. Someone should create a single programming language to rule them all ! something easy to understand, ideally -that everyone could read and write easily. Something like Espéranto, but with 1s and 0s

It’s like building the NY subway system—you’re constantly adding on new bypasses and trying to maintenance old tunnels in order to account for new features/population. It ultimately ends up working most of the time and the daily commuters get to move from Point A to Point B with minimal interruption, but if you viewed the subway as a whole it’s a cobbled mess with lots of redundancy. Some of the architects who are currently around don’t even know where the oldest tunnels go, or why they’re there.

Wanted to give a take on it that didn’t focus on the obvious “language” aspect. I could be 100% wrong on this—I’m sort of basing it off of comments I’ve seen here or there. I know very few folks who work in tech and I work in healthcare.

Honestly that's more like network engineering than programming, but you're surprisingly accurate.
- This is an accurate representation of tech debt.
- Definitely spot on for network engineering.
Fascinatingly accurate.

Type some algebraic equations into a text file.
Run it through something called a "compiler"
Suddenly everyone knows what the fucking weather is.

Reads code, spends too much time figuring out what it does and why the compiler is complaining about it, find out who wrote it, open drawer of voodoo dolls, rummage through them and pull out the relevant doll and stick another pin into it. A faint scream echoes through the cubicle farm. Place voodoo doll back in the drawer, close drawer, leave for lunch

There's a reason we have a tool called git blame.
- Still waiting for git good unfortunately 😔

I don't know if Lemmy is the best place to ask, lol

I think its like trying to get a toddler to accomplish a task and it keeps technically doing what you said but in an annoying and counterproductive way you didnt even think of yet and you have to just become insanely specific about what you want the toddler to do and when and in what order with what timing

That's actually really accurate when first learning to program. Eventually you figure out how to think like a toddler.
- But then you gotta deal with the teenagers.
  
  You tell them exactly what to do, and they do most of the time, but they can twist words and meanings to come up and do something entirely different when it suits their needs.
- I cheated, my friends are in IT lol I get to hear a lot of complaints

Well idk about all programming, but I imagine hackers go through at least one keyboard a month and suffer serious finger strain injuries from typing so fast and furious.

I'm a hacker. You don't even want to know what my monthly budget for balaclavas and fingerless gloves is.
- whats worse is how hot it gets under the Guy Fawkes mask
- The truth hacker knows about the socks.
If you're into custom mechanical keyboards it certainly feels like some of us are acquiring new keyboards every month even if we're not wearing em out...

Given that I stole this from a programming community, it shouldn't be too far off from true.

(Caveat lector: I'm not in the IT industry but I'm often messing with bash scripts and decompiled python code.)

What does "decompiled python code" mean ?
- I meant "decrypted", not "decompiled". (When I wrote the above I was sleep-deprived.)
  
  I mostly pick visual novels apart, to know how to reach one or another specific route. From that I'm somewhat used to read Python code - or at least Ren'Py code.

Swinging between feeling like you're a computer god, and then feeling like you're horrible at your job.

found the programmer

Playing with imaginary Legos to put together a rickety tower.

Edit: though on reflection, a systems approach to nursing the acutely ill is exactly the same but we're maintaining "God's" legacy code while we try to keep someone with kidney, heart, and lung problems functioning with judicious application of fluid management, drugs, and dialysis.

Maybe what we do is closer to Jenga.

ive written a lot of code for clinicians, i have been afforded the benefit of witnessing that chaos

i have it far easier
But things get weird when the lego shapes have different sizes and you need to craft adapting pieces?

A laughably small team is expected to do tasks that take triple the team size to do properly, and then the team gets endlessly shit on for Facebook looking different now for unrelated reasons while getting zero recognition for somehow finding a way to get some massive project done on an absurd timeline with no additional resources.

I have been in power plants for many years now. Nobody notices us until we fuck up, and then nobody ever forgets. For example, Three Mile Island.

Three Mile Island was as much a UX problem as anything else.
A laughably small team is expected to do tasks that take triple the team size to do properly, and then the team gets endlessly shit on for Facebook looking different now for unrelated reasons while getting zero recognition for somehow finding a way to get some massive project done on an absurd timeline with no additional resources.

