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 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!
That’s so cool, thank you very much!! 😁
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 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.
“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.
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.
That’s why bugs can be labeled “in shipped version.”
They know. It’s just they balanced it against everything else and it wasn’t worth spending time on or delaying the game for.
I won’t say that it’s purely a AAA problem, but it’s harder to excuse there.
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.
That grass is better than wild growth. Wait…
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.
That it all used to be like this.
What field is that?
Green.
A comedian huh?
That I could fix Windows PCs. Nope. When my work PC has issues, I call IT. I design computer chips.
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.
Woah, you’re on OG! I’m unfamiliar with a lot of those things and had to look them up. Crazy!
Hah! ISE - I used that for a hot second, and you still see tutorials using it as well.
My goodness, tell me about it, I’m new and I already find myself frustrated with Xilinx sometimes. It feels like there are very few resources from them for learning, but I thought that was just because it’s a niche subject. I’ll have to take a look at Efinix. I guess I thought it was safer to stick to the biggest name while I’m trying to get established. At the moment I’m trying to get some example projects working on a Zybo Z7. I’m finding out that it’s a lot to take in
Thanks for taking the time to reply! I feel strangely honored to hear from such an OG :) Cheers!
Whenever you are looking for a supplier for something, keep in mind that there are advantages and disadvantages when choosing one.
If you are in a small niece company, and your supplier is THE BIG OLD COMPANY, you are completely at their mercy. On the other hand, they usually have vast resources you can tap, like training capabilities and software you won’t get elsewhere, or at least nor for the price.
That was our relationship with Xilinx. Yes, you get trainings and tutorials for everything, and they have a “light” version of ModelSim thrown in for free in their IDE, but on the other hand, they basically cut us off from one day to the next. And that was not even our fault.
So we went looking and found Efinix. Small, but growing, their IDE has a few edges that need to be rounded off, and they can’t afford to throw in a free simulator, so we had to spend quite a few bucks to buy that (and it was not even ModelSim we bought, so I had to re-train). But at least they are open and helpful. You ask a question in their forum, and they come back to you to help. I’ve been talking to real people who are directly in contact with the dev team. When I had a strange compiler problem, I had a fix within 48 hours. THAT is gold in a supplier.
I’m finding out that it’s a lot to take in
Yes, indeed. The step from CPU-based programming languages to Hardware definition languages is hard for most programmers, and for some, it is even insurmountable. Once you get the hang of it, it gets way easier.
I met a student once in a Reddit sub once who had issues with her code. I helped her and gave her a few tips how to improve it, and at the end, she asked me of my opinion of the project. I told her that it was a nice little beginner project, something to pass a boring Friday afternoon. Her reply: “Thats my Bachelor Thesis!*”. What looks big and difficult to master will one day look simple and meek when you look back, so don’t let it drag you down if things don’t work on the first try.
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.
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.
Yeah lots of people who aren’t in tech think of coding as a solitary job, but it’s a very social-skills-dependent job.
Social skills required to be a coder (at least; probably forgetting many):
- Communicate complex concepts which have never been discussed before
- Deliver things on time
- Understand the tradeoffs of others’ jobs well enough to make good decisions about when it’s worth it NOT to deliver something on time (or be able to figure it out by communicating with whom you’re delivering to)
- Know the balance between asking for help and trying to figure it out yourself, including the short- and long-term tradeoffs of the two approaches
- Know whether a problem you’re encountering is your own lack of skill, your own lack of knowledge, your own lack of care, or someone else’s any of those, and then communicate with others on the basis of being unsure of this
- Deal with antisocial coworkers who can hide their shenanigans in the complexity of the code. I.e. if they’re smart enough they can screw with your work, making you look bad, in a way that is extremely difficult to explain to non-technical management (and hence get support for)
- Have the emotional stability and the hutzpah and the finesse to call things like this out when they do happen, and make those complicated explanations or deliver their abstract form
- Understand and feel the pain of users when their systems break
As an autistic person, I struggled mightily with the social skill requirements of being a coder on a team. I ultimately failed. I’d like to go back and try again, after doing some really basic shit to improve my own character.
(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.
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.
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.
Oh yes. I support a lot of developers, and being a good programmer is not the same as understanding networking in a corporate environment or even knowing anything about printers. That’s why I’m needed 😃
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.
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-sorted 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.
Do you think education is generally moving in the right direction? I have a few people in my circle that trained to be teachers and left the profession because of the lack of support from admin when dealing with troubled students (and troubled parents). They described a staff that was upside down, similar to a hospital (everyone is an admin, a very small part of the staff is actually teachers, and they never make the rules).
On the other hand it sounds like the mechanics of disseminating knowledge have increased tremendously due to research supported practices. I just wonder if the next generation is doomed, I guess.
I’m a web developer and people seem to think that once a product is brought to market the devs are no longer needed.
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.
Was a cook at retirement home. Amount of pastries I’ve essentially warmed up are over easily over 10k
If I’m out can spot if someone is using that same Cisco pastry or Pillsbury scones lol
