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.
  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    183
    ·
    8 months ago

    The notion that creating a half-decent application is quick and easy enough that I would be willing to transform their idea into reality for free.

    • Lung@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      73
      ·
      8 months ago

      I’m pretty sure that government software always blows because they think software can be written according to a fixed schedule and budget

      It’s tempting to think it’s like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it’ll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule

      But no, in software, the “wood” is always shape shifting, the land you’re building on is shape shifting, some dude in Romania is tryna break in, and the blueprints forgot that you also need plumbing and electric lines

      • astrsk@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        43
        ·
        edit-2
        8 months ago

        Well, that’s probably true for the most part but by far the reality is that it comes down to lowest bidder 9/10 times. Unrealistic budgets and unrealistic time frames with as cheap labor they can find gets you a large amount of government funded projects throughout all the years.

        • Treczoks@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          16
          ·
          8 months ago

          One of the most common problems of government or other big organisation software is that they don’t scale, either “not well” or “not at all”.

          Some guy hacks up a demo that looks nice and seems to do what customer wants, but then it turns out a) that it only allows for (number of open ports on one machine) users at the same time, and b) it only works if everything runs on one machine. Or worse, one core.

      • mathemachristian[he]@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        20
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        8 months ago

        It’s tempting to think it’s like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it’ll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule

        it never goes according to schedule eve if there is blueprint & wood

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        8 months ago

        I have a hypothesis that a factor is that government needs to work for everyone.

        A private company can be like “we only really support chrome”, but even people running ie6 at a tiny resolution need to renew their license.

        • Lith@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          8 months ago

          I believe this is usually covered by the fact that you can do just about anything you need to do over mail. I once ran into a government site that only worked on Edge.

    • cadekat@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      52
      ·
      8 months ago

      That’s absolutely true. What’s hard and what’s easy in programming is so completely foreign to non-programmers.

      Wait, you can guess my password in under a week but you can’t figure out how to pack a knapsack?