A slight, but crucial reordering of electrons.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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Rearranging entropy by moving heat from one place to somewhere else.
I'm a fire wizard??
Eh, it's more like electromancy, but... yes.
An architect's building can last several hundred years. A programmers genius logic becomes obsolete in three years.
Tell that to leftpad.
Oh, I've got awful code from 20+ years ago still in mine.
That's okay. The company is set to go IPO in two.
Don't worry there'll be a company in 2095 that still using it. They're always is someone.
And the fools rushed code is still there a decade later...
You nailed it.
That's what's always amused me about the "code re-use" imperative. I started my career with Visual Basic 3 -- what good could anything I wrote back then possibly do me today?
I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It's hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.
I wrote a web app circa 2001 (Visual Basic 6 and Classic ASP) that is still in use. Unremarkable except that this app was a graphical UI front end atop a clunky mainframe app from the 1970s. The fact that my app is still running means this mainframe app is still running.
"Minus 400 lines of code created today."
"That's less than nothing, kiddo ;)"
Depression.
The end result of a programmer's work is depression.
As a system admin.... Same.
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I feel like this needs to be one of those tshirts from old facebook ads that is like a skeleton riding a motorcycle. "I'm a programmer, that means I'm a machine that turns tea into nothing."
I always liked "my body is a machine that turns childhood trauma into profits for the pharmaceutical industry."
Who,.that's the next mother's day gift sorted then.
im a machine that turns cold beer into warm piss
Don't know about you guys but I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it ain't for nothing.
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.....)
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?
I feel like that's almost a macabre in-joke to the adults involved
Dog hammering away at keyboard, in the other side off the wall an ATM is now working or a plane safely lands.
Am also a dev.
For real that standard just requires people be creative
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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?"
I worked from home for a few years. The Pornhub sessions would need to be edited out.
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It puts food on your table so you don't fucking starve, you little unappreciative shit.
My kid seems to get the connection between my job and our accommodations, but they'd still rather I play with them.
They once introduced me to a teacher by saying "this is my dad. He likes working. And money!"
The (quite young, probably barely in her twenties) teacher considered this for a moment, then said "well... I guess my parents do, too."
You should explain to the little ones that your boss wants a certain amount of work every week, and if he doesn't get it, he'll get mad and won't give you any money at all
They get the idea. They can even explain it back to me (though they're as likely to say that the money is for toys as they are to say, for example, food).
They just know what they'd prefer over me working.
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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.
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!
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
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