I have tried for 20 years to get into coding, and among adhd and having 10 million other projects going on, just could never get it beyond absolute basics and knowing some differences between languages.
Now it seems every tutorial I see is really just clicking around in a gui. Very little actual typing of code, which is the part I actually find cool and interesting.
So my question is, since everyone on lemmy is a programmer, what do you guys actually do? Is it copying and pasting tons of code? Is it fixing small bugs in Java for a website like “the drop down field isn’t loading properly on this form”?
I just dont get what “a full stack developer sufficient in sql and python” actually does. Also i dont know if that sentence even made sense!
10% creating bugs, 90% fixing bugs.
This should work… it doesn’t. What? Why the hell not… omfg.
This should work… it doesn’t. What? Why the hell not… omfg.
This should work… it doesn’t. What? Why the hell not… omfg.
This should work… it doesn’t. What? Why the hell not… omfg.
This should work… it doesn’t. What? Why the hell not… omfg.
This shouldn’t work… Why the hell does it work, don’t touch it!!
I’m more scared of this one, “it should work but doesn’t” means there’s something I’m missing, usually small, maybe I forgot to change one function call or an import. “it shouldn’t work but does” means there’s a huge misconception in how the thing actually works.
They pay developers to put bugs in and then they pay them to take bugs out.
They pay people to find the bugs and then ignore them!!
0% figuring out what the customer wants? I envy you.
There’s a zen peace that comes after realizing the customer is out of their mind and will change their mind tomorrow, anyway.
A “full-stack developer” is someone who can do front-end / UI work (HTML, CSS and Javascript or whatever the frameworks and tools de jour are nowadays if we’re talking webdev), back-end work (APIs and “business logic” and all the stuff users don’t see), and often storage and infrastructure work (manage databases, write and optimize SQL queries, put things in buckets, get your code running on AWS / k8s / a pack of gophers / whatever)
that is
someone who wears too many hats and isn’t paid nearly enough by a company that doesn’t want to hire 4 engineers
I’ve been a full stack developer for nearly thirty years. They keep adding so much to the stack that these days I will only claim to be a Java developer. I know way more, but there’s no point in laying claim to it. I can do JavaScript, css, and typescript, but I don’t really know react and I don’t want to because it’ll be replaced in another five years anyway.
I have worked with so many CI/CD systems and there’s a new one around every corner and what you know for one doesn’t apply to others.
Like, whoever you hire is going to take months before they are able to do significant stuff independently and 2 years before they can do the full scope of the job you hired them to do, and most folks are looking to move on after 2 years. About the time they’ve been around for a full Java/spring upgrade, build system change, and you’ve moved cloud providers, they will have encountered every problem often enough to know everything they need.
CI/CD! How did I forget CI/CD?
oh right I’m an SRE with Jenkins trauma
fuck groovy
10 Get told to stop working on whatever I’m working on, some tech debt just became tech foreclosure.
20 Some new problem is now problem number 1
30 Get about 70% done fixing the problem (it’s functional but ugly, just need to wrap up this mess so it doesn’t become tech debt…)
40 GOTO 10
Wait till they find out that your are capable of GOSUB - RETURN too.
I write code in a niche industry, in an even more niche language.
With 20 years experience I am finally at the point that much of my stuff works without too much headache.
Unfortunately, now that I’m finally good at it, it’s become a much smaller part of my overall job.
Nothing I look forward to more than being left alone for a few hours with my headphones on banging out a project.
That’s the most hilarious thing about being good at being an engineer it seems. I’m more than 10 years into my career at this point and I spend more time correcting other people’s work and outlining the technical work that needs to be done than writing things myself these days.
“hey instead of working on the projects that you are responsible for, can you spend your whole week answering 10 peoples complex questions since you’re the only one that can answer them”
But from the companies perspective this is a net-gain.
You’ve just unblocked 10 people so they can continue to work… and even if their weekly individual productivity is 25% of yours, combined they’re doing more than twice the amount of work you’re doing and it only cost the company a week of your time.
Yeah, at times it’s frustrating and distracting, but hopefully you’re getting compensated for the knowledge you bring inaddition to the work you deliver.
I’m curious what this niche language is if you don’t mind sharing. I love niche languages and always enjoy hearing about them being used in industry.
I work in corporate Audio Video, and program in all the main AV languages. I specialize in AMX / Netlinx, but do Crestron, Extron, and various DSP programming as well.
Tie it all back to web applications where I primarily use PHP.
Been learning Python as that looks to be where things are going in the next 5 years.
See you at Masters!
since everyone on lemmy is a programmer
Just because I’m on Lemmy, does not make me a programmer.
I mean, I am a programmer.
But not because I’m on Lemmy. (I think.)
what do you guys actually do?
I say “please” in various ways that computers understand.
Is it copying and pasting tons of code?
Well… Yes, but with a lot more swearing at the computer.
But I’m very good at it, so I copy and paste very small amounts of code very cleverly.
Is it fixing small bugs
I fix small bugs, huge bugs, critical bugs, and intermittent sneaky bugs. I get paid either way.
