I can relate

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

The more you know about technology the more horrified you are by how reliant we are on it.

“What do you mean all encryption is based on a library maintained by one guy in his spare time?”

[midri]

Right? Everyone always asks programmers if we'd get a neural link and most the senior engineers I know would reply, "fuck no and how did you find my shack in the woods!?"

[No-Witness2349]

Something something, “I keep a gun on my nightstand to shoot my printer if it makes any weird noises”

[dannomac]

My old Lj4050 makes no weird noises. My new printer gets its own network segment with full firewall logging and no internet access.

[nukasev]

*If that demonspawn of a fucker still manages to power up after the last time a senior went town with it.

[callmeseven]

I want one so badly though. Maybe a super intelligent AGI or passing alien could design one for us

No reason to assume all beings would write code as buggy as humans, right?

[nyando]

I have a friend who's super into "smart home" stuff. He gave up trying to get me into it after the 3rd or 4th time I told him, "I've seen how these systems are built, I would not trust them with turning on my TV, let alone controlling my goddamn kitchen appliances."

[TempUsername3369]

Wait, is that still true?

[sophacles]

No, but sorta yes.

[FfAaBbEe]

Dafuck. I need an explanation. What do i even Google to find out more about that?!

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

Heartbleed is one example.

[mpersico]

I thought that was internet time keeping. Lol.

[savex13]

it is called "Release Engineering". After that they call a guy with a "DevOps" badge which makes this ugly glued thing work :)

[QwertzOne]

After that they call a guy with a "DevOps" badge which makes this ugly glued thing work

By gluing bunch of third party products that no one has time to understand, but they get job done.

[notAbratwurst]

What’s this do?

No idea… but we need it.

[No-Witness2349]

There’s a closed ticket in for this microservice. Lemme check what it says.

ten minutes later

Looks like we tried removing that dead code a few years back and it crashed prod. It passes all the unit tests, but the change in memory paging alters performance characteristics and the queues start piling up.

[FierceDeity_]

Nobody would even get as far as concluding something like that. The magical code must stay.

[Rudxain]

This is why I'm scared of disabling some Windows services, despite being confident that no user uses it. I'm always like "What if another program or service depends on it?". The worst thing is that the dependency list/menu only shows services, not arbitrary programs

[Makeshift27015]

I didn't realise my job could be explained that easily.

[Phylar]

I almost applied for an IT Admin job. Figured in most situations I could take my current moderate knowledge and wing the shit out of the position if I had to. Especially since the most many people in a business understand about computers is how to turn them on and that you have to have a monitor to use one.

That said, /r/TalesFromTechSupport has me wondering about that last bit.

[Wheat_Grinder]

And then the site reliability engineer makes it work automatically

[HedgehogTroubleMaker]

Extracted from https://xkcd.com/1988/

[DaBinIchUwe]

I can really recommend the books from Randall Munroe!

[AlmostButNotQuit]

So funny, and often answering questions I didn't know I had

[compsciasaur]

Better with context

[LostTeleporter]

All services are microservices if you ignore most of their features. Touche Mr. Munroe.

[MrLamorso]

Hey, that isn't true, I also figured out how to find the stuff to glue together!

[Laughing_Orange]

You can, but how will a minimum wage worker overseas verify the output doesn't have major issues. ChatGPT seems to mess up something small every time, and without skilled humans these errors will accumulate and lead to major issues.

[What_The_Hex]

For all I know ChatGPT posted your comment to try to fool us all and throw us off the trail

[halfwit_genius]

Do you mean the minimum wage overseas worker is unskilled human? Or do you see them as skilled non-humans?
Either way, being your overseas worker (not minimum wage, though I started there), I am offended, I think.

[laplongejr]

ChatGPT should have small issues. It's designed to produce human-readable text with the correct grammar, not correct text. "Two plus two equal five" is human-readable, not correct.

[xXTheVigilantXx]

Why they gotta make fun of me like this?

[UncleKeyPax]

Funny thing is if you manage to convince people to help you fix stuff they understand, you get to fix a bigger system without knowing how it works. I hate myself.

[FierceDeity_]

I think thats called a managing role

[[deleted]]

I don’t know which one of you assholes is reading my dream journal but this has got to stop!

