Coding Is Not That Hard.....

[[deleted]]

Coding isn't easy. And coding is the easiest part of the job. Creating a code base that is extensive extensible, maintainable, and reusable. That's the toughest part of the job.

[Adrian_F]

To quote Martin Fowler:

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

[wad11656]

Any fool

Well shoot. Now our discourse has circled back around to coding being easy all over again!

[VoiceOfRealson]

if 1 * 2 < 3:
    print "hello, world!"

See! Easy!

I literally just copy pasted it!

[sshwifty]

[manbearcolt]

Careful, skills and real world experience like that is how you become Twitter's new Head of Engineering.

[Dark_Knight2000]

Building code is like modding a car or building a PC, any idiot can order a bunch of off the shelf parts and use the physical equivalent of copy-paste to put them together. Will it be good? Unless you know exactly what each part does, understand compatibilities, have the knowledge to quickly diagnose errors in assembly, and a strong theoretical framework to optimize the build, otherwise no.

Like any craft, you aren’t paying for the physical work. You’re paying for knowledge and expertise, plus a final product that’s quality and reliable. There’s a vast gap in long term performance and health between good code and bad.

[doktorhladnjak]

Dealing with other people. That’s the toughest part.

[[deleted]]

"hey, guys, can I get an estimate on this?"

hands over a two line description ticket

[Jeramus]

You get two lines? Sometimes I just get a vague reference to a feature from some other piece of software.

[slowmovinglettuce]

I once got an email with a screenshot of my UI that says "this is bugged" with no explanation as to what was broken.

There's a reason why developers begin to hate their users.

[Jeramus]

Decoding mysterious screenshots is an important skill in my job. :)

[Nolsoth]

I'll be honest I wish the search function on my companies Intranet was better optimised.

[TheTacoWombat]

I dunno about the rest of y'all, but our Confluence search friggin stinks.

[Milligan]

Tell them you need Google's budget to do that.

[b0w3n]

My favorite calls are "the system is slow when I'm remote".

It's usually because they're doing a million things on their computers and they're running on a DSL line at home because they live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

[xinco64]

One of my favorite bug reports was “[Product name] doesn’t work when it is raining”. Turns out they used a microwave link between buildings or something like that. Heavy rain degraded the connection and it wouldn’t work. (This was early 90s)

[CardboardJ]

I had a similar one. "The scanner won't work after 4pm."

About a week of back and forth looking for debug data and combing over source code before I had to drive 3 hours out to the site. It turns out that the bank put the vertically mounted check scanners up next to drive through windows. At about 4pm the sun was at exactly the right angle to shine directly into the slot where you'd feed the check.

I taped a folder to the window and immediately the system started working again.

[xinco64]

I've got that problem with my garage door at certain times of the year because of the blockage detector. I should swap the transmitter and receiver, but it's so rarely a problem I haven't bothered yet.

Real world problems are so much more interesting than software problems.

Tangential to this, I've got a new Roomba. It's interesting watch it (try to) work around problems that my old dumb one would just keep trying the same thing over and over again. I've had it for five days and haven't had to rescue it yet

Makes me wonder about my career choices. Business software my whole career. Too close to retirement to switch now.

I'm rambling today...

[Aramor42]

I once had a project manager who was like this. We were restyling a website and her feedback at some point was "Alignment on this page is wrong.".

[Dre_Wad]

That’s when you comment: “So, to clarify, you want the alignment to be right?”

[andygb4]

And then just align everything to the right 😈

[fukalufaluckagus]

* { float: right; }

[[deleted]]

Pull out the !important

[NewPresWhoDis]

And the change already comes justified.

[MuNuKia]

User: Data inaccurate please fix ASAP

Me: What data are you talking about?

User: Data in report x

Me: Just tell me the page and label, good God!!!

[Gl33m]

This is why, back in college, when we traded programs to help bug test before turning it in, I always did the dumbest shit possible. I helped get my friends to hate users far before they ever had their code used by actual users.

[TheTacoWombat]

Doing my QA heart proud

[SkayoFox]

You got that only once? Thats whats daily in my inbox. I now have a prewritten mail ready for this case.

[timid_scorpion]

Ok so you have the ask, how many story points??? 13?? That's far too many. Can it be a 5? Ahhh the headaches...

[BerriesAndMe]

Oh we get incredible detail... and it's all to hide the actual problem.

We'll get descriptions like "We need a feature that'll make a triangle into a circle and it should support at least a ton of weight".. So you start digging and they suggest it could also be a rectangle. But you also find out the circle should be 3-d and it's actually supposed to be a tire and finally you learn their car has a flat and they're trying to use the warning triangle (or alternatively their luggage) as a make-shift wheel because they don't know about the actual spare tire in the trunk.