You have a wonderful way with words. 😊
- Identify a problem. (User wants do something and can’t, something that is supposed to work doesn’t, someone wrote shit code that works and we want to fix it)
- Get more info about it: ask users for more context, find out about their workarounds, assess the impact of the bug, find solutions to similar problems. Get together with others and hash out some design.
- Do the coding. Often involves a bunch of reading documentation and trial running code to see if it works
- Come up with a way to confirm the change does what it’s supposed to: write a new automatic test, or a procedure a person can follow to verify it works
- Write a description of the change and test plan
- Get someone else to check what I’ve done and make any changes they ask for (as long as I agree)
Programmer here.
Clicking things in elaborate IDE GUIs and copying stuff they don’t understand appears widespread because it’s easy to teach and make a video about, but it’s not it.
My days are spent in Emacs, (used to be Vim), and a Bash terminal. I sometimes use an more “fancy” IDE for a year or two but I always realize they slow me down and make me stupid.
I write code I understand based on system models I discuss with the team. My time is spent thinking about the models, learning the components I work with, debugging, etc. While all of these involve typing up some code, only 5% or so is writing actually “finished” code.
Neovim user here. Why the switch. (I’ve never tried emacs)
Probably enlightenment.
ducks
I like NeoVIM, but in the end it got a bit frustrating to get the tooling to behave, like language server for Guile, especially when the configuration was half config format, half Lua code, third half referencing those from Vim.
In Emacs everything - code, config, invocations - are jus lisp. And the ecosystem is a bit more mature for the tools I use in our current codebase.
I switched to Helix and I’m so far liking it more than nvim
Something something Jira something scrum agile Confluence something another meeting something hit tab and let copilot do it and repeat.
Disclaimer: I have a dream job for me and my experience is probably not representative.
Go on open.kattis.com, pick a problem, solve it. That’s what 40% of my job is like. 20% more is reading through and understanding where the right place for this bit of code to live or what bits of code I should be reusing to make it. Another 20% is discussing with other engineers the tradeoffs of solving a problem with x vs y and picking what to do, and the last 20% is reviewing code, i.e. making sure other people solve their problems correctly and don’t drop a bunch of hack in our tree.
Have business requirements change by the hour
I’m a DevOps guy and seem to spend most of my time fixing AI slop. It’s supposed to mean automating builds, tests, scans, deploys, compliance, etc, so the other developers can focus on product code and all the process just works
First of all, there is no graphical stuff. That’s just for simple learning sandboxes.
We have an IDE - Integrated Development Environment. You can think of it as a glorified text editor. We type code in text and it gives us the equivalent of spellcheck, grammar check, autocomplete. They usually colorize the code so you can see structure, match parens and quotes, and other low level assistance. But it gets much more useful with integrations to version control, scanners, build tools, download dependencies . You can click to build, test, scan, commit. They’re usually tons of other tools to make life easier.
But code is cheap and easy to write the first time: much more expensive to fix. Maintenance over time is far more expensive than writing it.
So now we have AI as another tool integrated into IDEs, and it is somewhat useful for generating new code based on patterns from previous code. But it’s never good enough to be an end result. A good developer can use the ai to get a jumpstart on new code, iterate it to get better, and almost always have to use their own knowledge to finish it to a working, maintainable result.
So I have a bunch of junior developers in another country, just directly checking in ai slop. They don’t seem to be experienced enough or diligent enough to recognize when it needs more work. Which means I need to spend a lot more time on code reviews trying to figure out the unorganized mess, give the same feedback over and over, review the same code many times, and inevitably spend much more time on bug fixes for their mess than I would have taken implementing it myself.
The thing is ai is not good at bug fixing. You can try to have it summarize the code, or compare it to best practices but it can’t really help figure out what’s going wrong and how to best fix it. Especially if the original code is ai slop to begin with. So I don’t even get any advantage from it
jr devs … AI slop… same code review over and over…time…slipping
There is this channel that live-streams themselves if you wanna watch like 5-20 minutes and get an overall idea.
Sit in meetings
Mind i ask what are you trying to archive? At what point would you see yourself as a programmer? When its in your job description? X amount of projects worked on on GitHub?
As an auti-dd I really really like coding and i had a developer job once to discover i absolutely loathed it. I hated having rules and infrastructure that directed me how to code, i hated being told what i could work on. I could not stand having a schedule telling me when to code and from what desk to do it.
The only thing that makes me want to code is to creatively express myself. I no longer accept compromise beyond creative limitations i myself put in place. (Really autistic-pedantic shit sometimes)
My current job description is an IT position that could not be further removed from coding in its description. It also doesn’t challenge me. I don’t want it too because now i often have spare free to “improve the functioning of the workplace” which i do by writing scripts and tools that fix common annoyances in our legacy software and save my coworkers plenty of time.
Or in house developer team (who have no time and are to distant from other day-to-day work have expressed confusion why someone like me wants to stay in my role rather then join them but i know i wont be able to continue my side projects and am just going to get assigned to expensive-big-ego-pet-project instead.
I also have plenty of code related projects at home, i lost motivation for those when i was a “real programmer”
Mostly I make JIRA tickets.
