Ask Lemmy

It's frugal.

... It's not. Yarn is expensive as hell, even more so if you want any type of durability or wearability or comfort.

I work in IT (Sysadmin). "Oh, you fix computers? Can you look at my laptop?"

• QA tests software.
• QA reports issue with software.
• Developers review issue report.
• "Will Not Fix", "Works As Designed", "Cannot Reproduce", "Works on my machine"

End Users: "This software is buggy, their QA must suck!"

"oh wow your photography is so nice what camera do you use?"

._. photography is 80% skill and 20% gear and yet, i never get asked "what technique did you use?", it's always about the camera i use, as if this entry level DSLR is framing and shooting on its own

People always assume I want to turn my hobby into a job. I love to bake - it helps me de-stress from my job. If I made it my job, I wouldn't have something to help me de-stress anymore. I make enough money; I don't need to extract the joy from everything in my life for the sake of making more money.

I do not actually have keys to anything, nor am I allowed to wear headphones.

(Janitor)

I'm a web developer. People assume the following:

1. I'm an expert with operating systems.
2. I'm good with math.
3. I eat junk food and drink energy drinks/soda.
4. I'm a proponent and consumer of all new technologies.
5. I like (insert) TV, Movie, or Anime.

That I spend all day coding, I spend most my day reading. Code usually but still

People are always amazed at how physically active embroidery is at an industrial scale. Everybody thinks it's just sitting around with an oldschool hoop, but I'm up and down the length of an 8ft machine all day, embroidering the same design on 6 garments at once.

I think the most I ever did was 300 garments in an 8 hour workday, but I put 17k steps on my fitbit and was dead tired afterwards.

Edit:oh heck it was more steps than that

That I can make the band suck less. Sure, there’s something to be said about polishing a shit... But ultimately, it’s shit in>shit out. Your guitar doesn’t sound like ass because of the EQ; it sounds like ass because the guitarist had nine beers before he even walked on stage, and he can’t stay on beat to save his goddamned life.

Psychoacoustics is a fascinating subject. Just like placebo, people will fool themselves into thinking that something sounds good or bad, simply because they want it to. I always keep a DFA fader on my console, for when random people walk up and have suggestions. I make an adjustment to the DFA fader, they smile and nod to themselves, and then walk away. DFA means “Does Fuck All”. It’s literally a fader that isn’t doing anything at all. It’s not in the mix, it’s not in the monitors. It’s just a spare fader. But by adjusting the DFA, audience members will feel like I took them seriously, and they’ll placebo themselves into thinking that I took their advice.

To be clear, not all audience advice is bad advice. But for every “it’s too loud” complaint, you’ll inevitably get an equal and opposite “it’s too quiet”. There’s a reason music festivals have their audio console fenced off with a very wide perimeter. It’s specifically so drunken audience members can’t just saunter up and start yelling suggestions. That shit is distracting and 99% of the time is entirely unproductive.

That management and leadership are smart, visionary, people without whom everything would fall apart.

It doesn't matter what my line of work is. Management is mostly out of touch idiots everywhere.

"We need to redesign the web page to be more modern! Get me a big hero image and an image carousel!"

"Customers are complaining about how they can't save their search settings. Maybe we should do something about that?"

"No that's not a priority"

As a teacher: I don't get summers off.

As a waitress: Carrying food or drinks to the table is the least significant part of the job.

People praise me up for "saving the bees". Honey bees don't need saving. It's the other bees that do, the hundreds of species of bumblebees, mining bees, solitary bees etc etc. Bees that are outcompeted in some areas due to the number of hobbyist beekeepers and commercial bee farms. I'm one of the baddies.

Therapists are not "always analysing" you.

Seriously, you gotta pay me before I'll spend the energy to do that

That I can fix their computer or home network.

Sorry, Bubba, if your router costs less than my PC, there's not much I can do. Same answer if your PC costs less than my car.

Also, I haven't been good at troubleshooting windows (to the extent that is at all possible) since Tobey was Spiderman.

Software engineering.

Most people don't have a clue what we do. Especially management. Most people think we're code factory workers, just writing code all day. In reality, it is closer to being an artist than it is a factory worker. There's a ton of thinking, discussion, design, and unfortunately politicking.

User end hands on IT for the elderly.

that it's hard. "Oh I could never do your job"

It's literally a customer service job with tech paint. Reboot the device. Don't yell at the decrepit person doing their best in a digital world. Collect check and praise.

The amount of times I've been called a genius for relogging into someone's email is greater than 7.

Yeah. Real hard.

I’m a general contractor, and I think a lot of my customers assume I know everything about construction work - that whenever I’m doing something, it’s something I’ve done dozens of times before. But quite often, that’s not the case. Sometimes, all I know about the task at hand comes from a YouTube video I watched the night before, or I’m just following the manufacturer’s instructions step by step.

People don’t realize how often I’m just winging it and hoping it turns out fine. The fact that someone hires me usually means they know even less about the job than I do, which creates the illusion of much greater expertise. But in reality, the main difference between me and them often just boils down to the fact that I'm not afraid to try.

That I smoke all day, everyday. I don't. I read reports, I check environmental variable, I take readings from and make adjustments to tanks, I instruct people on how to prune and I sob over the new room of completely bare ones because nobody fucking listens to me.

Software dev and game dev: Being lazy, it not being a real job, not much effort, it being easy, everyone is a super genius, AI will replace us

I’m in engineering. If I tell someone I work for the phone company they think I work on phones. Not sure what my mom thinks I do.

I'm a physical substation designer, and people ask me if I can do electrician stuff.

No, I can't, and don't ask me anything about electricity, thanks.

I'm working with computers => I can fix their windows problems.

Nope. If I work on windows, and it eats itself for no reason, I call IT. I don't waste my time on that crap software.

No one knows the difference between fire eating and fire breathing. Everyone asks me for fire breathing lessons. I don't fire breathe. I also highly advise against it.

AI can do it - translator.

Example of Google lens fail:

People assume that because I'm into technology that I can unlock ~~stolen~~ phones or do XYZ whatever with their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram accounts or whatever. One, I don't touch stolen devices. Two, I don't have any accounts with any of those sort of services, and ain't about to start one to learn the ins and outs for other people.

Work - that I do math and science and stuff all the time. Reality - I do that some times. The rest of the time is investigating why an operator put toilet paper into the gear box or other oddities. People are weird.

Hobby - that 3d printing can make anything and it's better bc it's printed. Reality - it's just another tool, does some things well, others not. 3d printed houses are, in general, stupid PR stunts.

I'm a game designer. Most people have a very hard time understanding what I do

I work with embedded programming. I am not the first person you should ask to make a website for you...