Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Pay No Attention to the Manchild Behind the Curtain

If you've ever worked in IT, I feel for you. But I also hate you, because genuinely smart and competent people in the IT world are as rare as basic hygiene at Comic Con. In fact those two groups are quite similar, as we'll see shortly...

In the IT world, a systemic con has gone on for years that the technical skills weilded by developers verges on magic. Esoteric knowledge that allows one's wildest dreams to take digital shape! The truth of the matter is much more low and boring - writing code, of either web or database, is just a long and dull process. And that's even with gratoutious copy pasting.

Which makes up the vast majority of the development process. The second biggest block of time is devoted to printing things out and failing to make a plan of action, with the last bit of time devoted to hurreidly writing new code that takes a few rounds of testing to actually work. All of which is exacerbated by the average developer's crippling laziness, making it impossible to arrive before 11 in the morning and leaving the most pressing work until some time after 4 in the afternoon.

This isn't because the coding process itself is difficult - again, it's not in the slightest - but because the personalities that gravitate towards such a job are just plain dumb. If you ever thought a developer was speaking a different language from you, they were. A stupid language. The common developer has no comprehension of nuance, lateral thinking, or problem solving beyond the most linear basics. Their minds are as fetid ponds that need a good skimming.

And that's all well and good. Can't have everyone be a Nietzsche, else great thought would lose its distinction. The problem is, as anyone who's experienced these types can attest, is that they have a boundless sense of self-importance. When their code fails, as usual, they respond with disdain and condescenion to those pointing out their fuck ups. They feel justified in this stick-up-the-ass attitude because, like I said, everyone assumes the developer's job is something only a mental titan could fathom. Someone who can calculate the square root of Pi with just their noggin!

Bullshit. These people are just as dumb as you. Stop feeding into their ego fantasies and maybe they'll produce something that actually works.

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