What Do Programmers Actually Do?
A peek into the life of a mythical beast, the programmer
Imagine a 220 lbs dude. His only hoodie scares the crap out of your kids when he goes out to smoke every 30 minutes, but you don’t dare knocking on his door and asking him to lower the heavy metal blasting through your bedroom wall at 1:29 AM. You definitely think he’s involved with drugs. And, for some reason, he’s always Russian.
That’s how I used to imagine the typical programmer. So you can imagine my confusion when my mother, a five foot five human equipped with an emotional intellect, told me she’d enrolled in a programming course. “The pay is good,” she said.
I realized that I knew nothing whatsoever about what programmers actually do. To me, Bill Gates is as much of a programmer as my former coursemate who got kicked out for smoking too much weed.
When someone says they’re a programmer, what do you imagine?
My first serious realization was that “a programmer” is as broad of a definition as “a writer.”
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