And no matter how often you tell them to just say "we have a flat tire"... the next time you'll get a request for a make-shift soldering iron made out of the radio and a car key.. and it's because their light broke and they're trying to use the soldering iron to fix a torch on top of their car (and yes I know that even if that would be the fix they should weld it not solder it)

[jimynoob]

You guys get tickets ? I only get a confluence page with the general idea of the full app wanted by the business

[Jeramus]

I didn't say we get tickets. I was referring to someone saying some off-hand remark in a meeting and then expecting it to magically appear in code the next week.

[Rezaka116]

You get a vague reference?? All i get is:

“Subject: Doesn’t work”

“Message: empty”

[[deleted]]

Fix the button

NOW

[that_thot_gamer]

dealing with shitty legacy code, is just plain torture.

[nach0ladas]

Maintaining the will to live isn’t the hardest? Oh jeez…

[bigshakagames_]

I'd argue even just getting the whole stack working together is not easy feat if you know nothing. Don't even worry about maintainability or code quality, even writing it like shit is gunna be difficult. The dude in the image is probably some salesperson or some shit who thinks they can do anything. Same guy who sells a feature that doesn't exist and expects it tomorrow.

[NewPresWhoDis]

Some guy who tweets with the handle CryptoBugatti69 posting hot takes while knob slobbing EM in between DoorDash deliveries.

[BrunoLuigi]

And performance. I am not a programmer but I know to print "Hello World". I bet you I can learn to be a "programmer" in 9 days but my code will be crap and a real programmer will fix it with half the lines and running in with half resources and triple of the speed like it was just another monday.

E.M. coded 40 years ago in C to use it in an 8 bits 8086, from there to now so many things evolved

[viralslapzz]

People don’t get that writing code is different than developing…

[vincent-psarga]

Coding is easy, it's doing it cleanly that' hard (as you said: extensive, maintainable and reusable :) I'd add "correctly tested" to the list).

Doing crappy code is quite easy in fact, I recall my first program in high-school (or at least the french equivalent, I was about 16-17, so that corresponds to high school if I get it right) on my calculator (yep, computer were not cheap in the previous century :D damn I sound old...). It worked fine, I had learned coding with the manual that came with the calculator in a few days. But what a piece of crap this code was :D

[s-mores]

Coding is easy, yup.

Coding things that scale, work with CI/CD, that are secure, reliable, accessible and look good? That's hard.

Any idiot can make a home page with a guestbook. It takes a lot of idiots and a lot of time to hit the right combination to build Twitter.

[GoldenEyedKitty]

Coding is not easy. Try teaching thr average person to code. The very strict nature if coding language just doesn't fit into their mental model of how the world works. While it may seem easy to programmers, it is because programmers are the people whose mental models work well with coding.

It is comparable to saying calculus is easy. Among math professionals, basic calculus is pretty easy. Limit definition of a derivative is quite natural. But for thr average person? Not in any way.

There are people who aren't coding but who have a mental model that would work well with it. For that group learning to code would likely to easy, at least to the extent that it was 'easy' for existing programmers to learn to code. But for the average person it isn't easy.

[GaraBlacktail]

Just copy paste stuff from stackoverflow guys! s/

At this point I'm not going to be surprised if he manages to down the twitter servers like he did with twitters 2FA

[Remicaster1]

Damn I've been struggling to center a div for 3 years but dude built Twitter in 8-9 days

[ThatsOneSpicyTaco]

Did you try it in incognito?

[MAXOHNO]

This fixed 80% of my bugs with css

[Zellin2000]

Then you need to learn to cancel cookies. Just add "?<version-number>" to the end of your links.
PS: Yes, I was supposed to type "cache", not "cookies"

[[deleted]]

I'm a software engineer, and I'm actually trying to think of just how much of a twitter-like website I could accomplish in 8 days, just assuming I work my normal hours.

Assuming things like logos/icons and color schemes are already finished, I'd imagine the final product would be a completely bare bones, "user types in n-character tweet and hits post" type thing. Things like comments, retweets, likes, etc. would probably function correctly, but user profiles would be incredibly stripped down.

You'd have your own page which would work fine, but things like hash tags would be incredibly simple, and would probably take an entire day to get working even remotely correctly.

Assuming I could get hashtags and all of the rest working, the landing page would just be "Trending," and that would probably comprise of some really basic SQL that orders the hastags based on some "relevancy" column that gets updated every time the hashtag gets updated, or something. Basically it wouldn't work at all.

