Programmer Humor

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.

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!

Lol

"Just because my medical school was in the Cayman islands doesn't mean I'm not a real doctor."

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.

Work with tech with the elderly.

God love a web search. The amount of people who think I am magic because of it is too high.

Most of genz get it pretty intuitively because they grow up with Google searching. I didn't realise until recently how much more important it is you understand the answers than find them especially if you're getting a niche error.

Not much different to a doctor reading through clinical trials and then recommending the best treatment based on the use case. They didn't design, develop or manufacture the treatment. They were not involved in the trials. The majority are just expected to know enough to make an educated decision based on specific, individual circumstances.

I want my doctors to use tried and tested treatments. Not reinvent the wheel. A good doctor is one who has a high success rate.

Yet the industry acts as though you're not a good dev if you can't reinvented the wheel from scratch... coz... Ignorance? Ego? Delusions of grandeur?

And that’s why everything sucks.

change variable names
My code.

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.

You try memorising every known disease and alment in history.

a foundational understanding of how things work

Yeah! Kids these days are learning (in school) all about containers, service discovery, AWS, production deployment strategies, password vaulting solutions, cryptographic key/password management, and most importantly: politically defensive email practices.

Oh wait: No they aren't, LOL.

I just interviewed dozens of fresh (CS) college grads a few months ago and only one of them even knew what SSH was let alone anything remotely resembling basic command line stuff, Linux skills, or any of the above mentioned things.

They sure could write a mean linked list though! 😁