• Blake [he/him] ( Blake@feddit.uk ) 
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        3 years ago

        You probably shouldn’t decide how much to respect someone for what job they do. Unless they do like a really sketchy or immoral “job”, like a hitman or a scammer or something.

        • essell ( essellburns@beehaw.org ) 
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          3 years ago

          I think the only reason to respect someone is for what they do.

          What better measure is there, even if job is only part of that? better to form my opinion of people for what they do rather than the traditional historical measures.

          • Blake [he/him] ( Blake@feddit.uk ) 
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            3 years ago

            A persons actions are important, but so are personality and motivations. A job isn’t “what someone does because that’s who they are as a person”, it’s the thing that they do because they need to pay their bills. It’s one thing that you know for sure that they have ulterior motives for - money.

            I respect people for how they act towards me and others. Are they generous, or selfish? Do they admit when they’re wrong, or do they double down on it? When they have power over others, are they cruel, or are they kind?

            This is way more important than what job someone has. Often, what job someone has only gives you a guesstimate as to how wealthy their parents were, and little beyond that.

  • Park ranger. There are two kinds: chill and friendly, or the kind that make you show all your documents, prove your park stickers are valid, make you repark your car, and then scold you for being too loud even though the next nearest campsite is several hundred feet away and nobody has complained and you arent even being loud…

  • SethranKada ( SethranKada@lemmy.ca ) 
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    3 years ago

    Programming. People treat it like a career, but fact is that unless your really good at it, your not going to make any money from it. I’ve found programming to be far more like art than work anyway.

    • Cralder ( Cralder@feddit.nu ) 
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      3 years ago

      Maybe I’m biased since I recently started working as a software dev, but you don’t need to be really good to get a job as a programmer. I’m evidence of that.

    • Blake [he/him] ( Blake@feddit.uk ) 
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      3 years ago

      It is a career, for sure. It can be hard to get into, but I’ve been in the industry for a long time and I have worked with people who have been paid a developer’s salary for years who were unbelievably bad at their jobs.

      I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.

      I’d say there are a lot of developers who are barely competent at copy/pasting code from stack overflow until it works. Maybe 10-20% of the people in SMEs are that. The majority are pretty decent, but kinda lazy. Then there are the incredibly competent and hard-working people who are like gold dust. A really good developer who isn’t a complete drama king/queen, has good communication skills and just gets on with their work instead of getting sucked into personal pet projects is incredibly rare.

      • treadful ( treadful@lemmy.zip ) 
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        3 years ago

        I used to manage a software team - once I was trying to explain something to a coworker and asked them to write some code to loop from 1 to 10 for me, and they couldn’t do it. I even prompted them by saying “you know, write a for loop” and they said that they kinda knew what for loop was, but they wouldn’t know how to write one. I asked them to give it their best shot, just write the word “for” and then see what flows from there, but they were just not able to proceed. I explained how to do it to them, and then they asked me what an int (integer) was… but I had already explained what an int was the day prior. This person had an honours degree in computer science.

        Are you sure you managed the team? I’m joking, but how did this person get through an interview, let a lone survive so long working as a dev?

        • Blake [he/him] ( Blake@feddit.uk ) 
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          3 years ago

          Haha, it’s a fair comment - it’s a team I inherited, it wasn’t my hiring decision. I don’t know what the interview process was like before me, but I’m guessing it was a very old fashioned “where do you see yourself in 5 years” affair.

          I’m pretty sure that they just muddled through by copy/pasting stuff seemingly at random and tinkering until it worked. Which can be a good way to learn, for sure, but it’s not really what you want from a professional developer, full time.

          The guy who managed the team before me didn’t believe in object oriented design, and not in a cool Haskell way, in a really old fashioned “I can do everything with batch scripts” way. The team was using a programming language that was so old that they were using dosbox to compile it because the compiler was a 16-bit application.

            • Blake [he/him] ( Blake@feddit.uk ) 
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              3 years ago

              Yeah, it was called DataFlex. The vendor has released new versions of it called Visual DataFlex (VDF) and then renamed VDF back to DataFlex, but this language was what we called “character mode” DataFlex. It’s still used by the company as their main data entry application even today and a lot of their processes still are written in DataFlex. A lot of the work that my team did was rewriting a lot of the old crap in C#, but there was just so much of it built up over the decades.

    • Not sure where you’re from, but here in the states, if you have a basic ability to code from a bootcamp or even self taught with a portfollio, you’ll pretty easily get hired making anywhere from 45-55k a year. And after about 2-4 years, you’ll pretty easily be making 70-90k sometimes more depending on where you live.

    • orizuru ( orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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      3 years ago

      You can still use programming to leverage your current position.

      If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.

      Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.

    • jtk ( jtk@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
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      3 years ago

      In an interesting and challenging field, yes, you need to be really good at it because everyone wants to do it. But if you are willing to work on anything, like an ASP.NET Web Forms site built in 2005, that the business is entirely dependent upon to function in even the most basic capacity, with more technical debt than anyone would ever care to deal with, and no time allowed to refactor, you can make quite a nice living.

    • Oliver ( zomtecos@feddit.de ) 
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      3 years ago

      That’s why I switched sides. From programming myself to developing functions and writing requirements which someone else can implement into code. :)

      I could do some programming (did embedded C), but surely I wasn’t the very best in it. So now I’m the guy who defines what a small (but essential) part of SW has to do which will run in hopefully a few million cars in a couple of years. :) Much more fun (and money).