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What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

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Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#4
post #2

Making six figures (by sheer luck of the fact that their work scales better than most jobs, including most harder jobs)

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries.

I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better than the vast majority of other options out there.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#5
> How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping

Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM.

What it does save on is memory bandwidth, because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture for objects that are far away. And it improves visual quality, since you can use expensive scaling algorithms to produce high-quality downscaled copies.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#6

> How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM. What it does save on is memory bandwidth , because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture for objects tha…

in early games it was a metod to save RAM too, for a short time but it did. Because you didn't have to store all mip map parts in the RAM

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#8
post #2

Making six figures (by sheer luck of the fact that their work scales better than most jobs, including most harder jobs)

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries. I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better t…

Yup. When I get frustrated I just take a deep breath and then remember how relatively easy and well compensated this career is compared to just about anything else - for me, anyway.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#9
post #2

Making six figures (by sheer luck of the fact that their work scales better than most jobs, including most harder jobs)

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries. I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better t…

I worked in biology before going into tech. Dear lord its so much easier to scale your labor in tech. I have manually genetically engineered multiple types of organisms. It's insanely tedious.

To the extent that if I ever went back, I would probably immediately focus on roboticizing most of the work.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#10
laughs nervously while trying to get performant 2D rendering of large tilemaps in their first game

I can barely begin to imagine all the pain involved in creating AAA games. Decades of whitepapers to read and build upon only to get to a point where consumers aren't downright angry at the quality of graphics being given to them.

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