Respect my Authority
October 13th 2006 17:30
As I type this I am struggling to stay awake. I have been sitting down in front of the computer for so long, almost non-stop for the past two days with about four hours sleep in between and maybe a total of five hours of breaks and time away from computer (to eat food for example).
Ladies and gents, I’m a computer programming student. I have been diligently coding away for the past couple of days, perhaps not coding more so as solving the puzzle. The thing about programming is that it’s easy to know how to do things, but making those things work as intended is another story all together. You put down the code easy, but it never works the first time, and if it does, it isn’t working the way you want it to. So you’re always tweaking here or there, putting this there or that here hoping it will work.
Sometimes you find yourself completely off base. Imagine sitting in front of a computer monitor for hours on end trying to understand the nature of a problem, where is the problem exactly, what problems is it causing, why the code just won’t work, and then you find out that the whole design is fundamentally flawed, that the programming language doesn’t like what your doing, that the computer your using won’t accept it like that.
It’s depressing, but I’ll tell you what’s more depressing.
Thinking something works, after many a hour of sitting in front of it watching the program fail to work over and over, seeing those terrible words ‘null pointer exception’ (terrible, terrible error) for instance over and over, you find you pray to God that you don’t see it after you tweak your code here and there. Then finally, it works, or so you think. You might even run it through some tests to see how well it worked but you don’t take too much care, you’re really tired and you’re just happy it worked, you go off to bed.
You wake up the next day and run the program again, it doesn’t work, why? It never worked, that’s why. It gave you results, but they weren’t the results you wanted, you were too tired to notice the night before, your back to square one.
Programmers have to be the most patient people in the world, and I’ll tell you now, the only people more patient than programmers are their mothers and their wives or husbands (assuming they are married). How do you think we keep our sanity? Do you think its easy programming these machines to behave how we so desire? Well… it is, but it damn well isn’t easy to make it work as intended. It never does.
There is a saying that "Profanity is the one language all programmers understand" I suppose its true in a way, but I have never sworn at an inanimate object before… well I have, but not at the computer.
Programmers go through all this crap, yet they are probably the lowest of the low in the world of IT. We are like the Hollywood script writer, we write the blockbusters but scarcely anyone knows our name, we save multibillion dollar companies from bankruptcy overnight yet nobody notices, we saved the world from ending in 2000, but who are we to be called heroes? Our income is also below the national average, we work longer hours than most and often are forced to take overtime, sometimes we even take it willingly. We obsess over our code to the point we will stay back to fix it, and not even be paid for it. We are also willing to show up 1pm the next day and be yelled at despite the fact we saved our employer many millions of dollars because we were working on ridding the software of any potential bugs until the wee hours of the morning that very same day, and we had only slept maybe five hours because of it.
You have no idea how much of a brain twister even the most simplest things can be, so the next time you think to yourself ‘gee, this program stinks’, remember that it was far harder to create than you could possibly imagine.
Ladies and gents, I’m a computer programming student. I have been diligently coding away for the past couple of days, perhaps not coding more so as solving the puzzle. The thing about programming is that it’s easy to know how to do things, but making those things work as intended is another story all together. You put down the code easy, but it never works the first time, and if it does, it isn’t working the way you want it to. So you’re always tweaking here or there, putting this there or that here hoping it will work.
Sometimes you find yourself completely off base. Imagine sitting in front of a computer monitor for hours on end trying to understand the nature of a problem, where is the problem exactly, what problems is it causing, why the code just won’t work, and then you find out that the whole design is fundamentally flawed, that the programming language doesn’t like what your doing, that the computer your using won’t accept it like that.
It’s depressing, but I’ll tell you what’s more depressing.
Thinking something works, after many a hour of sitting in front of it watching the program fail to work over and over, seeing those terrible words ‘null pointer exception’ (terrible, terrible error) for instance over and over, you find you pray to God that you don’t see it after you tweak your code here and there. Then finally, it works, or so you think. You might even run it through some tests to see how well it worked but you don’t take too much care, you’re really tired and you’re just happy it worked, you go off to bed.
You wake up the next day and run the program again, it doesn’t work, why? It never worked, that’s why. It gave you results, but they weren’t the results you wanted, you were too tired to notice the night before, your back to square one.
Programmers have to be the most patient people in the world, and I’ll tell you now, the only people more patient than programmers are their mothers and their wives or husbands (assuming they are married). How do you think we keep our sanity? Do you think its easy programming these machines to behave how we so desire? Well… it is, but it damn well isn’t easy to make it work as intended. It never does.
There is a saying that "Profanity is the one language all programmers understand" I suppose its true in a way, but I have never sworn at an inanimate object before… well I have, but not at the computer.
Programmers go through all this crap, yet they are probably the lowest of the low in the world of IT. We are like the Hollywood script writer, we write the blockbusters but scarcely anyone knows our name, we save multibillion dollar companies from bankruptcy overnight yet nobody notices, we saved the world from ending in 2000, but who are we to be called heroes? Our income is also below the national average, we work longer hours than most and often are forced to take overtime, sometimes we even take it willingly. We obsess over our code to the point we will stay back to fix it, and not even be paid for it. We are also willing to show up 1pm the next day and be yelled at despite the fact we saved our employer many millions of dollars because we were working on ridding the software of any potential bugs until the wee hours of the morning that very same day, and we had only slept maybe five hours because of it.
You have no idea how much of a brain twister even the most simplest things can be, so the next time you think to yourself ‘gee, this program stinks’, remember that it was far harder to create than you could possibly imagine.
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Comment by Harmony Rocks
head for threads
Harmony's Forum For You
Harmony's Forum For You
Your authority is duly noted and respected.
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Joy
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by Cathy
Fakes Frauds Fools
Artist Quirk
Best Emerging Artists
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Well its 3am.. gotta get back to work
Funny thing is, I'v just done it all, all I have to do is piece together the seperate parts now to make a whole program. Gah, its killing me, I spend 2 days making it, now I'm probably gonna spend another 2 piecing it together...
Comment by incognito
incognito
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
Comment by MelissaA
Fun Facts
Ours even had went through an evaluation process of pay some years ago and they decided that they were proud to announce that for their field, they were not in the lowest paying company bracket ( 4 brackets 25% each bracket), but we all knew thay'd just scraped over the line at about 2%.
So even within the industry, and it's irrelevant how good you actually are, it's quite easy to end up on the bottom of the pay scale. And for the long patient hours that you work, I think all software coders and programmers should be given a big round of applause.
(As should the partners that support them ; ) .)
Comment by Ahmed
Video Gamer Kids
Little Green Foosballs
PolyKicks
I wish I could update my blogs but I don't have time, its killing me... siIly programming assignments, they'll be the death of me and my blogs