As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren’t as familiar with it. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.
- I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.
As a non-dev (tinker for fun) observer- it sounds like your friends and family think you’re working in IT, but their assumptions thereafter are fair. Is that accurate? That the misconception is software dev does not equal IT?
It goes a bit farther than that, even: IT work doesn’t always equal IT work. Someone can be an expert in managing Linux-based load sharing servers and have no idea how to help a family member troubleshoot why their windows install is slow. Sure, they might have a better idea about how to start, but they’d be essentially starting from scratch for that specific problem rather than being able to apply any of their expertise to it.
Think of it like a programmer is a car builder, some IT people drive them for a living, others are mechanics. Someone who specializes in driving F1 cars might not have any idea why your car is rattling. The programmer might be able to figure it out if they built that car or the cause is something similar to what they see in the ones they have built. But if they build semis, odds are that isn’t the case. But they might have a better idea than say a doctor.
I use the medecine analogy: you wouldn’t ask your dentist or even your GP to operate on your brain; doesn’t mean that they are not good at what they do though.
Yeah, I like that one better, too.
Yeah, sorry for oversimplifying. I worked in IT resellers for years and am acutely aware of all the different roles, and even specializations within that. The irony is back then (20 years) you’d get walked around the halls and introd to “the networking guy,” “procurement for paper and toner,” “Mike who needs components for the pbx; or the as400” - I had a thing for everyone from data centers to keyboards… but “oh, those are the software guys… they don’t buy stuff” - today it’s a devtools man’s world. Everything is for the software guys! (Having said that, my friends that grew into devops are finding new (old) opportunities managing actual on site data centers and co-los more often as the unit economics of AWS, gcp, azure, etc haven’t panned out as hoped)
100%
I program – yet I’ve been asked to fix a camera and Apple Maps.
I mean, I can fix them, but not because I’m a programmer. Makes it hard for normies to understand the difference.