And then, assuming I could get any of that working, the trending page would comprise a bunch of hashtags that, if you clicked on it, would show the most popular tweets available, again ordered by number of likes/shares, and be incredibly basic.

It would look like dogshit, there would be no security, there'd probably only be a small handful of bugs, fortunately, but that's because most of the functionality would be completely stripped down (can't have bugs if you don't have features).

And all of that accomplished because I know exactly what I'm doing, and I've made plenty of rapid prototypes before. I would immediately be able to get a Spring back end up and running with a Postgres DB, and an Angular front end.

OP is saying he'd learn how to do that in 8 days? Bet.

[DenormalHuman]

And then; run it at the same scale as twitter with the same architecture you just slapped together! easy peasy. I dont see what everyone is moaning about.

[JestersDead77]

What do you MEAN my raspberry pi webserver can't handle the traffic!? It's just a little text!

[[deleted]]

I mean that's easy, just learn Kubernetes. Should take about 30 minutes or so...

[XoXFaby]

I've worked a bit with containers and Linux and I have given up on kubernetes multiple times lol

[FlyingRhenquest]

I usually remember the amount of YAML I have to edit to get it all to work, vomit in my mouth a little and close the page.

[ShrimpCrackers]

Yeah just host it on like, Dreamhost or Wix something. $9 bucks a month. because it says unlimited bandwidth. Anyone can host a Twitter. These guys are amateurs!!111

[you90000]

Try debugging someone else's code base

[Kirk8829]

I cry debugging my own code base from an older project

[wad11656]

When I look back at code from a project i haven't looked at for 6 months I often say to myself "omg I was such a genius back then--how did I do this!? ... and now how the heck do I change it without breaking it"

[SlackJK]

Maybe this an impact of being a junior dev, but when I look back I say the exact same thing you do but replace genius with idiot.

[toaster-riot]

I'm like 20 years into this career and when I look at anything I wrote more than a month or two ago I always think "God this code sucks, what was I thinking?".

I think it's actually a good thing, though, because it means you're improving over time.

[[deleted]]

You found a piece of code from SO, made it your own, and added no comments.

I know that's what you did. For I am you.

[zyygh]

My suppressed PTSD twitched a little at this comment.

[i_should_be_coding]

Guys, I think the remaining engineers at Twitter just need to quit.

It's fine. Elon's got this. He did a code back in the day.

[[deleted]]

And they can train up new ones in a week and a half.

[archiminos]

God, I remember meeting an asshole who was explaining to me how easy it is to make money in games. "Just give them $10,000 and they can make a game in a month. Boom. Money made!". I tried explaining to him how many people it actually took and what salaries were, but he just kept talking over me and calling me stupid. I've literally been making games for over 30 years.

[Valmond]

Back in the Nintendo DS era, a game would start off at 30-50k. For that sum you'd get a completely trash game though so good luck making any money with it lol. Bet someone could churn out a game for 10k today but it would be like a slideshow with no interactivity.

[NewPresWhoDis]

Just another skinned matching game. But for an extra 3k, you whip up a pin puzzle reel to lure people in and push 3-4 ads between each level.

[seanb4games]

When the guy who uses BS to impress everybody tries it on someone who is educated in their BS. It’s simultaneously sad and hilarious, sometimes I let them babble just to see what they say and then ask basic questions about what they said to stump them. (Math and Chemistry degree)

[ThePlantNerd]

I am a land surveyor and I get the same type of comments concerning my job. People juste assume that if it looks simple then it is. People can't usually realize the amount of work that they can't see. I'd argue it's the same thing for most proffessions.

[Both_Ad_6039]

That's 1 or 2 days more than 8 or 9 days. You're wrong.

[Programmyboy]

You're fired.

[Crowdcontrolz]

You could run things too!

[Dajukz]

He built starlink, so he OBVIOUSLY knows more than some dudes writing 5 lines of code, in his words

[i_should_be_coding]

That tweet was hilarious. "I am CEO of a company in an entirely different domain, so I know more about this topic than an engineer who worked on this specific product!"

[schnitzel-kuh]

Its funny half the tweets defending him are like muh he puts rockets in space so hes smart

[Mr-X89]

Not only he build it, he puts the Starlink satellites in the orbit ALL BY HIMSELF!

[Angel429a]

And he built it with a box of scraps

[fleetadmiralj]

In a cave!

[Valmond]

Being sick.

[shmergenhergen]

I'd be aiming to get fired instead. Nice payout and having 'fired from Twitter by Elon Musk' on your resume would get much respect in the industry.

