this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 3 months ago (1 children)

(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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 3 months ago (2 children)

no one QA'd this AAA game

Actually, that game breaking bug was caught weeks ago by QA. Unmoving deadlines set by upper management meant that a fix couldn't be made in time for the content schedule.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Also, by the time the game has been released for 1 hour, the players have already racked up more playtime than the full QA team could reasonably achieve throughout several years of development (and for most of that time QA were playing an older version…). So, if your game has a lot of player choice, randomization, simulation, complex systems, chances are the players are seeing things that QA never did. And then the players wonder how QA could miss such an obvious bug.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I've mothballed multiple RCs from finding P0 issues by pure chance. In my experience, 90% of bugs are already caught by QA, 8% were isolated bugs that would realistically never get caught in QA, and 2% just slip through.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago

"IT is mainly introverts doing mysterious stuff no one understands"

It is a very cooperative field where everyone has different roles with different responsibilities, but everyone has a vague idea what everyone else is doing. Most of the time is spent making sure everyone else can also use the systems you build, not just yourself.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 months ago

That the folks in IT have any sway over microsoft or facebook's ui plans.

NO Karen, I can not make Teams go back to the way it used to be. No matter how many times you ask.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

That IT people can pretty much fix anything like TVs, HVACs, stoves, water heaters, fridges, toasters, rice cookers, and many more.

Just because we work in tech, doesn't mean we can deal with every technology known to mankind.

And no, we're not certified electricians.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think that comes from the fact that a lot of people got into computers by learning to take apart and fix things like that.

That, and the general populace has fuck all for troubleshooting skills.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The error on the screen tells you exactly what is wrong in plain English... But you got impatient and clicked past it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

(Unless the dev happened to not write the error messages, then you're fucked or pay money for support)

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That I could fix Windows PCs. Nope. When my work PC has issues, I call IT. I design computer chips.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Hey! Can I ask you about that? What type of chips? What are your most used skills/technologies and what helped get started when you were new? I want to work with fpgas, and I'd love to know what your experience with that has been like

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I’m going with beekeeping as my β€œfield” 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You let the bees roam around? So they're not inside bees?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nope, the bees are never in one place. They roam from town to town

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago

I'm a web developer and people seem to think that once a product is brought to market the devs are no longer needed.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

People generally assume stay at home parents only choose that if their spouses make a lot of money, that they are bored or unsatisfied with their life, and that it's a job that is very hard and not much fun.

Obviously I don't speak for SAHPs and maybe these things do apply to some, but my life is freakin awesome! We choose to live very simply and frugally on a single below average income and it is completely worth it every single day for us.

I have so much control over my own schedule, I can't get enough of spending time with my kid and have so much fun with them, I have more time for my own interests, self care or friendships when my spouse can take over at times after work, we get fun family time all together almost every day because we don't have to spend all evening cooking and cleaning (plus our schedule is more flexible), and this is the only job where everything I do all day long directly benefits myself and my loved ones (beyond financial support).

There is genuinely nothing in the world I would trade for this. But man do I get tired of the negative comments from nearly everyone who finds out what I do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My brother in law is a stay at home dad too. He's a wonderful father and supportive spouse. Yall deserve a hell of a lot of credit!

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

In any software development timeline given, triple it to be safe!

Programmers don't just pull perfect codes from their butts

Programming languages (yes, in some scenarios, even python) are hell to work with. And yes, I know developer experience has gotten so much better compared to 5 years ago. Still, there are too many unknowns.

It's like trying to shush a crying baby. Trying every trick on the book to put her back to sleep. But naaah, all she does is cry (no reasons, no hints)

This makes a half-an-hour job take 2 days (hence the unknown delays and setbacks)

If you meet a programmer that pulls a rough prototype of a single module inside a program in a few seconds and works immediately. Know that he/she has 10+ years of experience in that language domain.

i.e. that one granny that "feels the baby" and knows what it wants, making the baby calm immediately.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

And even then, it just meant that whatever solution they thought up worked first try.

