• Bajingo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    I feel like this needs to be one of those tshirts from old facebook ads that is like a skeleton riding a motorcycle. “I’m a programmer, that means I’m a machine that turns tea into nothing.”

  • Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca
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    22 days ago

    I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.

    After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.

    • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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      21 days ago

      That’s why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.

      And that’s why game developers are paid terribly

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      0·
      21 days ago

      I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I’ll be able to say “yeah, I worked on that”. Needless to say it wasn’t that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money’s in my bank account, food is on the table, everything’s fine.

      On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        I used to work for a major cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Although working for them was kind of like working for Darth Vader, I did take some pride in the fact that our app had millions of daily users. Eventually I learned that essentially all of those daily users were faked and that nobody actually used the shit (and they only installed the app in the first place to get a discount on their cable bills). Then I was only able to take pride in the fact that we were essentially scamming the c-suite and the shareholders out of millions of dollars a year.

        • kamen@lemmy.world
          0·
          20 days ago

          It’s somewhat amazing to be able to pull this off - and also speaks of the layers and layers of management in modern corporations.

          Did the c-level folks find out eventually?

    • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don’t know if what you do matters.

      I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is “You work on family and friends”, I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.

      So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.

      • kungen@feddit.nu
        0·
        21 days ago

        But why should we think so much about the final result when it’s out of our hands? Without you, these people probably wouldn’t have gotten any care whatsoever (or at the least, delayed with it -> higher risk for worse results).

        Unless you did stuff to worsen their condition, you’ve undoubtedly saved many lives, and many people are very thankful for your contributions. So, thank you!

    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      21 days ago

      I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
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      22 days ago

      A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn’t a software company decided they were now a “software company”. I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(

      • Yondoza@sh.itjust.works
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        21 days ago

        Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.

        The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It’s like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.

        If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you’ve got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).

    • four@lemmy.zipEnglish
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      21 days ago

      What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing

      • tinyvoltron@discuss.onlineEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        And that’s why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don’t always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.

  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
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    22 days ago

    The result in the end should be an organized series of events, a process, that takes or produces data. The data can be anything from a single number in a calculator, to a text message, to your entire social profile. The process can be anything from basic math, to advanced math (i.e. machine learning, rendering, cryptography, etc), to performing simple operations on that data like shuffling that data somewhere else.

    These processes are stacked on top of each other and utilized with basic logic (if, else, loops, scope, etc) and combined together with a myriad of programming patterns and algorithms, to produce higher and higher orders of complexity, that eventually solve a real-world problem.

    The result is an ever increasing complexity of useful tools and processes that can either solve specific problems directly or at least provide discovery for other useful tools and processes that might.

    It’s translating higher order problems from something understandable at the task level all the way down until a piece of specialized rock that only understands on and off can eventually spit out a meaningful result.

    ok ok electrical engineers get the claim for the last sentence, and plenty of the real-world complexity, but hopefully it illustrates my point that ‘nothing’ is … just wrong. We cannot discount the absolute importance of abstract things. Everything from “imaginary” numbers to completely abstract things like philosophy have real- world consequences. If programming produces nothing, then MOST jobs that aren’t manual labor produce nothing.

    • Droechai@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      If she would have wrote that on the last question I think the teacher might have deducted points due to parental ghostwriting.

      The writing style kind of somehow doesnt fit with the previous answers style

  • pelley@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

    • Frederick Brooks
  • Psythik@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    It puts food on your table so you don’t fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
      0·
      21 days ago

      My kid seems to get the connection between my job and our accommodations, but they’d still rather I play with them.

      They once introduced me to a teacher by saying “this is my dad. He likes working. And money!”

      The (quite young, probably barely in her twenties) teacher considered this for a moment, then said “well… I guess my parents do, too.”

      • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        You should explain to the little ones that your boss wants a certain amount of work every week, and if he doesn’t get it, he’ll get mad and won’t give you any money at all

        • toynbee@lemmy.world
          0·
          21 days ago

          They get the idea. They can even explain it back to me (though they’re as likely to say that the money is for toys as they are to say, for example, food).

          They just know what they’d prefer over me working.

  • Robyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    21 days ago

    Yea… Tho I’d argue that’s true of most jobs nowadays. Nothing, or somehow less than. Joining the work force has been a very depressing experience so far. Any ambition of learning and or contributing getting annihilated. It’s a compromise that allows me to have a roof and food at the end of the month without living at my parents.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    0·
    22 days ago

    Yeah once i realized that nothing lasts very long in it, it started to feel like a pointless job. But it makes good money. But in the end, its just new frameworks and languages to learn forever so you never feel like you actually are an expert at anything.

    Networking is a good field though. If you are an expert in networking and devops, it really helps with a lot of troubleshooting and networking so you can easily run a homelab. Those skills actually last and are useful every day.

    I cant bring myself to be interested in Ai though. Im just not excited about training models.