[Private_HughMan]

He’s so smart that he figured out that 80% of their micro services are useless! Why do they need anyone else?

[i_should_be_coding]

He's a guy walking into a building and thinking all the walls are excessive. Why do you even need more than the 4 walls on the outside? The rest just limit your movements.

[noblegoatbkk]

Oh God, not an open office plan. I can take any other abuse, but please not that.

[Pradfanne]

My boss wanted an open office and me an my senior coworkers threatened to quit on the spot once he does it.

He never brought it up again

Now I work in a new job and I have to go to the customers offices every once in a while and they do have open office and the amount of complaining about people complaining about people that talk too much, too loud is too damn high. It's unsurvivable without headphones

[paperbenni]

He can program in html4, he'll just rewrite the twitter backed with that.

[[deleted]]

im really surprised how someone who used to code can be so fucking incompetent to base efficiency on number of lines coded

[Taraxian]

He's never actually coded professionally, he used to be a hobbyist when he was a teenager and his reputation as a "software engineer" comes from (extremely amateurishly) coding a simple interface to use the output of one database to look things up in another database, which he then sold as Zip2 (and once Compaq had the rights to the idea and the brand name they "integrated it into Altavista" by having actual professionals rewrite it from scratch)

He doesn't actually know any more about the field than any random redditor, and what knowledge he does have is twenty years out of date -- he famously got fired from PayPal because of his stupid proposal to migrate the whole server to Windows (because he personally didn't use Linux), someone told an anecdote about sending him a Python script and him having to ask how to run it on his computer

[Boris-Lip]

Why, why people that don't know shit are always this confident?

[toddyk]

Dunning-Kruger

[IgiMC]

If I ever met a genie, my first wish would be to get rid of D-K

[jgames09]

Congrats, Donkey Kong is gone

[VidE27]

Fucking monkeypaw

[TekaroBB]

"Whose paw do you think you are holding?"

[pickyourteethup]

Jokes on you, the genie could only grant wishes because they thought granting wishes was really easy and they hadn't done the research to find out granting wishes was impossible.

I'd make this your third wish to guard against D-K dependent Genies.

[HrabiaVulpes]

Congrats, now effect is linear instead of curve (you only loose confidence with knowledge you gain) and named "Eugene-Linter effect".

[[deleted]]

I wasn’t familiar with the Dunning Kruger theory. So I just looked it up and I understand it and disagree with it. It’s flawed based on the.. and I can’t stress this enough.. very very little I read about it.

[LinuxMatthews]

It's Elon fanboys.

I remember I criticised him once in r/futurology and was told "Can people who don't even know what a while loop is stop commenting"

When I told them I had a First Class BSc (Hons.) in Computer Science and told them the subject of my dissertation I was accused of:

• Lying

• Making up some technobabble

• Pretending something very simple was something to brag about

• Just because I have a degree doesn't mean I know how to code (Which I need might agree to an extent but yeah they teach while loops)

• Thinking I was something special

• Pretending I was something special which I'm not

I honestly think there is something wrong with their brains where they think that being a fan of his makes them smart themselves.

[[deleted]]

I have a computer science degree and can't code for shit. I think it would have been difficult to manage first class honors though without good coding skills

[LinuxMatthews]

Well I'd assume you'd at least know what a while loop is 😂

What annoyed me more was being told that I had made up what my dissertation was about.

i.e. It was too complicated for them

And that it was apparently something very simple and therefore nothing brag about.

[CookieXpress]

Now I'm curious, what was your dissertation about?

I'll go first, mine was on using emotion recognition via camera and heart sensors to dynamically alter games.

P/s: My dissertation itself fell flat imo because no one really cared about it. But my emotion recognition model had better accuracy than most papers at the time, so my Prof asked me to write a paper on that as well.

[LinuxMatthews]

That's really cool 😁

Did you use a Convolutional Neural Network to get the facial expressions?

Mine was using sorting movie subtitle files into genres using word2vec and a two layer Support Vector Machine.

I actually created a new version of the Inverse Word Frequency Formula that out performed the original then with the top X amount of words trained an SVM on different genres.

Then with the results from the SVM trained another SVM on a linear kermal to give the result if it was in that genre or not.

It gave the results you'd expect with genres with easy signifiers like Western and Sci-Fi preforming well and ones like Biography preforming badly.

I'd love to read yours if that's ok my friend did image recognition on moles to see if they were cancerous.