With experience you get better at finding good, working solutions quicker, but there will always be times when things take a bit of iteration.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Medical field here: The vast majority of us are not in it for the money. Physicians have to spend 3 to 9 years after medical school working for a wage that works out to about $5/hour to gain certification and a medical license in their specialty. And that's after 8 to 12 years of undergraduate/graduate/doctorate education that basically has to be paid for with loans unless they're in the military or come from a rich family. So, yes, physicians do make high salaries once they're established, but there was a lot of work and sacrifice to get to that point, and very few people are masochistic enough to put themselves through that just for the money.

Also, the most expensive parts of a medical appointment/surgery/ER visit etc is the administrative overhead, inflated prices of drugs and supplies, and insurance company bullshit. Very little money from that price tag actually makes it to the healthcare workers. Your average EMT on an ambulance makes between $13-20/hour depending on the state minimum wage.

If you have a problem with your healthcare costs, that's something to take up with your representatives in government, not the EMTs, CNAs, nurses, and physicians providing your care.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As a patient, the reason I'm complaining about healthcare costs is if you say something like "My job isn't to worry about the money". Well mine, as the patient, is. Sometimes it helps when I explain that financial stress is a predictor of heart disease, then they get where I'm coming from.

I need to know in advance how much this costs because I'm doing a cost-benefit analysis against other forms of harm that I can spend the money to avoid. And if you (the royal you, your entire profession) can't understand how that could be a factor, I can translate the financial cost into morbidity statistics.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I'm in my third year of medical school, so I've just started my clinical rotations, but one of the things that shows up on almost every reference table for physicians regarding treatment options is information on the price for the patient. I'm rotating in a family medicine clinic right now, and we pretty frequently prescribe the best possible treatment, and then when the pharmacy runs it through the patient's insurance and finds out how much it's going to cost, we then start working down the list of next-best alternatives until we can find something the patient can afford. Because there are so many different insurance plans out there, we have no idea how much something is going to cost until the insurance tells us.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

We aren’t trying to screw you, the actual solutions (not bandaids) are just expensive (paying for knowledge, skill, equipment, and parts). That 5 min fix took years to know to look for and how to fix quickly, plus have the part on the truck for immediate installation. Typically a quick tech is a good tech if the problem is solved.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I'm a physicist and we are actually dumb as a box of rocks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

That grass is better than wild growth. Wait..

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I worked in food logistics before my current job.

People think baked goods in stores are fresh, many are packaged and flash frozen then defrosted when it arrives at the store. Even fresh baked stuff is often proofed then flash frozen, baked from frozen. Nobody but expensive bakeries has actual bakers anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Credit card companies don't issue credit cards, they're middlemen for the banks and take a cut from every transaction processed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Visa and Mastercard, yes. Amex and Discover are both network and bank.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

That I know how to fix problems with their printer. That includes members of my own household.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Teacher:

Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you've done a course once, you can coast forever.

Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it's not done very often.

Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.

Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are "old school" are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I work with radio camera links. The number of people who get upset over the receivers is depressing. They can make the 5G conspiracy theorists look educated.

Receive equipment is incapable of radiating at all.

The part that radiates is completely safe!

Seriously, any danger would be at the camera end. I am happy to sit with it fully powered and the antenna between my legs. (It stops the camera getting knocked over). It can't put out enough power to do any harm. It's comparable to home WiFi and weak compared to the mobile phone you are happy to put to your head!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

IT is actually a vast field with many many specialties similar to medicine. Asking the copier guy why your server is down is kinda like asking a podiatrist why you're sad all the time.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

That they could get the same level of table service if waitresses were paid a flat wage.

That waitresses rely on tips to make up for a deficient wage instead of the other way around.

That less ice will mean more drink in the glass.

That the 185Β°F water from the coffee machine will clean the silverware better than the much hotter sterilizing rinse of the industrial dishwasher.

That they should wait to complain to a manager instead of telling me right away if something is off so I can fix it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That less ice will mean more drink in the glass.

If the drink is filled to the same level on the glass, then less ice must mean more drink, right?

Unless you fill the drink first, and then add ice, in which case the drinks with ice would have higher water levels then those without ice.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

For water and pop, sure.

For cocktails, not so much.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Not so much a professional field as a field of human experience, but being homeless.

People think the main things homeless people lack are:

  • food and drink
  • shelter
  • money

In actuality, most homeless people have at least some of that stuff. What they tend to totally lack, creating the difficulty in living a civilized life of dignity, are:

  • bathrooms/hygiene facilities
  • security
  • storage space
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