This was at a hackathon which my study organises yearly. It's a 24 hours challenge and you've got to work in teams. It's always from 12 (noon) to 12 (noon the other day).

Another group of programmers was pulling their hair out because of their code not working, it kept crashing and they didn't see it after more than an hour (half of the team had difficulties with keeping their eyes open and it was about 3-4am so we were already programming nearly non stop for about 15-16 hours).

Walked by and offered to take a look:
"YES PLEASE FUCKING HELP"

Took a look and about two seconds later:
"oh you're missing a hashtag there *points*"

All programmers at once: MOTHERFUCKER! (or in Dutch: GODVERDOMME!) (motherfucker contextualizes the situation better imo)

I think I made their entire hackathon at that moment 😊

A guy on another team who is regarded by non-programmers as a genius wrote a python script that goes out to thousands of our appliances, collects information, compiles it, and presents it in a kinda sorta readable, but completely non-transferable format. It takes about 25 minutes to run, and he runs it himself every morning. He comes in early to run it before his team's standup.

I wanted to use that data for apps I wrote, but his impossible format made that impractical, so I took apart his code, rewrote it in perl, replaced all the outrageous hard-coded root passwords with public keys, and added concurrency features. My script dumps the data into a memory-resident backend, and my filterable, sortable, taggable web "frontend"(very generous nomenclature) presents the data in html, csv, and json. Compared to the genius's 25 minute script that he runs himself in the morning, mine runs in about 45 seconds, and runs automatically in cron every two hours.

Optimized!

I think I'm going to delete my account.

I browsed through my personal feed, and even though I've spend some time curating, only about 1 in a 100 is a real rant. The rest are memes, mildly funny observations, the kind of programmer humor which is only funny to non-programmers, and bland anekdotes.

And when I post something IN ALL CAPS WITH SOME FUCKING CURSEWORDS AND RAGE IN THERE YOU CUNTS ALL TELL ME TO CALM DOWN AND BE MORE POSITIVE?

What kind of a weak, smoothieslurping mindfulness convention has this community become? Do you guys just want to be a mildly funny reddit clone for easily offended hipsters?

This place was my outlet, my venting space, the spot where I didn't feel alone in frustrations.

I find this new content fucking sickening.

Friend: Why do you always listen to metal music when coding?

Me: So that if non-programmers saw me smashing my keyboard, they will understand better why I did so.

Friend: Fair point.....

"Programmers are persons that convert caffeine into code". Every time i see this quote, i ask myself: Am i the only one? (non-coffee drinking programmer)

Is it bad that I refer to non-programmers as muggles?

That fealling when your in a social dinner with friends (non programmers or techies) and everyone has great histories about work situations... and then you try to tell your history... and then you think about it.. and then you give up because no one will be so excited about some major bug you solved

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

I HATE MEETINGS!!
Especially with non-programmers 😒

Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.

The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.

The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.

The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.

What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.

An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.

All those fucking non-programmers in my university should fuck off!! Just because am studying computer science and am in 2nd year doesn't mean i have to be like Mark and build Fucking facebook!!
Mark started in his 2nd year...bla bla fuck you!! You wanna make facebook go learn how to code yourself worthless piece of shit.
So much talent is discouraged even before it buds because of these stupid expectations!!

It was 1999. I was just starting my first real job as a programmer for a major insurance company. We were working on code that would screen scrape legacy mainframe data output and convert it to a web-based UI. REALLY stupid project approach I had no input on. I happened to find a programmer in Germany who had released his code in the public domain that would help with making a certain conversion task easier. I downloaded his code and put it to work.

During a code review, a programmer who was probably about 60 asked me where I got the code and what it was doing. I didn't even get to the part about what it was doing because he made fun of me so badly, in a fake German accent in front of a room full of non-programmers, for using code that today is no big deal due to the prevalence of open source. I just clammed up in humiliation because he got everyone laughing at me. His philosophy was if we didn't buy it or write it ourselves, we had no business using it.

I guess I was just ahead of my time?

I'm leaving my job.

That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).

With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".

Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...

I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.

I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.

Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.

Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.

To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.