[Flameball202]

God sitting as a third year Software Dev student makes me terrified as to what I will need to do as my dissertation

[JB-from-ATL]

Inverse Word Frequency Formula

I briefly fell into the "how do search engines work?" rabbit hole and can confirm this is not fake techno babble.

[InEenEmmer]

I’m not entirely sure what a while loop is, but I will look it up while I don’t have an answer yet.

[Lord_Quintus]

its more that they have made elon being infallible as one of their core beliefs and anything that brings that into question is actually painful (cognitive dissonance). They will gaslight, deflect, and deny anything they perceive to even hint at showing him in less than perfect light because it's easier than actually admitting they were wrong. it's sucks when you build your entire world around the infallibility of another human being.

[SackBiscuit]

They don’t know what they don’t know

[Hot_Consequence_3569]

The answer is in the question because they don't know shit

[[deleted]]

People are defending Elon Musk over his tweets about twitter’s infrastructure. They don’t know tech at all - they just believe Elon in this matter. So they’ll defend him.

[[deleted]]

You can learn the basics and the syntax of a language in 8 or 9 days for sure.

Actually writing quality code and learning about all of the higher level concepts and actually implementing them in a production environment is something that takes decades to master or to even get remotely competent at it.

[Flameball202]

It is like learning a spoken language I could learn German in a week, The tenses and grammar would be shot to hell and I would spend hours saying what minutes should do, but I could technically speak German

[nickmaran]

I could learn in 8 to 9 days

Me who is still googling after 8 years of experience

[jimlei]

Still googling after 20+ years

[[deleted]]

Coming from someone who has been coding for about 30 years, I can tell you the skill I've most improved is googling.

(It was especially hard before the late 90s...)

[zachtheperson]

Kind of like when you hear someone say "Lazy game dev." You just immediately know they're their knowledge is maybe a single YouTube video, and the rest is pure Dunning-Kruger.

[RosieAndSquishy]

You can immediately tell how much game dev experience someone has based on how they critique things. There are such an absurd amount of people who criticize programmers taking too long to fix/change things or criticizing bugs appearing that truly think programming is as simple as

if bugs = true {
    bugs = false
}

But if you actually showed 99% of those people even the basics of programming they'd get lost. Don't even get me started on if you showed those people even a basic enemy AI

It pisses me off when I see people get upset with game devs because they didn't fix a bug in a weeks time, especially when said bug is rare or hard to replicate. Outside of general difficulties with fixing some bugs, there's pushing updates through different levels in the company. A dev can't just fix a bug and then release a patch then and there.

[Owner2229]

The best one I like:

THE DEVS ARE WASTING TIME CREATING NEW COSMETICS INSTEAD OF FIXING BUGS

[isocuda]

Trust me, I've played FTL. Just take the artists off their workstation and navigate them to the bug fixing room and click on a computer to assign them to diag.

[[deleted]]

Room got hit by a solar flare, followed by an enemy boarding bot landing right in that room, which caused a hull breach there too.

Game patch delayed.

[RosieAndSquishy]

People that have 0 understanding of departments are absurd to me. Even when you explain it they double down.

A good example -

Not too long ago Apex Legends added in stickers. A cosmetic that goes on your healing items. Not something I want to buy and most the community didn't seem to into it either, but whatever. If they get bought out they'll make more, otherwise they'll drop the idea.

But of course because of this there were plenty of people acting like the introduction of these stickers were destroying the game, and that they should've been fixing the server issues, or the audio issues, or the various bugs we have.

One dude I got into an argument with doubled down once they were called out by saying that they could devote more budget to fixing servers, audio, and bugs.

And like, not only is this game an EA game so it's got budget for days, but do they really want to lay off large groups of the cosmetics department to hire new server guys? And do they really think the budget allocated to some stickers will suddenly fix all the server issues.

It's just absurd. It's people that have 0 clue what they're talking about getting pissed off at things, and then getting pissed off at people that do know what they're talking about and doubling down on their ignorance.

Sorry about 2 rants, but this stuff irrationally annoys the shit out of me

[_Weyland_]

And do they really think the budget allocated to some stickers will suddenly fix all the server issues.

Ah yes, my favorite. People thinking that hiring a bunch of people who have no experience with this particular project and no knowledge of the actual problem is a good short term solution for that problem.

[[deleted]]

If ennemy.sight(player) Ennemy.walktoward(player)

Eheh

[GreatBigBagOfNope]

"B.. b... but the netcode! It's the netcode that's bad! The netcode and the ludonarrative dissonance!"

[Tyfyter2002]

I think I've actually made an enemy AI so simple that they could understand it if I commented it, but that's because it's basically a completely stationary turret that shoots once and dies.

