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.
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.
You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.
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).
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. :(
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.
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.
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?
Bombast retired this app three years ago, so they at least realized they weren’t making any money off of it. It was always understood to be a loss leader of sorts, but I don’t think they were ever really fully aware that even its utility as a loss leader was being greatly exaggerated.
Bombast is strangely competent in a weird way. During my time there, I frequently worked under vice presidents (they have hundreds of these in their corporate structure) who ranged from grossly incompetent to clinically insane, but they were always disappeared within weeks of my being assigned to them. I assume they were fired and escorted out of the building immediately, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out murder.
Also strangely incompetent in weird ways. The founding Roberts died in 2015 and many people wore his signature bowtie to the corporate memorial service to honor him. The scuttlebutt was that everybody who wore a bowtie was fired shortly afterwards. I know for sure that this was the case with my own boss. I could never hope to explain why this was done.
Full stack baby
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.
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!
It puts food on your table so you don’t fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.
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.”
Cool it?
Depression.
The end result of a programmer’s work is depression.
No, a programmer’s reason for existence is to bring me the butter…
Which of course I haven’t received yet.
They keep promising it will be delivered next week or so for the past 5 years.
You got your butter. But first it wasn’t “green enough,” then you yelled at us when you found out it was made from cow milk because we should have known you wanted butter from bat milk, and after that it was inedible because it was wrapped in wax paper and you insisted on aluminium, and when we went into production you had us destroy an entire production run so you could print randomized Bible verses directly on every stick of butter, but then the text was the same shade as green butter so you had everyone start over again, and you haven’t paid anyone in weeks.
Tap for spoiler
This is all hyperbole, in the event that wasn’t obvious.
As a system admin… Same.
An architect’s building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
And the fools rushed code is still there a decade later…
You nailed it.
Except when it doesn’t. Then it becomes https://xkcd.com/2347/
Oh, I’ve got awful code from 20+ years ago still in mine.
Don’t worry there’ll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They’re always is someone.
That’s okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.
That’s what’s always amused me about the “code re-use” imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 – what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
Tell that to leftpad.
You know those illustrated story books for children?
The ones with cute anthropomorphized animals going about their jobs in a fairytale animal society, posting letters and walking kids across the street and fixing cars in the garage?
If you can’t accurately depict yourself doing your job as a drawing in one of those books, it’s not a real job.
(I’m also a programmer, by the way…)
Dog hammering away at keyboard, in the other side off the wall an ATM is now working or a plane safely lands.
Am also a dev.
For real that standard just requires people be creative
Isn’t everyone on lemmy?
I was reading one of those books to my kid once and there was a pig butcher. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work in the lore of the book. Was he some halliburlector type or was he actually just a butcher. How deep does the analogue go?
I feel like that’s almost a macabre in-joke to the adults involved
I always thought those old scratch-n-sniff books were a better analogy. Scratch my code and smell the shit.
“Minus 400 lines of code created today.”
“That’s less than nothing, kiddo ;)”
I can hear this gif.
So can I…
One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire”, which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.
I thought it’d be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer’s work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”
I worked from home for a few years. The Pornhub sessions would need to be edited out.
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
“My dad does a programmer.”
Perchance the mother is also a programmer
“I did a programming… at the program factory.”
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.”
I always liked “my body is a machine that turns childhood trauma into profits for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Who,.that’s the next mother’s day gift sorted then.
Don’t know about you guys but I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it ain’t for nothing.
im a machine that turns cold beer into warm piss
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.
If me and my wife had a daughter, this could be funnier:
- I don’t have a daddy
- See above
- See above
- The destruction of the patriarchy
I mean, the questions could have been constructed for the student, because the teacher would know the kid has a dad.
Have you tried coffee?
Square pusher flipping bits, like George Jetson without the sprockets