/rant

Found this on Amazon.
For non-germans:
"Programmers don't make a mistake, they just create new Features!"

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

'Muggles' appear to be a word used quite a lot on devRant for non-programmers.

I propose we call them PWOTRTJSAJAKAGFDEM:s, or Pwortes for short.

To clarify: 'People who often times refer to JavaScript as Java aka. God fucking damned evil Muggles'.

When non-programmers try to make programming memes...

Non programmers will never look at everyday problems the same way programmers do.

So two mini rants rolled up into one

1) programmers who can code in 8292 languages but don’t know shit about the business side and think they know better than the business folks when it comes to big picture decisions, please go fuck yourself.

2) People who respond to “Gotta set up a few machines for non tech folks” with “Oh you should try Linux, it’s so user friendly”. You need to go fuck yourself. You have no idea what you’re talking about and probably lack empathy too you rotten squid smelling cumsock.

Languages like python and R are some-what high level languages, with an easy syntax and very readable code. This useful essentially to make it easier for non-programmers to use it. For me as a software developer with +4 years of professional programming. I started with Assembly, Quick-Basic to C++, Java then C#, I found Python super convenient, and at times way too convenient.
At first it felt like I was cheating, and would not consider myself actually writing code, more like pseudo-coding.
After a year or so, I got used to it and it became my default, but it still does not feel right .. is anyone else feeling the same?
I do believe that coding the hard way is not always the right way, but I am just wired that way.

I need to show this to all the non-programmers on my dev team to make them realise...

PM: You can cut corners it it's necessary.
Me: Thanks for giving me permission to move faster.
*But as you know, I wouldn't be in this position if you hadn't made us agree to such an unrealistic deadline.*
..
...
*after completion*
.
.
PM: There are bugs in the code.
ME: There are bugs, because you asked me to cut corners. *fu#k you* *wtf moment*

Code comments #1: A way to document bad code that wasn't reduced to it's essentials and thus unreadable. Bad.

Code comments #2: A way to explain for non-programmers how the code works. Wrong place.

Code comments #3: Company policy. No one really knows why, but others do that, so we better do it to. The management sucks.

Code comments #4: Because some hip methodology/guru describes how to document code. After a few years, when the methodology has been (unofficially) forgotten, everyone still comments the code the same way. The old management sucked.

Code comments 5#: For insecure programmers who want to convince them self they understand the code they've written. Maybe apply at McDo?

Code comments #6: Some programmers are apparently paid by lines of code. Possibly understandable.

// Comments, anyone?

After many years... I truly believe that non IT people belive that this is how programmers work:

- Goodmorning computer. How are you? Can you make me a program? I want the program to include an userfriendly userinterface, database, optimized code, documentation and dont forget that i dont want any bugs! Thanks computer. I'll get back to you when my coffee is ready.

You can always tell if someone is a programmer by asking them:

Is zero equal to zero or equal to 1?

Non devs say 0, devs say 1

trs()

For those of you desiring to post non-rants, I wrote a handy utility function for you:

/*
* Toggles whether this post is
* a rant or not.
*/
function toggleRant()
{
// Check if toggling is safe
for(var i = 0; i < 999999999; i ++)
for(var t = 0; t < 999999999; t ++);
console.log("Crazy security checks came through.")

// Toggle ('isRant' is true by default)
isRant = !isRant
}

From now on, you can easily put 'toggleRant()' on the first line of any rant. As we all know, the 'isRant' on devRant is true by default.

Feel free to play around with it:

toggleRant()
toggleRant()
toggleRant()

This would also indicate that your "rant" is not a rant.

I've also wrapped the 'toggleRant' into another function with a shorter name for you lazy people (which most programmers are):

/*
* Wrapper for 'toggleRant'.
*/
function tr()
{
toggleRant()
trogus() // Just in case
}

Or if you type one additional letter, you also make sure that it's extra safe to call the function:

/*
* Extra safe version of 'tr'.
*/
function trs()
{
for(var i = 0; i < 746985768; i ++);
console.log ("Extra safe")

tr()
}

What is the condition to join two tables ?
Programmer: primary keys match.
Non-Programmer: The tables height must match.😐

There are two kinds of people who work at Microsoft:
Non-programmers.
Those who use Linux cause they hate Windows.

