11–20 of 157 posts
I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
* I don't understand their technical terms.
* The way they explain their thought process when something goes wrong, feels very much like software engineers fixing a bug.
There are differences but this, to me, was the most striking similarity.
I couldn't care less if you can invert a binary tree. One of the greatest developers I've ever worked with, I hired straight out of college. He graduated with an electrical engineering degree but his senior year he took a course in Java and liked it and decided to be a programmer. Couldn't tell me the first thing about programming but I could tell he had the chops to figure things out and that he had a passion for things getting done.
I've seen CI/CD configs where you couldn't tell the difference! :)
It’s a small sample size, but highly motivated self taught folks who come from tough blue collar careers that I’ve seen have been pretty reliable and committed. I presume it’s a lot easier to appreciate the working conditions and compensation package, as well as tolerate the political dramas, when you have some perspective on how life is for most other people.
It has downsides, though. One thing you learn in blue-collar businesses is that the direct work is primary, with other stuff secondary. In a restaurant, nobody shuts down during the lunch rush to talk with everybody. In a factory, everybody understands that the machines keep going; any administration is done very much on the margins.
So it's maddening to me that in most office contexts, my schedule fills up with meetings and I'm expected to get my work done around them. And that nobody sees that as a problem, because that's just office culture.
> His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight." Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?
Not at all. Not everything needs a digital solution.
Fair enough.
This is great. Occasionally I wonder what I'd be doing if I weren't a software developer. I suspect I'd be a mediocre car mechanic. I'd be great at the weird and interesting problems, but bored to tears by the standard, unchallenging work. And crabby about it, of course.
Sold everything and travelled for 4 years where I worked on projects of my own (programming) and being self taught I planned to be a programmer when I came back (now) but thinking about it... I don't think I would like the day to day work, typing code like a monkey on the que of a superior, it honestly feels like programmers are the new factory workers of the industrial revolution.
Also doesn't help that I am in the Netherlands, where it isn't paid as exceptional as in the US, it maybe would make it bearable.
My big problem now, what am I going to do...
> His reasoning: "Wherever sewer odor can get in, so can smoke … except we can see smoke with a flashlight." Anyone else get the urge to build a smell detector machine with an arduino or rpi?