You already have the latter 5 year portion of what you learn in your first 10 years as a computer scientist

Now you just need the first 5 years of education

I would imagine it is as follows:

Come up with ideas or goal to accomplish /be given said goal
spend large amount of time looking at existing code or prior implementation of your stated goal.
attempt to write or import some code tailored to your specific needs
test and identify problem areas
find everything fails spectacularly and start over +/- tears.
repeat until successful or dead

They said people outside the tech industry

Imagine a poorly lit room. The smell of coffee permeates every inch while the Baba is You soundtrack is played on repeat. Five to fifty monkeys sit in desks and attempt to bind whatever devils are necessary to invoke the magic their leader demands. sixty three percent of their effort is actually just browsing social media and posting memes in niche online communities, but they still manage to get stuff done.

See, I feel like this was written by a coder. WAY too accurately specific.

I assume it’s looking for that one space that should be a semi-colon in a sea of garbled letters.

This is 100% accurate.

I imagine it’s like people who talk to animals but instead of animals you have computers.

accurate description of python devs.
- I've worked with those..., they spend their day hissing at the monitor, it's honestly unnerving
And the animals are ants

Judging by the amount of their nonsense posted on Lemmy, I imagine programmers sitting around all day creating memes about how hard their job is.

Seriously, this is the most Lemmy-ish post I have ever seen. "I see there are people not in programming discussing non-programming topics...what question can I ask to steer the question back to programming?"

Judging by the amount of their nonsense posted on Lemmy, I imagine programmers sitting around all day creating memes about how hard their job is.

Programmers are just like the rest of us!

A cross between Latin and algebra.

Close. Add the game Twister, and you've got it.
- Algrwister ? Twalgebin ? Latwinbra ?
You forgot to mention the pentagram drawn in blood, and the candles.

You have super cool sunglasses and a chair where a needle goes in your brain... right?...

And guns... a lot of guns.

I figure it’s like what I used to do in grade school to make the turtle draw shapes in Logowriter, on an Apple IIe.

And you say you're not a programmer 🙄
Yeah, that's programming

I'm pretty sure most of these comments are written by programmers 🤣 reciting CSI stuff...

When things get really tough, two of you will double up on the same keyboard.

1 in 6 have multiple personalities and substance abuse daemons.

Your bosses ride little skateboards everywhere, when they're not busy programming animated singing viruses.

The FBI watches you code, but has no idea what they're looking at.

A significant fraction of you can type with your feet, proficiently.

No, those are all 100% true

You guys talk to computers in the language of computers. You are trying to get the computer to do something you want. However the computer doesn't help you out, you have to tell it explicitly what to do down to the tinyist detail or it won't work and you will be sad.

To the outside observer this looks like typing gibberish and copying in chunks of more gibberish. With occasional swearing.

How'd I do? (I know very little about programming and computers, I've worked manual labor for something like 20 years.)

That's pretty much bang on.

You learn pretty fast that you're an idiot and yes, you can write something, read it back many times, and still be wrong.
- Hunting that missing semicolon in 500 lines of code qq

Playing ping pong in an office that looks like a spaceship, while chat GPT writes code for you. 😉 Just kidding! I assume it is lots of problem solving and work around to make some feature your leadership put in the roadmap.

Since programmers invented AI, did they make it so it wouldn't take their jobs? I hope that was on their list, there has to be a job for someone not in the service industry in the future.
Sadly (or luckily, depending on how you look at it), GTP is much much worse at writing code than media would make you think.

It's about at the level of a young teenager who knows nothing about coding except how to copy code they found on google.

I don't think about programming at all, no offense.

What about us who are not in the IT industry but our job is being programmers (I'm an actuarie, on the insurance industry, and I spend 90% of my time programming scripts on python and SQL)

Doesn’t count. Move along.

/s

Endless logic puzzles.

I wish!

Enhance...
Enhance...
Enhance...

@httpjames Back in the day I liked to dabble in Linux, and I always liked the IT people in the larger firms I worked at so I imagine it's understanding basics of code, and then a lot of googling for fixes to problems people have already dealt with, composting code with templates and tweaking it to work with the specifics of the job at hand and then taking credit for saving everything because people are dumb.

I know it's a typo, but I like the idea of composting code. A lot of it is turning to shit and has gotten moldy, so the metaphor is apt. Gotta mix it up with some fresh stuff, and turn it around every so often and you'll end up with gold if you can give it the proper time
My job is pretty much this but instead of Google, I have gigs of notes from people who have quit long before me.

