Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

I'm trying to decide if this is parody or not.

I try and try to explain that this arcane system of monochrome text and rendering steps is ACTUALLY easier than editing in Microsoft Word, but my pleas fall on deaf ears.

Easier for you, who probably has an auto-activating mode in your text editor that highlights Markdown. Not easier for someone whose only plaintext editing tool is Wordpad. Not easier for someone who can hit command-i to turn on and off italics as easily and thoughtlessly as you type .

And of course it is a simple program, but whenever the first step is opening a terminal, it is no longer simple*

To you, the terminal is a comfortable place. You have learnt all the arcane incantations, including the ways to make the terminal help you craft and remember them. To them it is a mystifying place, with little guidance, and the possibility of totally fucking up their computer if they type the wrong thing.

I tell them to execute the simple and easy step of running $PACKAGE_MANAGER install $PROGRAM, and they don't want to do it.

And then you list examples of exactly how you have learnt all the arcane incantations. You have ten different package managers on your computer already, and know how to use them.

"Can you help with my printer" "no"

Fair enough, really. Drivers suck.

What was the point of writing this post? I don't know. [...] Maybe I just need to have a little more empathy (or is it sympathy?) for normal people.

Yes.

Find someone who refuses to use your cryptic incantations, and find out what they're really good at. If you can find someone who's frighteningly good at a thing, who's been doing the thing at a professional level since before you're born, that's the best. If it's something you have no interest in doing yourself, that's even better.

Ask them their stories of the time they had to work with someone who was completely clueless of their craft. Ask them how they do something that looks impossibly complicated to you with next to no effort. Ask them to walk you through doing one of those things in enough detail for you to do it. How immensely tedious does this start to sound? How many times do they use a word you've never heard, or a word you're familiar with in a way that is pretty clearly having a very specific meaning to their craft that is not the same as normal usage? What tools do they refer to; how many of them do you have casually sitting around your life, and know how to use with even the vaguest competence?

"Oh you're a programmer, come this to this start up idea you can do after working 9-5 for zero pay"

Keep in mind that "unix knowledge" doesn't mean knowing bash scripting, but understanding a bit about the shell is the key part.

You worked on windows, but you probably know about environment variables, how they are passed around, what PATH is, how to list files in a directory, cd around, copy/delete files, redirect, pipe and how to use git given your profession. Isn't that the case? I've been on Windows and learned all that as a hobbyist (I'm a professional developer, but I work on unix systems)

I asked the company I work for to add as a requirement "familiarity with bash", because otherwise we would get candidates that don't know how to use PATH, or environment variables, and that was a serious problem. It's equivalent to having the requirement "know how to use a computer"

If you're wording your CV the way it screams sysadmin right in your face the only offers you get will be sysadmin. Try emphasizing your coding experience more

I got the feeling that what the commenter wrote exactly was a bit of hyperbole, but maybe that wasn't the case. Either way, I would sort of expect new college graduates or anyone to receive some training from their seniors and colleagues along these lines. They aren't all that hard to learn or all that hard to teach. The main concern is showing context and uses cases where they're useful and important.

> Isn't that the case?

Yes, of course. But there is certainly a wide variance in people's understandings of all the command line tools and uses cases that they are presented with in their own work and experience.

Software engineering is a huge field with a ton of use cases and different contexts and applications and domains. It's really all over the place. There is some patience needed when interfacing between all of these.