What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it?

I'm pretty sure that government software always blows because they think software can be written according to a fixed schedule and budget

It's tempting to think it's like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it'll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule

But no, in software, the "wood" is always shape shifting, the land you're building on is shape shifting, some dude in Romania is tryna break in, and the blueprints forgot that you also need plumbing and electric lines

That's absolutely true. What's hard and what's easy in programming is so completely foreign to non-programmers.

Wait, you can guess my password in under a week but you can't figure out how to pack a knapsack?

I once had this and ended up paying for the meeting room cuz he was broke.

What's worse is them insisting that you build it in Rust and Mongodb only.

And everyone expects you to know how to make phone apps.

He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways.

Uh, I've been present when such a thing happened. Not in the military, though. Guy should install driver on a telephone system, despite not being a software guy (he was the guy running the wires). Result: About as bad as expected. The company then sent two specialists on Saturday/Sunday to re-install everything.

Ironically, most of those things are true, but only with effort. We are better than most people at solving technical problems, or even problems in general, because being a programmer requires the person to be good at research, reading documentation, creative problem solving, and following instructions. Apparently those aren't traits that are common among average people, which is baffling to me.

I used to get a lot of people asking for help with their printer. No, just because I am a software developer doesn’t mean I know how why your printer isn’t working. But, yes, I can probably help you…

My neighbour asked me to take a look at her refrigerator because it wasn't working. I am a software developer.

"Sometimes when somebody called it shows up up here but normally it covers the screen and I can see the name." Like I have no idea how those businesses fix people's phones, when they hear this kind of instructions. Makes me tear my hair out.

Don't pretend you suck at these things. You know very well you are fucking equipped to fix this kind of thing when you work with programming. Unless you're, like a web developer or something ofc

Or some stupid Facebook “””issue”””

My favorite is "and there was some kind of error message." There was? What did it say? Did it occur to you that an error message might help someone trying to diagnose your error?

Lol! My mum still asks both me and my husband (“techy” jobs according to her) to solve all her problems with computers/printers/ the internet at large/ any app that doesn’t work… the list is endless. I take it as a statement of how proud she is of me that she would still ask us first, even if we haven’t succeeded in fixing a single issue since the time the problem was an old cartridge in the printer some 5-6 years ago.

Isn't the solution to send them this link? ;-)
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

My answer: "I don't play Windows".

Confuse him with "I used to do that but I'm nonbinary now"

Every Hollywood programmer

That might be true of VHDL / Verilog programmers I guess.

It's a meme to say "can't you just" at my workplace

Also “simple”. “It’s a simple feature.”

I like to say:

We have a half finished skyscraper, and you're asking me to Just add a new basement between the second and third floor. Do you see how that might be difficult? If we want to do it, we have to tear down the entire building floor by floor, then build up again from the second floor. Are you prepared to spend the money and push back the release date for that new feature?

"Just" is a keyword that I'm going to triple my estimates. "Just" signifies the product owner has no idea what they are requesting, and it always becomes a dance of explaining why they are wrong.

I would have written that comment if you hadn't already done it.

I don't know exactly why people think that we can "just" do whatever they ask for.

Maybe it has something to do with how invisible software is to the tech-illiterate person but I'm not convinced. I'm sure there are other professions that get similar treatment.

I get that from our product owners a lot, and I usually say "yes!", followed by an explanation of how much time it will take and why it's not the path we want to take. People respond well to you agreeing with them, and then explaining why it's probably not the best approach.

Sometimes when people see me struggle with a bit of mental maths or use a calculator for something that is usually easy to do mentally, they remark "aren't you a programmer?"

I always respond with "I tell computers how to do maths, I don't do the maths"

At the same time, I find it amazing how many programmers never make the cognitive jump from the "playing with legos" mental model to "software is math".

They're both useful, but to never understand the latter is a bit worrying. It's not about using math, it's about thinking about code and data in terms of mapping arbitrary data domains. It's a much more powerful abstraction than the legos and enables you to do a lot more with it.

For anybody who finds themselves in this situation I recommend an absolute classic: Defmacro's "The nature of Lisp". You don't have to make it through the whole thing and you don't have to know Lisp, hopefully it will click before the end.

On the other hand in certain applications you can replace a significant amount of programming ability with a good undertstanding of vector maths.

We must do different sorts of programming...

Tbf, that's probably because most CS majors at T20 schools get a math minor as well because of the obscene amount of math they have to take.

Negl I absolutely did this when I was first getting into it; especially with langs where you actually have to import something to access "higher-level" math functions. All of my review materials have me making arithmetic programs, but none of it goes over a level of like. 9th grade math, tops. (Unless you're fucking with satellites or lab data, but... I don't do that.)