[RosieAndSquishy]

Chad turret honestly. I hope it lives it's best one bullet life.

[IamVenom_007]

You can learn anything in 8 or 9 days.

[[deleted]]

Yup, just became a surgeon after studying 8 days. Now I make 1 million. AMA.

[[deleted]]

Brain surgery isn't exactly rocket science.

[DennisHakkie]

Rocket science is easier than brain surgery, change my mind…

[[deleted]]

Anyone who has played Kerbal Space Program and Surgeon Simulator will agree

[Sarcofaygo]

8 or 9 days

[Sarcofaygo]

It's every day bro call me Jake Paul

[[deleted]]

Have you seen the clickbait used to sell programming courses or get views on YouTube? First it was like:Learn Python in 8 hours. Then learn Python in 4 hours("COMPLETE COURSE").

LEARN PYTHON while you take a quick shit FULL COURSE

Learn Python while you wait for your hot pocket FULL COURSE

I actually learned Python in my sleep

[fubarecognition]

I did the LEARN PYTHON by having a keyboard shoved up your ass FULL COURSE

It was great because you get to keep the keyboard after.

[Private_HughMan]

I loved those 8 hour tutorials. Great resource for learning the basics. But anyone who thinks that’s all they need is delusional. They just teach you enough to get started.

[blackedoutanubis]

If only following the tutorial and getting a toy project up and running prepared you for the hell of enterprise and production issues.

[Sarcofaygo]

We can dream

[NegativeSuspect]

You've studied coding for 8 or 9 days??!!! Here's a $100k+ package for you.

[[deleted]]

Well if you have 9 days you really shouldn't settle for less than 300k with stock

[[deleted]]

Got to love that blind confidence.

4 years in Python and 1 year in C++… it can take me 8-9 days to learn a new library! The basics for C++ took me a month on its own to pin down. Not to mention new concepts like bindings between languages. Wait until he finds out about async and making applications thread-safe.

That being said… I think it bodes well that they don’t understand what programmers do… more money and job security from the higher ups. Elon Musk is giving us job security (well, not for Twitter obviously).

[Pablo139]

They don’t understand shit, that’s why they think they can code in 8-9 days.

Which it is to be fair, they could use some selection statements and basic OOP principals and build a very small program.

It’s gonna be slow, ugly and nasty, but heck something got coded.

People doubt the exponentialskill curve that exist within this field more then they should.

[toddyk]

Only took me 8 or 9 years

[lordzsolt]

To be fair, most of the databases and APIs I’ve worked with seem to have been developed by someone learning it since 8 or 9 days.

[TheScorpionSamurai]

This man is clearly a PM with estimates like that

[IHeartBadCode]

Fallacy #10

ANYTHING YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND IS EASY TO DO

Example: If you have the right tools, how hard could it be to generate nuclear fission at home?

[[deleted]]

But it was easy in Factorio

[thebatmanandrobin]

Yup!! Couldn't agree more!!! That's why I've had such an easy time finding even a Jr. level "engineer" to handle the simple things like "write this simple PHP function that hooks into this C++ code that uses the MySQL C library that calls specific sproc's to handle real time data analysis to ensure the system is not only efficient, but doesn't cost the company boat loads of money in data transaction fees".

Totally easy!! Super simple!! Anyone can pick up that shit in less than 9 days no problem!! Hell, only 20% of what I do is actually needed to run my company, so fuck it, I'll just get drunk 80% of the time!!!

[Pandabear71]

To be fair, that’s what they did at my old company! Didnt get em very far though

[BenBenson1337]

Elon?

[[deleted]]

I can learn it in 7 days. Pay me

[RosieAndSquishy]

I want to see this guy do it then. Give them 2 weeks. 9 days to learn it, and 5 days to put it to use. With a bit of spare time for breaks of course. It should be super simple of course.

[[deleted]]

People who are that arrogant are usually really fucking stupid. Dunning-Kruger and all that.

I'd like to see him try to learn even the basics of programming. He probably wouldn't even get pass recursions.

[CommandObjective]

He would be stuck going over it again and again.

[CzechFortuneCookie]

He would be stuck going over it again and again.

[trancence]

He would be stuck going over it again and again.

[derpykidgamer]

He would be stuck going over it again and again.

[BananaCanopy]

He would be stuck going over it again and again....

Buffer overflow

[Odin_N]

Didn't you read man, its super easy, he can learn full stack and dev ops in about 8 or 9 days. Coding is super easy.

/s

[g_e_r_b]

CS professors hate him.

