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.
I mean the classic is that you must be “really good at computers” like I’m okay at debugging, just by being methodical, but if you plop me in front of a Windows desktop and ask me to fix your printer; brother, I haven’t fucked with any of those 3 things in over a decade.
I would be as a baby, learning everything anew, to solve your problem.
fuck printers
fuck you. my uncle was a dot matrix.
That reminds me of one of those shit jokes from the eighties:
Oh man love it. In the 80s, I used to go to my grandmother’s work after school. She was a stenographer at the neighborhood newspaper in Brooklyn. If she was alive she’d probably love this. My mom ran a copy room for a high school but I think it would go over her head.
Especially HP printers and honorable mention to Konica Minoltas.
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 was gonna say, the OP here sounds perfectly good at computers. Most people either have so little knowledge they can’t even start on solving their printer problem no matter what, or don’t have the problem solving mindset needed to search for and try different things until they find the actual solution.
There’s a reason why specific knowledge beyond the basic concepts is rarely a hard requirement in software. The learning and problem solving abilities are way more important.
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 don’t know anything about your apple device, I prefer to own my devices and not have somone else dictate what I can use it for”
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 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.