What if we were in an alternate universe where Java was a scripting language and therefore was the same as JavaScript, and all non-programmers thought they were different.

I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.

The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?

After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.

(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)

After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.

The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.

Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.

Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?

Biggest teamwork fail? This is the general way we do business where I work right now:
My boss didn’t want to be the kind who hovers, always micromanaging. He also hates the idea of taking programmers away from their work for meetings. Sounds great, right? This has resulted in:

• All non-lead devs being excluded from all meetings other than scrum (including sprint planning and review meetings). Nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. They don’t think we “need to know.” This means most of our day is spent trying to figure out what needs to be done, rather than getting anything done.

• Our remote boss making dozens of important decisions about our platform, never telling us, and blaming us for not forcing our lead to be more communicative.

• Pull requests staying open for weeks, sometimes months, because nobody has definitively decided what version we’re actually supposed to be working on. This means our base branch could be any of them, and it means PRs that have been opened too long need to be closed, updated, and re-opened on the false promise of someone actually looking at it.

Just ranting here... but I think our biggest teamwork fail is happening right now, with all of those things ^

Having to explain to non-programmers why devrant uses ++ and -- for invited and down votes....Same as explaining why they named it C++

My friend is learning PHP and I told him to install xampp but that fucker went nuts and installed MySQL too which didn't allow the xampp's SQL and ended in conflict.
Oh man that's so funny when non programmers don't do what we say.

God, I hate python and its ecosystem with a passion! I feel like because of it being so popular amongst non-programmers 99% of the python code one has to deal with is just plain garbage. Also, fuck your shitload of dependencies who all fail to install!

Fucking shit for brains authors that think the digital world is a fantasy realm where everything can happen just to aid their story. Out of boredom i watched "scorpion" today, a tv series about a group of geniusses which are a special case task force.
They got a visitor from the government saying the servers from the federal reserve bank were encrypted with ransomware. I already twitched when they said the economic system would collapse if the servers were left inoperational for a few days. Then one guy got to his desk and "hacked" the fed network to check... he then tried to remove the malware but "it changed itself when observed". But they got the magical fingerprint of the device that uploaded it. In the end some non-programmers created the malware, but it is super fast and dangerous because it runs on a quantum computer which makes it hyper fast and dangerous. They got to the quantum computer which was a glowing cube inside another cube with lasers going into it and they had to use mirrors to divert the lasers to slow down that quantum thingy. And be careful with that, otherwise it explodes. In the end the anti-malware battled the malware and won, all in a matter of minutes.

This is a multimillion hollywood production. How can a movie this abusive to computer science even air on television? Shit like this is the reason people still think the cyberworld is some instable thing that can explode any second. It's not, it's an instable thing that can break down any second. I remember "ghost in the wires" and people had surreal imaginations about the internet already. Shit like this is why people stay dumb and think everything can be done in seconds. If i ever should encounter one of these idiots i tell him i have an app that can publish his browser history by taking a picture of his phone and watch his reaction.
Time to shuw down the tv and learn vim again.

Prof introducing a batch of non-programmers to JavaScript.

Me: Ha! I'm going to ace this class.

Disclosure: Its an Art school, We're studying Multimedia Arts, and we have a couple of Web Development classes that focus on html, css, js, and php. (and I have been a web developer for 4 years)

working with non programmers - need to make a gigantic excel worksheet for everything that python could do in a dozen lines or two... 😑

I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.

Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.

Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.

All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.

I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.

If you want a self stem boost talk to some non programmers sometime. They seems to see us as gods with some mystical magical powers!!

Talked with a broker today and he told me about a damaged computer that he had with some important files. I told him that I'm not that kind of computer guy and proceeded to explain him briefly what I do (I build stuff) and he was like "oh, so you a the the REAL computer guy!" (no offense to any technicians here!)
I loved it!

So, get out and talk to the muggles and stop complaining that you are not good enough to work for Google (or Google is not good enough for you anymore anyways...)

Sometimes I want to show off some fancy code to non-programmers. Then I remember basic code would do the same.

