That what I do is easy and that I’m “just pushing buttons”. Yeah, I’m pushing the right button at the right time because the whoke shebang has been program’d, cued, mixed over weeks of rehearsals so that, come show time, it’s all by magic. Magic of pushing the right button at the right time while also reading the brochure, watch the stage, issue cues to other dept sometimes in 2 different languages.
Easy peasy!
Stage manager? I’m not one myself, but I used to work in a theatre, and those people earn their money for sure. It’s an amazing talent to keep everything running so smoothly, and it rarely gets the credit it deserves.
Yup! Must say this stemmed from a not-so-long-ago public comment by a “lead actor” which later took an hour-long dressing down by the director straight through his face. He apologized.
That you can quickly pick up coding with a few courses.
Can you learn it? Sure why not. Just keep in mind that you’ll never stop learning, so it has to fit into your lifestyle.
Further, you’ll have to be patient and be able to deal with stress well. If you can’t adjust yourself to work in a team, you’ll have difficulty finding work.
Another misconception is that coders stay alone at home in a dark room all the time. Coding is just one part of your life and people do all sorts of stuff.
Yeah lots of people who aren’t in tech think of coding as a solitary job, but it’s a very social-skills-dependent job.
Social skills required to be a coder (at least; probably forgetting many):
- Communicate complex concepts which have never been discussed before
- Deliver things on time
- Understand the tradeoffs of others’ jobs well enough to make good decisions about when it’s worth it NOT to deliver something on time (or be able to figure it out by communicating with whom you’re delivering to)
- Know the balance between asking for help and trying to figure it out yourself, including the short- and long-term tradeoffs of the two approaches
- Know whether a problem you’re encountering is your own lack of skill, your own lack of knowledge, your own lack of care, or someone else’s any of those, and then communicate with others on the basis of being unsure of this
- Deal with antisocial coworkers who can hide their shenanigans in the complexity of the code. I.e. if they’re smart enough they can screw with your work, making you look bad, in a way that is extremely difficult to explain to non-technical management (and hence get support for)
- Have the emotional stability and the hutzpah and the finesse to call things like this out when they do happen, and make those complicated explanations or deliver their abstract form
- Understand and feel the pain of users when their systems break
As an autistic person, I struggled mightily with the social skill requirements of being a coder on a team. I ultimately failed. I’d like to go back and try again, after doing some really basic shit to improve my own character.
No, as a webdeveloper I don’t know anything about your custom windows server environment and how to share files between all kinds of devices on it.
That I will ignore 30 years of accumulated knowledge and experience - and all the relevant laws - just because they really really really want me to build something their way, and that they tell me it’ll be fine. If an experienced professional says “no” there is a good reason for that… we’re not just being obstinate.
That I know how to fix problems with their printer. That includes members of my own household.
I’m going with beekeeping as my “field” because it’s my main hobby now I’m retired. So. Many. Misconceptions. The Bee Movie was not a documentary, people! The mating process for honeybees is horrifying and you don’t want to know. Male bees have one job, and then they die. If they don’t do that job, they still die; their sisters kick them out at the end of summer. Plus, I was talking to someone the other day who didn’t realise we let the bees just roam around.
You let the bees roam around? So they’re not inside bees?
Nope, the bees are never in one place. They roam from town to town
I wonder how many of us instantly wrote bee-versions of the lyrics?
The saxophone solo is definitely now done by bees.
As an uber driver: that I know where building G is. Your housing complex is like ten acres of apartment buildings and speed bumps I have to go over while I search around for building G.
For anyone unaware, you can fine-tune the pickup point in the Uber app by holding and dragging the map.
You set the pickup point, then I meet you there. That’s my side of this job.
That we IT people know everything about every bussiness application that is used in an org of more than 5 employees.
If I new that I would be automating your job and you would be out of a job.
That grass is better than wild growth. Wait…
Credit card companies don’t issue credit cards, they’re middlemen for the banks and take a cut from every transaction processed.
When I lost my credit card overseas I was issued an emergency replacement by MasterCard and it only had MasterCard branding. I guess sometimes they issue cards (unless they got a bank to print it without their branding).
That’s technically not a card issuance, which in CC terms only happens when the bank associates an account on their end with a new card profile from the CC company. No actual card needs to be issued either, a token in a digital wallet works the same way.
Deactivating a lost card and activating a replacement (temporary or otherwise) are just maintenance activities on an existing card profile. They get recorded to the original profile both for record-keeping and so that the bank doesn’t get billed extra for issuing a new one.
There you go, proving exactly what the OP was asking about! I just assumed issuing and printing were the same.
I did too! Turns out there’s a lot of weirdness and jargon that gets built into the system after 44 years of continuous operation, and of course the CC companies wanted to be able to bill separately for issuing new cards and printing replacements. XD
Visa and Mastercard, yes. Amex and Discover are both network and bank.
I work with the homeless. the main misconception is that they’re all either addicts or mentally ill. This is far, far, from true. The ones you see daily, chances are they are addicts or mentally ill but the “hidden” homeless vastly out weighs the ones you see on the streets.
Most have jobs or are actively looking for work. A lot are escaping domestic abuse or are LGBTQ+ and escaping hostile home environments. There are A LOT of families and elderly people who simply can’t afford to keep a roof over their heads.
Haha, most people here do tech it seems. Well, me too.
People seem to think I’d be good at maths and my entire job is like maths. I’m not and I don’t view it that way. There’s a lot of problem solving and engineering, but I find it very creative and expressive
I know, the proportion of professional tech people here shocked me. I know there’s a lot of like open source nerds and whatnot here but I only do that stuff as a hobby lol
I’m a physicist and we are actually dumb as a box of rocks.
As a mathematician I will reiterate what my supervisor told me: Math is not hard, it is only we that suck at it (said in context of me complaining about having used way too much time on what I in retrospect found to be simple).
Learning to explain math to a computer has been a major blessing.
Physicist: Makes a weird formula, uses it for decades without knowing why it works.
Mathematician: Looks for an approach that makes sense for decades, dies.
I get annoyed with the way they use math sometimes, but I have to keep in mind there is an advantage to it (I guess).
Also a physicist, and I can confirm that we are all as dumb as rocks.
We are literally rocks
Anything smarter than the box of rocks is just theory
(IT support) I actually don’t know where that random setting in your application is, I’m just really fast and good at guessing from doing it a million times in applications I’ve never heard of before.
Similar to that, just because someone works in IT, doesn’t mean they can fix your computer problem. I’ve worked with a lot of developers who were great coders but couldn’t resolve networking or random OS issues.
I’m a developer. Most of the time when I contact IT it’s because they broke something I rely on, like our vCenter appliance or network communications between some Linux appliances with static IPs.
Oh yes. I support a lot of developers, and being a good programmer is not the same as understanding networking in a corporate environment or even knowing anything about printers. That’s why I’m needed 😃
Fair enough! Tell them it’s actually half empty! I can see your point. So they are trying to get out of paying for a double!