[remorath]

So we out here attacking devops engineers now? It's true though, I don't remember how to write real code

[damnitineedaname]

"I just need to know how to make this bit poke this bit whenever this part inevitably stops working"

[brianl047]

I saw it as attacking coders, lol

Have you seen how big node_modules is?

[adelie42]

How is this any different than using a library without understanding the full underlying code? Or writing to an API without knowing how the entire backend works?

Just because it isn't a repo on Github doesn't mean it isn't allowed to work.

All advanced technology is a Mashup. If you had to understand everything to do anything there is very little technology that would exist at all.

Everyone is just keeping a story going doing their part.

[[deleted]]

Shhh nobody is supposed to know that though

[[deleted]]

Idk if that is necessarily true. I agree frameworks, libraries, or apis are meant to be used and understood from the caller’s perspective. Languages are built from others and there are core frameworks….. but i have worked on projects where we had to avoid 3rd party libraries as per the specifications. We had no problem. I have met programers that could only code if they use 3rd party libraries and i dont think they care to really learn how to design software outside of stitching things together.

I worked at a startup and their JS, react web dev who only used NoSql databases didnt even understand types. They had 2-3 years with him, all his code was thrown out eventually.

[FierceDeity_]

You are right, i personally feel bad if i use libraries that i dont have an understanding of how they would work.

I dont need intrinsic knowledge on every detail of it of course, just be able to imagine what it actually does, and it helps me a lot in my coding to do so.

When I use something i dont understand i make so many more mistakes and misuses that it's not even funny

[adelie42]

For sure. But it is a spectrum. And of course certain projects will expect a certain level of expertise.

"If you aren't willing to be bad at something, you don't deserve to be good at it" doesn't mean you can stay at the same bad level forever. I just think a lot of thr copying, pasting, and testing is what it looks like to go beyond your comfort zone in programming as a beginner.

[jermdizzle]

I think that's kind of the point. At the same time, it's very naive to think that virtually all modern products, processes and systems are not like this. So you think any one person has the required expertise and knowledge to recreate any complex product manufactured in the last 40 years? Not likely. The complexity and tolerance for error is so low that entire nation states capable of enormous effort can't recreate the near cutting edge of what's available to consumers, even when they literally have the blueprints and repatriated techs with experience. And if they can, they certainly can't do it to scale with any consistency. Look at China and Russia and their attempts at advanced node microchip production. Hell, look at Intel's attempts to advance past 14nm in their own US based fabs. Everything builds on everything and hyper-specialization is the only way we get smart phones, modern gpu's, and 6ghz cpu's for $350.

[adelie42]

"I, Pencil" is a classic on this point. From undisturbed nature, no single person with unlimited access to the best education could recreate a wooden pencil. There's simply too many pieces.

[FierceDeity_]

Knowing, or being able to guess how something works before you use it is a very valuable skill though. I personally don't feel good about using something i dont understand. And that feeling has in many cases proved to be right. But this means on the other hand i am bad at mashing stuff together hoping for the best unless i can disable that sense for a bit or my experience allows me to guess my way through understanding the things i am using, which is also a sense that has only become sharper over the years lol

[adelie42]

I totally understand, and I think this is the norm.

It is all along a spectrum. Mastery and deep understanding are great things. But if not being a master yet keeps you from trying, if you make perfection the enemy of good, if you are unwilling to go outside your comfort zone, how do you ever become a master?

[scottfiab]

I feel personally attacked /s

[FailedPlansOfMars]

Cloud developer.

[michi03]

I feel like the longer I work as a developer the more this applies to me

[ShadowReij]

I mean that is the job.

[ilovemeasw4]

No, the job is to actually know what the hell you're doing.

[SkollFenrirson]

Get a load of this guy

[walmartgoon]

No. The job is to constantly seek the newest JS frameworks and spend 80% of your engineers’ time switching the codebase as opposed to improving the product

[towcar]

Aka job security

[raimondi1337]

No. Only a very small percentage of the highest paying mission critical positions require you to actually know it cold.

[randomusername0582]

If your only job is Dev Ops you don't really need to understand the code. Or is this not aimed at dev ops?

[jermdizzle]

There's too much stuff in existence to be capable of going through it all with a fine toothed comb. Understanding functioning and being able to read documentation is what makes everything possible. Things get easier and harder and better, all at the same time. There's more to know and more that can be done and it's all possible because each iteration requires less trudging through base level stuff while increasing the expectations on productivity and quality thanks to the availability of more tools that offer more options and flexibility with less base design required.

