What you should not say to any programmer you know.

When you see this kind of title, be prepared. It’s going to be some essence I get from my daily Quora digest. I should have believed my friend when he told me about how great Quora is – whatever, we’re going to dive into the hilarious topic of the day, which is about code, nerds, stepping on the wrong wires and catch yourself some fire.

Listen up, managers.

Don’t tell your programmers that they can take as long as they need to deliver the product. This somehow means that you will be paying their salary forever while they take forever to deliver the product. Don’t get me wrong, programmers are not lazy. In fact, most of the times they are pretty enthusiastic about their job and the highlighting their IDE gives when they type their code. The only issue is, there is no such thing as a “completed product” in the programming world. Don’t ask why. The computing world is evolving every single second and there is always a way to make your product better, like a super minor UI tweak for aesthetics, a codebase rewrite to use the latest graphical technologies, etc. It is a never ending task.

Source: https://www.xkcd.com/612/

If you said that to me, I will happily say “okay”, give you updates on the product every week, and give you another to-do list every single week too. If you stop seeing the to-do list for one week, that means I’m about to quit and abandon the code :)

I can do it in one day!

Probably you’re going to make another programmer in your team rage quit. At least this is what happened to that company mentioned in the post.

Programmers know what they are doing – if you never coded something, you won’t know it. Scratch doesn’t count. When they say they need that amount of time to do something, it includes the time required for test runs, debugging, designing, writing test suites, etc. Of course as a casual code player I rarely do all these stuff, but I will have an idea how long it will take to implement a new feature. The schedule can only extend but not the other way round, because extra spaghetti will require more time to be eaten up, and not the other way round. Plus, if something is easy, then probably it’s ugly, and you may summon a T-Rex with it.

Source: https://www.xkcd.com/292/

A lot of replies also mentioned about “hey I have an idea that might change the world can you help me to code this out you’ll get a portion of what I get”. According to what they say, most of their ideas are bad. Of course, if their ideas were good, we should had Steemit before the 21st century and everyone will be rich without a thing to complain. Too bad a perfect world doesn’t exist.

“This feature does not look hard to implement, can you do it within this time?” many also mentioned this. I can totally relate. Like totally.

A long time before when I am playing in my relative’s office, doing some mobile apps for them, I fully embraced the power of my code. I can’t help but laugh at myself when trying to add some features into that little mobile app. You need a QR code scanner? That should be easy, it’s just importing another library, create a new activity and give a button to launch it…oh wait hold on…

The library is needs something that cannot work with some other library used by another part of the code, adding the button in the most strategic location will need me to reconstruct the entire UI, once I find a promising library that seems to do the work it lacked documentation…etc. And when everything gets done, I still have to deal with dozens of null pointer exceptions or something like that. Of course it’s just an example. I don’t really remember the details, but it’s more or less something like this. Dependency issues broke my sanity a long time ago and the nightmare never ends.

So, if you are manager or a leader in the office, please do not do anything above. I don’t know if your programmer is going to take his sniper or Samsung Note 7 out, just don’t say it. :)

Or you can probably hope that this happens.

Source: https://xkcd.com/1722/

You’re a programmer, so can you fix my printer?

F*ck you, and f*ck your piece of sh*t printer.

Aladin Bensassi, Web Developer

Yes, a bunch of programmers only know how to code. They know nothing else about computers, just like me. Although I should be slightly better because I am literally forced by my family to solve computer issues from a very long time ago. Working with the computer does not mean that they know computers well – go ask your secretary that types with the computer every single day. Probably they can’t tell why their Office license expired one day too.

As I said above, I can help you to solve your issues, but obviously I won’t like to. For 90% of the times, if the issue is not software-related (I can still somehow solve software issues like the ones that are caused by the spaghetti within Windows. I mean, backing up their data with a Linux Live CD and reinstalling Windows does not sound too hard anyway), I can still try to solve it. But if you bring your laptop to me with a broken hard disk or a CPU on fire, then I will just throw that machine out of the window and tell you to brace yourself. Or, if I have the mood, I might just help you to call a few technicians I know…that’s the most I can do. Nothing else.

Source: https://www.xkcd.com/627/

Don’t touch me when I’m in the zone.

Even my mum knows this. She won’t disturb me when she sees my brain on fire with full attention on my keyboard.

There’s one phase in everything we call the godmode – you get good in that thing in a sudden, becoming the god of the code playground, mastering every path of spaghettis, controlling the flow of every single control structure, creating the most brilliant idea of whatever – as long as you can do it in your very own code playground you can do it. That’s how it feels. For the non-code guys around, that literally means you have the ability to write about every single thing like a god when you are in the Steemit post editor. If that feeling feels familiar, you get the idea.

It is a little similar to games. After playing for a moment probably you will get that godmode feeling too. It’s when you start to get the hang of it and really enjoy every single thing in it. So, you will now know that it is actually hard to get in it, and it is also very hard to get out of it. If you managed to interrupt a programmer in this state…they’ll not be productive for the next hour. Unless you pay for their coffee. Probably.

What about me?

Yea...me IRL

Source: https://www.xkcd.com/1163/

After about 1k words, let’s talk about what triggers me the most…no, it’s not people asking me to fix their computers. That’s not an issue at all.

The most frustrating thing I can ever have when I am coding something for someone is, the client (I can’t find a more suitable term despite I don’t charge) can’t tell me what is the error that stopped the thing from working. 99% of the times they don’t even have the correct Python version installed.

When I ask about what is wrong, all I get is “it broke”. Tableflips and eternal hellfire. If you were a programmer, you would fully understand the frustration dealing directly with someone that has 0 programming knowledge. It’s really a thing.

I can really continue ranting about forever but why should I :P

Don’t step on that wire!

If you are a manager working with a bunch of nerds, don’t ever go over the borderline, you won’t like it.

You may go and read the Quora thread – it’s too long and I can’t finish it. But there seems to be more and more memes down there, worth a look.
Until next time,

--Lilacse