-Dream with code.
-Compulsion to start coding every no profitable projects that I imagine.
-Buy a lot of programming books.
-Want to have the source code of my favorite DOS games.
-Hate business people.
-Love language wars like a viking.
-Love terminals.
-Hate GUIs.
-Hate printers
-Hate every non programmers.
-Hate
-Hate

Explaining difficult things in a way that they are understandable by non-expert audiences.

This helps a lot to focus on simplicity when programming. And simple means it'll get understood by your peer programmers, it is simpler to test and it will be easier to maintain, and so on...

Linux certainly is the best. It works even on my slow 4gb laptop.

One of my family member's laptop running vista went dead today. Checked system, seems like only workaround is using repair disks with iso. Used this chance to finally convince her on moving to ubuntu.
Well, considering there wasn't even any comparison needed for Vista x Linux, she might just need to suit herself using libreoffice instead of winoffice. Just afraid she(not familiar with computers) might be bothered about the sudo here and there-thats something that takes time to get used to for non-programmers.

Well, changing someone's OS really is a great accomplishment. Kudos for myself.

Reading through one of my posts I’ve realized how much ego programmers can actually have. Guys, some of you have already mastered or grasped more than just the foundations of the industry standard languages, as well as developed a very solid intuition behind some design patterns and a solid understanding of some frameworks and libraries, say NumPy, say React... we get it.

You don’t have to be such condescending assholes and be offended by some of the jokes we, programming beginners, make to release stress or just to have fun.

You already have some amazing developer and engineering skills. Do not ruin it with such a detrimental attitude; I make this post because I myself have made this mistake, and I still do to this day. But if what I’ve felt reading your comments is what non-programming people feel when around me, I wouldn’t be surprised if I found that some people hated me or just wanted to kill me.

I don’t know if this will get downvot’d or if more people think like this. But I needed to share this, even just as a reflection of my very own attitude.

Thank you for your time,

D.

Me: *ranting to my friend who isn’t a dev (but is in IT and a good knowledge of networking) about a problem I came across in my project.

“I don’t know how I’ll send folders”

Him: “just compress it before hand and decompress when it’s sent”

Me: *mind fucked*

Have any of you guys gotten surprisingly good ideas from non programmers?

Being the only developer in your circle of non-tech friends is weird 😕.
And why are most female programmers not appealing 🤦‍♂️.
The beautiful ones are usually clueless and can't get into a ”deep programming concept ”conversation.
I guess I can't eat my cake and have it at a time.

To create an abstraction simple enough to make complex business logic challenges solvable for non programmers.

The issue I see today is programmers solving problems they don't understand as well as the user. I think two ways might be taken:
- Programmers specialize in other fields and solve problems there
- Other professionals create their own software

Both will happen in the future (IMHO) and I want to help the second happening.

Note: Excel does this really well, but I think we can so quite better today.

There's nothing funnier than talking to another programmer around a group of non programmers. Feel like the fucking rick and morty memes when you go "Hey bro. I heard you were having issues with finding the direction between two vectors, are you telling me you don't know that the direction is basically x1-x2 and y1 - y2? Just be glad you arent trying to rotate the object towards the second one with quaternions. I know eulers work but its still a pain in the ass to figure out the euler direction." And everyone sits there looking at you like youre speaking minecraft enchanting table

So this has been a pet peeve of mine since I started coding roughly 7-8 years ago, and I want to know if I'm alone on this.

When non programmers ask to, or do so without informing you, watch you work.

I cannot function whilst someone is watching me, it just doesn't work.

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

So here is my take on a shitty teacher.

I once had a microcontroller teacher, who tried to teach a class of non programmers how to code, from a broken compendium. While he was teaching he would correct errors that he found. Most of the classes would be pure theory on C and no exercises.
Needles to say after the first two semesters none of the students could program, and over half of the class had left the school.

if (!rant) Fuck oranges
else
It's about time we make some God fucking damn things fucking God fucking clear. What the fuck does programming have to do with fucking non-programming?

Honestly. Fucking fucks pretending to be fucking programmers (probably not you, but fuck off if you're one of those fuckers.) FUCK SUCH PEOPLE FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK fuck FUCK!