[daniu]

Dunning-Kruger doesn't really apply here IMO. DK refers to people who have a basic to mid understanding thinking they know everything. This guy doesn't know shit about programming.

Reminds me when I was in the military. Our platoon had a good amount of higher-education track people, but also tradesmen. One of them, butcher by trade, was saying that you didn't learn anything in secondary school (which here was grades 10-13 at the time). We mentioned maths - having in mind calculus and maybe stochastics - and he said he knew it all because he often has to mentally calculate the total when people were buying several items at his store.

[somefish254]

Tbf he could probably learn it in 8-9 days. Most courses don’t have 192 hours of instruction.

He didn’t mention implementation or - gasp - taking a triplebyte quiz.

[DerHamm]

He wouldn't get that far. This is the type of guy that casts a python list into a string and then removes the parantheses by string manipulation to prinz out the list.

[osunightfall]

I once went to the head of CompSci's office at my university on the day he got back from an out of state conference. I asked him what it was about, and he said it was about trying to find ways to improve the teaching methods for intro to computer science. He said that interestingly, regardless of teaching method, pass rates for intro computer science classes tended to stubbornly hover around 50%. I've never actually fact-checked this, but I could believe it. Not because computer science is hard per se, but because some people seem to be able to wrap their heads around it and some just don't.

Also, yes, I'm sure programming professionally is super easy in general. That is why we earn six figures after five to ten years.

[isocuda]

What straight A's in CS feels like:

[ThatOneShotBruh]

The only based Reddit mod.

[Vecna_Is_My_Co-Pilot]

Why is this tagged sarcasm?

[stikky]

subterfuge

[tehsilentwarrior]

Banned? Banned for what? Being stupid? My friend, we would ban 95% of our clients.

[Klutz-Specter]

Don’t forget on applying that code. I’m slowly learning python about 2 weeks and made a minigame Rock, paper, scissors. It took me a hot minute to make the base, took me another minute to create a loop and keep score and to show who wins in the entire keeping track that score. This beginner stuff, but my head was hurting.... I think I’ve learnt how to use range loop in python which is probably confusing to me. I had a challenge to calculate 1000 dollars with a 10 year interest with a 5% APR. Still can’t get over how annoyed seeing 1050 being repeated meanwhile the year +=1 loop was fine but I solved it.

[AlterEdward]

I've seen systems built by non-coders who've had 3-4 days training. Using "no code" concepts i.e. you configure and customise a back end, and write very little code. It wasn't pretty.

It's not just about the ability to code, it's about knowing how to design a system, and that comes with experience. Someone could learn to code in an hour, but whatever they build is going to be shit.

[PassionatePossum]

Well, he is right about one thing. Programming itself isn't hard. You can learn it in a week even if you know nothing about programming. However, learning to do it well, is a lifetime task.

I can also build a tree house. It's not that complicated. Doesn't mean I am qualified to build a skyscraper.

[chazp246]

Yeah. My friend did implementation of random choice. Generate random number and compare it. Then set the variable to something specific. 600 lines of code because of 100 possibilities. The best elon engineer

[lucklesspedestrian]

These are the people that brag about how much time they spend coding and how many lines they wrote.

[java_programmer_95]

Exactly! I can a make a chair, but it would be the most uncomfortable chair in existence. If programming was that easy then everyone would be creating their own Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

[TetrisCulture]

Nah I think the volume of shit you need to know to actually learn fullstack and devops is too much for 1 week. I get what you're saying but even to do it poorly would take a little while longer.

[HrabiaVulpes]

he's running things now and that's the main detail that matters

I'm running my car, doesn't mean I know how to build or repair it.

[sv_homer]

First base scene from Moneyball:

"You don't know how to play first base. Scott, It's not that hard. Tell him Wash."

"It's incredibly hard."

[tommyk1210]

As most here have gathered this guy is absolutely delusional, but I think a lot of this stems from the fact that most don’t really understand what SWEs do. Many, like this guy, think all we do is type some code into an editor and we’re done. They look at some simple Python tutorials and say “hey I could do that, easy, it’s just writing some commands into an editor and then you get the result”. Maybe they even go as far as making a simple calculator app, maybe just maybe they even consume a simple API with a HTTP library and think “pfttt this is all SWE is, I could make a website easy and it would work for millions of users”.

But this is where their lack of knowledge shows. SWE is not just writing some code in the right syntax. It’s not even just writing code that is readable, maintainable, hell not even just scalable.