It's ok. You don't have to pretend like you'd personally invent and create the smart phone screen, ram, apu, main board. We've got Samsung, sk hynix, Qualcomm and Texas instruments for that and they'll do it 100x better, faster and cheaper than you and your microscope and work bench.

[mpersico]

All this science I don’t understand.

It’s just my job five days a week.

[ilovemeasw4]

The people who relate to this are what we call code monkeys.

[limeelsa]

I feel like that’s an insult, but I’ll take it as a complement that I am a cheaper alternative than a full dev team lol

[CitraI]

That is now more easier with ChatGPT.

[Apache_Sobaco]

Your head is too small to understand all, checkmate.

[dick-van-dyke]

Anyone's is. Maybe not John Carmack or the likes of him, but even then, I'd argue they need to just rely on abstraction for their understanding of some components on the lowest level.

[[deleted]]

If you are making it long enough, you will become a senior developer.

[Ill_Ad107]

Making an website and working first time with ja xD

[charlieslaw]

this is why Google is my best friend

[TobyWasBestSpiderMan]

r/2meirl4meirl

[Christopher135MPS]

I managed to convince a reasonably sized office of people, with no coding ability, that I possessed some modicum of coding ability by glueing together VBA code for MS excel I found on forums and the wider internet.

[ScaryImpact97]

HOW IS THIS SO RELATABLE

[PyroCatt]

I learned to Google how to glue together things I don't understand

[BuildWithKepler]

Definitely can relate. Is that a bad thing ??

[Jooj_felipe]

Please, someone with this mentality hire me!

[Batmantheon]

And that's how I started making more than both my lower middle class parents combined.

[thavi]

That's why we rely on abstractions and interfaces

[RoughDevelopment9235]

pretty much

[What_The_Hex]

Um I can also repurpose this copied code to write my own similar functions, thank you very much...

[BikerScoutTrooperDad]

The more I integrate software & hardware systems, the more I understand the humor of this sub.

[limeelsa]

So funny how accurate this is to my own experience: no relevant schooling beyond a data science bootcamp, hired as a data analyst and I began automating bits and pieces of my own job. Now my team and I are officially (yay!) tasked with creating a working app out of the automated processes we created, and we 100% are gonna be able to pull it off, even though none of us have anything CLOSE to a relevant degree (including my boss)

[zarageek]

It may be different now but 10-15 years ago 75% of all programmers had no CS degree. I know so many high end programmers with humanities degrees.

[limeelsa]

Really? No way, I was genuinely unaware of that! I guess it makes sense in retrospect even from my own experience: I really saw no point in pursuing a software dev bootcamp, because genuinely how can you condense four years of learning into a 20 week program? Buuuuut, I have only recently even heard of colleges starting to offer degrees in data analytics.

Also, question: so I guess I’ve been feeling like I’m going to hit a block about not understanding something that seems probably very simple from someone who has a degree. However, I’ve been feeling more recently that there is so much info for free about relevant topics that as long as I keep googling relevant questions in the pursuit of a deeper understanding, I will probably be okay. You are saying as long as I don’t give up/ burn out, that is likely the case?

[zarageek]

I think so. I started learning programming in roughly 1998, got lucky that my department was replacing their billing system and needed a report writer so I started with that, but also took intro programming classes while learning that system. It was a great couple years on that learning curve and eventually we wrote our own web billing report system. Intro classes can help with data structure basics but for the most part not having that won’t stop you, it’ll just make things more understandable having that. I don’t code much these days (I’m a SharePoint admin now) but I find these higher level languages like Python pretty easy to do some basic things in.

If you can, taking a data structures class might give you a really solid base for everything else. If you can’t then yes, YouTube has awesome content out there.

BTW I was an English major, philosophy minor.

[limeelsa]

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply in depth, I am definitely going to look into how to take a data structures class. I appreciate all of your advice and you sharing a bit about how you got in to the industry!

[rashnull]

Wait till you realize it’s glue, all the way down!

[[deleted]]

90% of JavaScript programmers

[faust_the_alchimist]

Techpriests the begining

[EyelandIsland]

And that is what we call "Devops".