(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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I had a lady I was helping with tech support ask me about her lightbulbs. I just told her I didn’t know the answer. She said “well you should know, it’s electronic.”
As a certified electrician, this logic also works the other way. I wire things. I don't know why your PC won't boot. Yes your computer uses electricity, but this is not my professional forté.
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.
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.
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.
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
I started with programming about anything that is programmable and not up on a tree at the count of three. I did industrial control units, and I worked on a Cray X-MP, and about anything between. I wrote computer games, compilers, an OS, database engines, and loads of applications. I've probably forgotten more programming languages than todays students have heard of. One day I ended up in embedded systems.
As our company had only one FPGA developer, I got sent on a three day course to learn VHDL from the source (Eugen Krassin, one of the original key developers of ISE). Right after that, I started developing FPGA firmware for our company. Luckily, I had some hardware experience from my work on the C64 and earlier, so I had a good understanding of clocks and signals. I know that even seasoned programmers really hit a wall when entering the world of HDLs.
I started with ISE back then on Spartan S3 and S6, then Xilinx f-ed us up so hard that the boss slammed the phone down after the last call with those guys and told me to find a more reliable company STAT. We now use Efinix FPGAs which has the big advantage that people there actually listen and help when I ask a question.
My field is isosynchronous low-latency networks for audio applications.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My wife is a stay at home parent, she works way harder than I do on a daily basis. Whoever thinks parenting isn’t a full time job clearly has never had kids… or is full of shit if they have had kids.
That's so sweet, I imagine she feels very supported by your words! It's for sure a full time job, but to me personally it doesn't feel like a job most of the time even though I'm super busy. I think it's the "find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life" thing?😊
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
I ask for no ice because pop is pretty cold when it comes out anyways and I hate watered down pop. Also if I take it home I can put it in the fridge .... and it doesnt get watered down.
Some folks have noticed the service you get in the States is shit, unless the wait staff identify you as someone who will give a good tip. If you're from an ethnic group notorious for bad tipping, you're never going to get good service, and so you're never going to tip well... Continuing the cycle. 🤷🏻♀️
It's not that it'll clean better, but an additional rinse can't hurt - especially if a utensil might have been crowded or rushed through the wash. Or maybe the waitstaffs hands are a bit suspect.
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.