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What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This one floored me yesterday

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Just 2 days ago some friends thought that I could get any job from the huge pool of available jobs out there...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

That I'm in any way smart or good at math

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

I was at a party explaining that we were finishing up a release trying to decide which bugs were critical to fix. The person that I was talking to was shocked that we would release software with known bugs.

When I explained that all software has bugs, known bugs, he didn't believe me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.