There. Now that's out there. Leave fucking programming to the fucking fuckers who fucking know some-fucking-thing fucking ab-fucking-out it. If you're learning, ask questions, without you there'd be no fucking future for good fucking programmers. But if you're a fucking fuck fucking ducks in the fucking park--fuck the God fucking damn the fuck OFF!

The new MacBooks look so nice. And Mojave is pretty nice, and dark theme! And the touch bar! The price is quite high but for the first time I'm actually debating getting one... Almost. But:

Why no escape key apple! You were so close! A physical escape key at the cost of your touch bar being 1 inch smaller! Is that too much to ask!

Many programmers use Mac. I can see why, it's a bsd variant, it's almost a Linux box except it's supported and accepted by the non-geeks of the world.

Many programmers use Vim! It's great!

So it stands to reason that a "not insignificant" amount of Mac users use Vim. Why would you do this to us? Or at least offer a "Vim model! With physical escape key, some nice out of the box vim buttons for the touch bar, a greatly inflated pricetag... Yknow, the works!" But nothing?! You almost had me apple.

1) Having the opportunity to read and write the future, with no one telling you that you can't

2) feeling superior to non-techies because as this world gets more and more digital every day, you have more potential to control them or make them dependent on you

3) hopefully the AI overlords will be more peaceful to programmers because we created them....

Rant here... Consistent daily Mob or pair pair programming is for noobs, non-competent programmers that delay deadlines and cannot hold their own in corporate development environments

I work with a few non-programmers on my team and after almost 2 full years of using our CMS one of them called me over because they were getting an error when trying to copy a hyperlink... I come over and everything looks fine, so I say "Have you right clicked on the hyperlink and clicked 'Copy Shortcut'?"... She says "Well no, I don't want a shortcut I want to copy the URL." .... ::face palm:: This is why the other countries are beating us!

Why are non-technical people put in charge of technical people? I get there's a stereotype that programmers aren't good with people, but that's not really my experience. How can I fail to achieve expectations when you don't outline any? How is "I didn't see you run enough scripts" a valid criticism when they're run locally from my machine with no record being created? Especially when those scripts are only for very specific processes I generally don't deal with? Seriously I was on the team less than 5 months come my yearly review and I'm already under-performing? I can't even switch teams because in-house recruiters always request the last performance review and mine sucks thanks to that asshole. Nevermind the one before that I excelled, but different role doesn't matter I guess. Some days I'm so tempted to cash out that 401k and just hope I find a better job within a year. Anyone have advice on dealing with this shit?

Inhuman deadlines imposed by non-programmers... don't know what feels worst: the shame of my own present code, or the fear of my own future bugs.

It's super hard to see how many steps/changes any task/feature will require.
So it's just fundamentally impossible to give accurate deadlines.
I try to drill this into all non-programmers I work with.
They hate how wild my ranges are.

There's been a fad in the company where the managers ask for the opinions of other departments to "get different perspectives".

On one hand, we get feedback by non-experts, which is obviously bad because they're not in their field. "Feature X is kinda complicated. We could simplify it by doing A." and the manager goes "that's a brilliant idea! Let's do that!" and the devs go "we did consider that, but it has drawback N. And perhaps you wanna do B, but that has drawback M..."

And then they were asking for us programmers for inputs on their designs for logos, etc. Naturally, as programmers, we wanted quick access to many functionalities. But marketing wants a simpler and more intuitive design, even if it involves more clicks. This wasn't in my job description! I just wanna code! Thinking is your job!

Designs and artistic impressions...on a website.. . Those two have lots of difference dear non programmers. Stop appreciating random crap.

I hate it when I'm knee deep in projects that need to be done before the new CI strategy starts two avoid a three week long full test every two weeks and then my dear boss comes up with having me do the planning for the next testphase while my coworker is scrolling through 9gag. I mean, sorry old man but either I automate this monstrosity of thirty million layers of 'naturally grown', ill documented, identifier lackimg piece of shit or I can do the fucking schedule. My mother isn't an octopus, i've got only two arms...

Tl;dr: Why do non programmers always heavily underestimate the time shit needs to get done?