As always, there is an XKCD for that.

That is a pretty hard thing to do, to be fair. And the list of things that are easy sometimes makes big jumps forward and the effect of details on the final effort can be massive.

If it’s on the screen, it’s production ready

"I gave you a PNG, why can't you just make it work?"

I've had questions like your 3rd bullet point in relation to why somebody's friend is having trouble with connecting a headset to a TV.

No idea. I don't know what kind of headset or what kind of TV. They are all different Grandma.

A friend asked me to atempt data recovery on some photos which 'vanished' off an USB stick.

Plugged it in, checked for potential hidden trash folders, then called it a day. Firstly I havenever done data forensic and secondly: No backup? No mercy.

The things that make me a good programmer:

1. I read error messages
2. I put those errors in Google
3. I read the results that come up

Even among my peers, that gives me a leg up apparently.

Don't underestimate what having the necessary intuitions do engage with mathematics does for you. A significant portion of the population is incapable of that, mostly because we have a very poor way of teaching it as a subject.

I met a friend of a friend recently and they asked what I did and I told them I'm a computer systems engineer and they were like "oh you must be smart" and I was like "I like to think that I'm good at what I do, but trust me. I am not smart"

"But why? It both has to do with computers!" - literally a project manager at my current software project.

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.

Idk I'm not sure I'd trust any dev who doesn't consider cyber security in their coding. So much development is centered around security whether that's auth or input sanitization or SQL query parameterization...

If you're working on an internal only application with no Internet connectivity then maybe you can ignore cybersec. But only maybe.

fuck printers

I enjoy your comment so much because your methodical and patient approach to debugging code is exactly what's required to fix a printer. You literally are really good at computers even if your aren't armed with a lot of specific knowledge. It's the absolutely worst because troubleshooting without knowledge and experience is painfully slow and the whole time I'm thinking"they know so much more about this than I do! If they'd just slow down and read what's on the screen ..." But many people struggle to do even basic troubleshooting. Their lack of what you have makes them inept.

I can definitely solve their problems, but I'd have to go through all of the same research they would have to. They're basically just being lazy and asking us to do their work for them.

I go to excuse now is "I haven't used windows in 10 years", when people call me for tech support.

I literally can't help them lol

I think the difference is that they don't know where to even start, and we clearly do and that's the way to differentiate from perfectly working computer and a basically brick in their minds.

I use a car analogy for these situations: You need a mechanic (IT professional.) I'm an engineer (coder.) They're both technically demanding jobs, but they use very different skillsets: IT pros, like mechanics, have to think laterally across a wide array of technology to pinpoint and solve vague problems, and they are very good at it because they do it often.

Software engineers are more like the guy that designed one part of the transmission on one very specific make of car. Can they solve the same problems as IT pros? Sure! But it'll take them longer and the solution might be a little weird.

I work in service design and delivery. It's my job to understand how devices actually function and interact. Can confirm that dev types can learn the stuff if they want to but most have not. Knowing how to set up your fancy computer with all the IDEs in the world is great but not the same as doing that for 5,000 people at once.

Yeah like "Just add a simple button here". Yeah of course, the button is not the difficult part.

Its like they think we just tell the computer what they asked us to do and we're done.

I was coming here to talk about that recent post saying how easy it is to make a GUI and every program should already have one..

The best programmers I know are all super creative. You can't solve real world problems with the limited tools available to us without creativity.

I've been listening to stuff you missed in history class pod from the beginning and whenever something about computers, science or tech comes up they start being like hush hush don't worry we won't actually talk about it; as if the mere mention will scare away listeners

SELECT food FROM menu WHERE name LIKE 'Fried %';

I really like the word you used, code smell. I often have a hard time expressing to co-workers in code reviews why something feels off, it just does.

I live in the second one. On purpose. I'll never wear my debian tshirt.

I've lost all faith in tutorials as sources of relevant knowledge. If I'm searching about a specific problem, any from-the-top how-to might as well be Ben Stein reading it aloud at 50% speed, and then a year of my life later, it skips right over the place where something fucked up.

Nah, the fix is gonna have to be a workaround

Ah, yes. The "do nothing but cross your fingers and pray it doesn't bite you in the ass" workaround.

Why wouldn’t you just create a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track their IP addresses tho?

I might be your sister 😐

High spec machines are a curse 🤔

I also leave every firefox tab open until I run out of RAM, at which point I use the "close tabs to left" button, moving some tabs that I still want to check out to the right beforehand. On firefox, one can simply use the list all tabs button to easily navigate or search through all tabs, so no memorization is needed (or just type the title of the document in the address bar and it will just switch to the tab if you have it open).

This is horrifying lol