Programming

The notion that creating a half-decent application is quick and easy enough that I would be willing to transform their idea into reality for free.

The worst and most common misconception is that I can fix their Windows issues from a vague description they give me at a party.

That just because I'm a programmer that must mean I'm a master of anything technology related and can totally help out with their niche problems.

"Hey computer guy, how do I search for new channels on my receiver?"

"Hey computer guy, my excel spreadsheet is acting weird"

"My mobile data isn't working. Fix this."

My friend was a programmer and served in the army, people ordered him to go fix a sattelite. He said he has no idea how but they made him try anyways. It didn't work and everyone was disappointed.

I once had a friend who told me, that he finds it interesting that I think and write in 1s and 0s.

"Just"

That one word has done a fuck ton of lifting over my career.

"Can't you just make it do this"

I can't "just" do anything you fuck head! It takes time and lots of effort!

A lot people compleatly overrate the amount of math required. Like its probably a week since I used a aritmetic operator.

They can't possibly judge what is trivial to achieve and what's a serious, very hard problem.

People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services

That they have any business telling me how complicated something is or how long something should take for me to implement.

That IT subject matter like cybersecurity and admin work is exactly the same as coding,

At least my dad was the one who bore the brunt of that mistake, and now I have a shiny master's degree to show to all the recruiters that still don't give my resume a second glance!

I found it useful when explaining programming to lay people to try to put various programming paradigms in everyday terms.

Imperative programming is like a cooking recipe. You need specific ingredients in certain amounts and you need to perform actions in a very specific order, or the recipe won't turn out right.

OOP is like a bicycle. Lots of pieces interconnected and working together, hopefully interchangeable and standardized. It can also be used to explain unit testing to juniors. Clock mechanisms or engines can also work but people tend to relate better to bicycles.

Declarative programming (SQL) works like ordering at the restaurant. You still need to know how restaurants work and about meal courses and how to read the menu etc. but you don't need to know how the sausage was made, only if it's good or not.

• You're a hacker (only if you count the shit I program as hacks, being hack jobs)
• You can fix printers
• You're some sort of super sherlock for guessing the reason behind problems (they'll tell you "my computer is giving me an error", fail to provide further details and fume at your inability to guess what's wrong when they fail to replicate)
• If it's on the screen, it's production ready

That there's something inherently special about me that makes me able to program....

... Yes...patience and interest.

Doesn't happen as much, but family and non tech friends would present me to other people that "worked with computers" thinking I could take new job opportunities. They were always wildly unrelated to my field.

I know I know,.. they acted in good faith, and probably could have adapted a bit, but like 30 years ago there was a lot of overlap and systems where somewhat similar, but now somebody trained in Linux kernel maintenance isn't going to learn how to create SharePoint SPFx webparts. Development is very specific now!

That it's dry and boring and even I must hate it because there's no place for creativity in a technical field.

The speed at which it takes to make something. We had a vulnerability with a JavaScript library in an old app that I do minimal support on, I said that it only uses like 3 or 4 libraries, so depending on what it is the whole frontend may need to be re-written. IT: "Ok well we have to get that expensed." Sure bro let me just bill the client that is paying for it and error support 20k for new dev time. Nah, the fix is gonna have to be a workaround on your end, we do not have the bandwidth and they don't have the capital.

That you can mix and match bugfixes like lego blocks an hour before release.

Based on some places I used to work, upper management seemed convinced that the "idea" stage was the hardest and most important part of any project, and that the easy part is planning, gathering requirements, building, testing, changing, and maintaining custom business applications for needlessly complex and ever changing requirements.

I think that non-tech people think that tech just goes. Like you pull it out of a box and turn it on and it just works. They have no idea how much jenk is in everything and how much jenk was eradicated before a user came went anywhere near.

I mean the classic is that you must be "really good at computers" like I'm okay at debugging, just by being methodical, but if you plop me in front of a Windows desktop and ask me to fix your printer; brother, I haven't fucked with any of those 3 things in over a decade.

I would be as a baby, learning everything anew, to solve your problem.