Well, I'm not really the truly blind here, I used to do some BASIC back in the eighties. Just introductory level shit, though. I'm talking a course taken over a summer for "gifted" kids, not even an actual full on course at a serious level. And I wasn't very good at it lol

But, I still have no clue what modern languages are like, or how they're used professionally. I've always assumed, you guys are busy entering lines of code, then compiling and testing, then punching things because you have to go back and fuck up with the code again.

I figure there may be ways to streamline the coding itself, maybe chunks of prefab that can be copy/pasted, or whatever.

Other than that, I suppose there's lots of coffee, coke and/or meth, and a lot of waifu pillows.

Imagine this... line numbers are no longer a thing. 😆 Yeah I learned programming in the 80's as well, the Sinclair ZX81 was my first computer. These days a large number of languages, both compiled and parsed, are based around C so it's pretty easy to jump around a lot.
- Okay, no line hikers numbers. But, how the hell are things carried out in order? Did numbering just get replaced by another system, or did it get thrown out as unnecessary to coding as a whole?

Its like that movie Swordfish

It is like writing Mathematica code, only much simpler.

Hahaha, yes.

I'm not in IT and I'm a programmer / software engineer. I don't get why people always equate the two.

IT has different meaning in different contexts. I'm a programmer, so at work IT usually means tech support. But i've seen some job places, including my company's corporate site, include programming as part of IT. Kind of makes sense, because I'm using technology to process information
IT ＝ Information Technology (= Computer Science)

Saved for later – someone remind me to check back in on this in a day or two.

Hey, check back in on this in a day or two.

Sorry. I'm a dad. It had to be done. I'm not proud of myself
- Hi a dad, I'm Child Eater.

The realisation of what my career would be like if I programmed professionally is why I don't have a career in IT :P

These two phrases primarily "works as designed/expected" and "works on my machine"

Putting text in green font colour on a terminal. During crunch time, blowjobs help finish the programming within a minute. If you're an expert, you don't actually type code, you become one with the CRT screen and gaze deep into the pixels, while your hands create code automatically at a super fast pace. Sometimes you stop for a sip of a carbonated beverage.

Some people don't think it be like it is, but it do.

It's straight up magic gibberish to me. I'm a decently bright dude and have a highly technical job in a different field, but goddamn, that shit makes no sense to me. I am, however, very grateful for the enchanters and wizards in the art of digital tongue, for without them, I my be forced to sit in silence with my own thoughts rubbing two rocks together in a tree.

Magic

Tedious af.

Waiting for code to compile and deploy is a productivity killer, but it gives me short breaks
- Compiling!
Only if you're writing code that someone else wants you to write in a language you hate because your paycheck depends on it. As a side gig for your own pleasure with roughly total autonomy, it can be very fulfilling.

Actual programming is punished by your boss, the IP lawyer, and the customer.

Backup backup backup. If anything breaks rollback till it works again.

Implement machine learning for the business process. You can afford you one raspberry pi.

Copy/paste someone else's code into your own project then play games/watch anime for a while.

Are you sure you're not already a programmer?

I took programming in highschool with Turing. As far as I know that's how every computer program works

Just to give the benefit of the doubt, I don't think they actually think you type in binary, I think "1s and 0s" has become a colloquialism used to refer to "programming languages" or in some cases "digital magic I don't understand." They just don't know the words python, javascript, html, bash, rust, c, c++, c#, F#A# infinity, etc.

I hope.

I appreciate the GYBE reference
They've probably seen Assembly code and that looks quite like binary if you don't pay much attention.
- I feel like if you don’t know any different assembly will look like any other programming language. Just a bunch of words on lines that you don’t understand.

I think programming can be a pretty dull task, where you spend hours over hours copy-pasting fragments of code from former projects and/or from other sources, adjust it to your needs, run it, remove the bug, run it again and find the new ten bugs over and over again.

But you get to wear a black hoodie and a mask.

whack-a-mole, but in the Matrix

that's why i stuck with the creative side :P the only IT i do is at home.

One minute coming up with a feature, ten minutes coding the most basic version, potentially infinute minutes improving/fixing bugs, -6 hours despairing over time zones. (I had an IT class in my last 2 years of school)

Just turning it off and on again until a game pops out.

Adding powdered sugar to a donut?

I guess you write a bunch of gibberish, press execute and hope something happens?

I mean, you're not WRONG.

Lots of copying and pasting from github.

Stressful as shit. Because if you're not overworked then you're laid off