but i use ddg btw
Doctors
You still need doctors, because Dr Google just thinks everyone has cancer.
Imagine graduating in medecine and your employer respects you to be an expert at everything all at once that is related to the human body and being able to perform open heart and brain surgery and doing x-ray imaging and MRIs and being a gynecologist and an an optometrist and a pharmacist all at once.
That’s what being in IT is like. You’re expected to know how to program microcontrollers to mainframes to fucking VCRs and knowing every programming language ever created since electronic computers exist as well as networking and cloud technology and databases, etc. AND you have to be certified in all these things to prove you know them on top of your degree.
And vaginas, and MRI machines, and hearts change dramatically every couple of years. Plus the human body grows new organs and limbs every few months and you’re expected to immediately have 5 years experience with these new organs and limbs that have only existed for 2 months. Perfectly healthy suddenly people fall unconscious for no reason, despite all of their organs operating perfectly. When you check your human body documentation you discover that the lungs no longer work as of today, and you now need to use the sclurtleplussy instead. You have no idea what a sclurtleplussy, but you better figure it out immediately, or all these patients will die.
Why do programmers complain about expectations all the time? Just say “It needs more time” or “that’s not possible unless we change a lot of things”. Set the expectations, don’t accept them. You’re the expert. What are they gonna do? Do it themselves?
If they have inconvenient expectations, simply tell them to not have those! If your boss pushes back, just tell them in a calm but assertive tone that you tell them how things are gonna go, not the other way around.
I don’t understand why more people who have not been fired don’t do this.
Yeah! Piss all over their projects to asert dominance!
Wait: That’s what project managers do. Never mind.
We do set the expectations as best as we can, but the people who have these expectations really don’t like that - to some, it’s like we’re offending them, and to many others, there’s almost always some other developer they either know or heard about (they never do, in fact) that, allegedly, can do whatever we’re being asked, but 10x cheaper and 100x faster, and he’s also at a lower expertise level so we should be happy to have the job in the first place, oh and also update the documentation in 4 seconds in a way that doesn’t take away these 4 seconds from the “main work”.
Many of us love their job, or at least are very grateful to be able to have it, but we complain for the same reasons other people complain - ridiculous and/or hilarious clients, colleagues, and employers.
Well first, the big problem is they make promises based off of the estimates we give them, which they then cut down and over promise. It’s a careful dance between giving yourself the padding you need for if something goes wrong, and not letting them think they can cut down on that necessary padding if they find out you didn’t use it.
For us, we under promise and over deliver… Sales over promise, and project managers bid as low as they can to win contracts, and panic when the numbers aren’t working because they cut it too close or didn’t push back/renegotiate scope creep
So then, when the numbers don’t work and their boss tells them to fix it, they go to their team and tell them to make it work. And the only thing they can do is set meetings, make demands, and yell… Sure, you can tell them to go fuck themselves, but at that point you all look bad - if the technical and functional chains of command aren’t separated (more common), they just point at you as the problem to whoever signs your paychecks… Since talking to that person is part of their week and you’re busy working, that’s probably not a fight you’ll win.
If they’re any good, they do exactly what you said - they come over, say “hey, I’ve got this problem… This guy wants this, what will it do to our timeline?” And, by being proactive and trusting the experts, they can just go back to the customer and say “sorry, we went over the numbers and it blows out the budget, these are our options based on my expert and the contract vehicle”
Unfortunately, most people aren’t that good at their jobs. A lot of project managers have an ego and like to do handshake deals… once they start agreeing to things on their own, they put the whole team in a no-win situation
It’s not that things aren’t possible, it’s that there’s always more, and often better, options to pick from. Going back to medicine, it’s like surgeons have to learn new techniques, but with the difference there there isn’t anywhere near the same degree of specialization.
A better analogy would be if there were 10,000 ways to cut out a tumor but the patient only wanted the doctor to use one specific method because that’s what they have heard about. It’ll either be the method, “everyone’s using these days” or it’ll be a method that was popular in the 1990s but the tools available to perform that kind of surgery are hard to find these days because they were obsolete 20 years ago.
LoL you haven’t worked in a company as a software developer and it shows.
You’re expected to know how to program microcontrollers to mainframes to fucking VCRs and knowing every programming language ever created since electronic computers exist as well as networking and cloud technology and databases, etc. AND you have to be certified in all these things to prove you know them on top of your degree.
So there’s a problem even worse than this: When you have all those skills and more (I do 👍) employers expect to pay you the salary of someone who knows just one of those things.
Like, I was a professional hacker, a systems administrator (both Unix/Linux and Windows), I know networking, have administered/maintained databases, I’m also an award-winning web developer (I know the usual web stuff plus Python, Rust, and a few other things), an embedded developer (C, C++, and Rust), and I can even engineer, design, and program an entire product from scratch that didn’t exist before (see: https://youtu.be/iv6Rh8UNWlI?si=dG15yQlQpfNGCDal ). That includes designing/engineering the circuit board.
Do I get paid for knowing all these things? No. If I apply for any job you know what employers say when they reject me?
Overqualified
You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t!
Sick keyboard!!!
At the point you’re at with all your skills, have you thought of starting your own company? No employer will know how to use your talents as well as you do.
The number of people who simply don’t know how to effectively use a web search is absurd. If you can sit down to a search engine and find what you’re looking for within 5 minutes or less, you’re probably the go-to troubleshooting person for your family. The general population is almost dangerously tech-illiterate.
I don’t know what pissed me off more, watching my mom write a book into the google search bar because she refuses to just use the key words or the fact that it gave her the exact info she wanted immediately despite being somewhat niche.
Well, using a more complex search does improve results…
Using a different example, would “apple pie recipe” be less complex of a search than “What do I need to cook an apple pie and how do I do it?”
Edit - As far as a search engine cares.
AFAIK the two are identical, and words such as “how”, “do” and “what” are mostly ignored by the engine. The only content words in both are “apple” “pie” and “recipe”/“cook”.
depends on kind of complexity
Web search is rapidly getting worse & worse, unfortunately. Thanks, AI & SEO-chasers…
Shameless plug for Kagi. It’s a subscription search service but you get unlimited searches for $10/month (and a few hundred I think for $5), and it’s generally much better than Google – especially since you can customize which sites are shown higher in the results and which ones are shown lower or blocked entirely.
The reason why it’s a subscription service is that they don’t have to rely on ad revenue, meaning they don’t track or profile you at all (so no search history either, although I think they’re working on an optional history feature)
Somebody told me a story once about how they went to a doctor in Sweden. They told him their symptoms and the dude started googling them.
My doc is also googling stuff very often.
Probably not bad. If I could have memorized the entire dotnet framework documentation, I would. Until then I will keep googling, and I will usually recognize if the solution is sound. Probably the same with doctors and health.
Agreed, I’m simply pointing out that the comic makes it seem like programming is something you can always just Google the answers for, instead of a skill that requires honing and a basal foundation, similar to medical science or law.
I would love to have a doc who googles instead of just trying to sound smart based on their limited knowledge
Give kagi a try, if you haven’t yet.
Definitely worth the money imo. No ads is a weird experience.