There are 2 Types of People from a Programmer’s perspective – Outsiders (Absolutely No knowledge about Programming) and Insiders (minimal knowledge Programming, IT field, Business Users etc)
Frustrating Questions from Outsiders :
- You’re a programmer? My laptop is not working, can you fix that?
- You’re a programmer? Can you fix my internet connection/printer problem?
- You’re a programmer? Can you hack Facebook password?
Frustrating Questions from Insiders :
- Managers want time estimates quite in advance. Programming is not typing. They do not understand that programming sometimes involves creative thinking and needs ideas. We cannot really estimate time for that. They want everything to be completed by “yesterday”.
- Your code won’t be same if you see that after 6 months. Other people come and change that for their own requirements. They think you are dumb for writing such code. They do not understand the reason behind writing those specific lines.
- Management thinks they can get the job done by pushing or by adding more resources. There are managers who doesn’t understand about programming and thinks 9 women together can deliver a baby in 1 month.
- Scope Creep – The scope/requirements changes every now and then. They expect your code to be compatible with all of those. Most important – no change of deadlines.
- No documentation of existing applications. They expect us to understand just by looking at the code – which most of the time doesn’t have comments too.
- No explanation of bugs – End users think just posting about a bug is enough. They assume programmers know what it is. Sometimes, the developers themselves do not understand what they are talking about.