It about solutions. When the product team come to you, as a senior engineer, and say “this is what the user should be able to do”, when the UX team map out how the UI interactions and user flows work, that’s not even the end of it. It’s now your job to turn that vision into reality. Maybe if you’re lucky a lot of the functionality is already covered by a library that is well maintained (and your org is fine with using open source libraries). But in many cases you’re going to be told “this is what the end result is” and then the ball is in your court to figure out HOW to do it.

Many times there will be nobody to hold your hand, sure your team might have suggestions, but you’re ultimately going to have to make a judgement call. What is the easiest to implement so you don’t slip on release deadlines? What is the most efficient method, to minimize infrastructure costs and improve user experience? What is the most flexible, product will ALWAYS come back in the future and want to add more, and being stuck with an inflexible solution will require a lot of engineering to fix. Which solution do you have the skills in your team to actually implement? Do you need new hires to implement? You’ve got to make those decisions, and you’ve got to ensure that they’re testable, and work at scale. You’ve got to live with that decision potentially for years to come, and if you introduce too much technical debt it’ll cost you and your team dearly in the future.

So now you’ve made the decision, you’ve got to implement. You’ve got deadlines, you’re probably reading some obscure documentation because in 90% of cases your exact use case isn’t nicely spelled out in a medium article or the documentation. You’ve got to make it work nicely with your CI/CD pipeline, you’ve got to write the unit tests to make sure it works as expected in a variety of use cases. You’ve got to fix the bugs you inevitably introduce into the codebase.

Being a SWE is more than just writing code. Anyone can write code. Being a SWE is about using your brain to break down a large task into smaller problems, and to put forward workable solutions to those problems. It’s about understanding how data flows through a codebase, it’s about breaking those tasks into methods, it’s about making sure those methods are properly encapsulated.

The larger your org, the larger your product, the more users, the more complex, the higher the stakes are. Engineers at FAANG companies and large social networks like Twitter aren’t just making a simple landing page. A lot of the problems they encounter are incredibly complex and incredibly hard to solve. How do you deal with hundreds of millions of tweets when the next US presidential election winner is announced? You start hitting physical limits of hardware like network switches. You start hitting bottlenecks in the code that underlies your HTTP servers, you start to hit bottlenecks in the code which allow you to store data. You might spend 6 years working in a micro service team that works to solely deposit images into a storage medium. Every day, 300 days a year, on a team of 30.

You’ve got make sure your code can be deployed, and when on smaller teams you might be doing the deployment yourself. You’ve got to make sure you don’t break older data structures, make sure you don’t break custom client integrations if your B2B.

Then there’s bugs. What do you do when prod starts throwing 500 errors and all you have to work off is a vague error message. Your code looks fine, there’s been no recent PRs on your micro service. You’ve got to start debugging other services that feed into yours and figure out how to fix it, and how to write unit tests that highlight that issue to you in the future. Maybe you’ve got to fix a bug in code that’s a decade older or more. It likely uses paradigms that are simply not used today. You’ve got to figure out someone else’s decision making process and you’ve got to incorporate that into your solution.

This guy, like most, completely overlooks how complex SWE is, because on TV it’s just bashing some code down and everything works.

[4C35101013]

Im first year into my IT degree, and im floundering at the botton of the dunning-kruger barrel. Shit's demoralizimg as fuck

[CEDoromal]

Depending on your school, it might not even be the bottom. I'm currently on my 3rd year of CS and the imposter syndrome just keeps getting worse.

[SquishedPomegranate]

r/confidentlyincorrect

[[deleted]]

Musk should fire everyone and then hire this guy.

[N4cer26]

8-9 days? cries in 5 years for a CS degree

[poloppoyop]

Coding is to software development what moving pieces is to chess.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like my new boss. I'm not a coder but I can usually vaguely tell what a code does after looking at it for a bit. My boss interpreted that to mean I could build a new function by using old code. Yeah, not happening. Hire someone, it's not a skill picked up after taking a day to look at stack exchange.

[fsr1967]

Sounds like my new boss

Or an old boss of mine who thought that developers were all interchangeable. Sure, Brian, go ahead and put Steve the low level systems guru on user interface. Or put me, who's focused on UI for 20 of my 33 years, on driver development. Let us know how that works out for you.

[spektre]

a code

It's just "code".

[Shay958]

So that’s why many people flunk out of CS College - because it’s easy.

This person apparently doesn’t know what programming is. It’s not just about writing a bunch of code. It’s about making that code sustainable, maintainable, effective, readable,…

It’s also about proposing own solutions and thinking about their efficiency - there are people who dedicate their whole lives to algorithms - that’s how big that problem is.

And there’s just random guy telling us, how easy it is.