Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
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).
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
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.
That sounds much better than "push it to prod Friday" lol
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
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."
Someone needs a hug
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.
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 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.
That's okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.
'Bugs.'
And maybe some features as a side effect.
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.
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?"
"Minus 400 lines of code created today."
"That's less than nothing, kiddo ;)"
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.
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.
Wow get a load of this nerd
"My dad does a programmer."
Perchance the mother is also a programmer
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."
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.
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.
