• Omega_Jimes@lemmy.ca
    82·
    17 days ago

    I’m not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.

    After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I’m in university for tech, and i’m still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don’t often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
      31·
      17 days ago

      A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn’t a software company decided they were now a “software company”. I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.

    • four@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      17 days ago

      What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing

      • tinyvoltron@discuss.onlineEnglish
        5·
        17 days ago

        And that’s why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don’t always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.

    • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      6·
      17 days ago

      That’s why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.

      And that’s why game developers are paid terribly

    • Lyrl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      17 days ago

      I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
    42·
    17 days ago

    An architect’s building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.

  • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
    26·
    17 days ago

    You know those illustrated story books for children?

    The ones with cute anthropomorphized animals going about their jobs in a fairytale animal society, posting letters and walking kids across the street and fixing cars in the garage?

    If you can’t accurately depict yourself doing your job as a drawing in one of those books, it’s not a real job.

    (I’m also a programmer, by the way…)

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      2·
      16 days ago

      I was reading one of those books to my kid once and there was a pig butcher. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work in the lore of the book. Was he some halliburlector type or was he actually just a butcher. How deep does the analogue go?

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
    23·
    17 days ago

    One day I was thinking of Andy Warhol’s film “Empire”, which is basically one continuous 8 hour shot of the Empire State Building.

    I thought it’d be cool to make a similar art film about your average programmer’s work day. 8 hour shot of a programmer staring at the screen intensely, drinking coffee, scrolling through the code, and occasionally muttering “why the fuck doesn’t this work?”

    • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
      2·
      17 days ago

      ooooooohhhh… so that’s the point of “Empire” ? showing the stark immobility of the nevralgic/symbolic center of Earth’s most powerful military empire ?

      I never saw the film, tbh. Maybe it would have stricken me

      • Rose@slrpnk.net
        6·
        17 days ago

        Well it’s an art film. The purpose of art is to evoke emotions, to inspire dialogue. Yours is one possible interpretation. Ultimately, who’s to say it’s not valid?

        • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
          7·
          17 days ago

          That’s quite non-committal… of course art is supposed to evoke emotions… but that’s not getting me anywhere I wasn’t already… I was asking about the artist’s intent

  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    17 days ago

    The result in the end should be an organized series of events, a process, that takes or produces data. The data can be anything from a single number in a calculator, to a text message, to your entire social profile. The process can be anything from basic math, to advanced math (i.e. machine learning, rendering, cryptography, etc), to performing simple operations on that data like shuffling that data somewhere else.

    These processes are stacked on top of each other and utilized with basic logic (if, else, loops, scope, etc) and combined together with a myriad of programming patterns and algorithms, to produce higher and higher orders of complexity, that eventually solve a real-world problem.

    The result is an ever increasing complexity of useful tools and processes that can either solve specific problems directly or at least provide discovery for other useful tools and processes that might.

    It’s translating higher order problems from something understandable at the task level all the way down until a piece of specialized rock that only understands on and off can eventually spit out a meaningful result.

    ok ok electrical engineers get the claim for the last sentence, and plenty of the real-world complexity, but hopefully it illustrates my point that ‘nothing’ is … just wrong. We cannot discount the absolute importance of abstract things. Everything from “imaginary” numbers to completely abstract things like philosophy have real- world consequences. If programming produces nothing, then MOST jobs that aren’t manual labor produce nothing.

    • Droechai@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      17 days ago

      If she would have wrote that on the last question I think the teacher might have deducted points due to parental ghostwriting.

      The writing style kind of somehow doesnt fit with the previous answers style

  • Robyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    9·
    17 days ago

    Yea… Tho I’d argue that’s true of most jobs nowadays. Nothing, or somehow less than. Joining the work force has been a very depressing experience so far. Any ambition of learning and or contributing getting annihilated. It’s a compromise that allows me to have a roof and food at the end of the month without living at my parents.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    6·
    17 days ago

    Yeah once i realized that nothing lasts very long in it, it started to feel like a pointless job. But it makes good money. But in the end, its just new frameworks and languages to learn forever so you never feel like you actually are an expert at anything.

    Networking is a good field though. If you are an expert in networking and devops, it really helps with a lot of troubleshooting and networking so you can easily run a homelab. Those skills actually last and are useful every day.

    I cant bring myself to be interested in Ai though. Im just not excited about training models.

    • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      I feel sorry for 1990s people doing my job. When they moved a paper process to a highly automated IT solution they halved our workforce. When we do the same we get people moved to more valuable work

      Government IT is rewarding but is also so dependent on political processes.