Problem solvers
March 16th, 2009 | by emontero |The question “What is it that you do again?” is something I’ve heard repeatedly ever since I started doing what I do for a living almost 7 years ago. People’s face expressions usually range from the comic to the downright scary when I explain, as clearly as I possibly can, what my role within an organization is. “Uh, don’t you get tired of sitting in front of a computer all day?” usually follows quickly, after I’ve finished explaining that I’m a programmer and I, thankfully, code in order to survive. I was pretty much content with the definition I was giving. My explanation always revolved around creating software, making people’s lives better and, simply, rocking the world every day.
Everything was just peachy until Thursday night. That is, until I read this guy’s blog post:
When I tell people I am a computer programmer (or one of the other terms just to be different) most of them really don’t know what that means. They vaguely understand I “make software” (i.e. I’m a software maker, another term!) but have no clue what software looks like. So how to explain how you go about doing your job?
Writing software seems like a good start. After all we type a lot of words into a blank document using an editor, hand it to the computer to figure out what we want it to do, and then see what the computer made out of it. Rinse, repeat until done.
Even that watered-down description leaves out a lot of what we do. There is no way to really explain to people the raw details of our daily existence. Ever trying explaining programming languages and why there are so many to someone who knows nothing about programming? Or writing tests, debugging, or memory management? Don’t even try unless you like glazed over eyes. Trying to point out the importance of requirements and specifications to customers is often impossible, much less to people who don’t care.
I, not wanting to take the topic seriously at the moment, left this farcical comment:
I think we should really say: “Mystical Workers”. After all, what are we if not the product of using our highly dysfunctional brains to produce unintelligible pages of weird characters for computers to understand? THAT is mystical to the tenth power! =)
I read a few other comments and that’s when I realized that we all have different views on what we are and what we do. Defining the professional self is always a good introspective exercise (for us at least — I don’t think doctors or lawyers would have to do this). After some thought, now I wouldn’t call myself a programmer, a software engineer, a hacker, a developer or any other of those vapid terms. If you ask me, I think we’re nothing but problem solvers. Computers just so happen to be the tools we use to do the actual solving. If we had been born in the Pleistocene, we would have been the same problem-solving guys. Well, in all honesty, we probably would have been using a different set of tools (mostly rocks I’d imagine) since I don’t think computers were around 400,000 years ago.
Sometimes we have a little bit of a hard time solving the problem at hand. Coding can be a tad frustrating. And we love it!
Source: eyes-wide-open
Maybe we’re just a bunch of dreamers. To my fellow IT workers out there, how do you see yourselves as? Magicians? Programmers? Hackers? Engineers? Maybe we should add another option: none of the above.