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Comment by hudo | Hacker News Reader

What NYT thinks devs are doing in Silicon Valley: AI and machine learning hacking in VR 3D

What devs are really doing in Silicon Valley: debugging yet another "undefined is not an function"

What NYT thinks devs are doing in Silicon Valley: AI and machine learning hacking in VR 3D.

Funny, the article doesn't mention any of those topics at all (except for AI - but only as a way of introducing John McCarthy). Meanwhile we do do things like "finding all occurrences of a given word or pattern of letters in a text" quite frequently. And we are utterly dependent on technologies (e.g. databases, networks) based very strongly on the bread-and-butter content of Knuth's books.

I agree, though that for most of us, chasing down "undefined is not a function" and its variants tends to rule the day.

> debugging yet another "undefined is not an function"

Hey, you're lucky. I'm not in silicon valley, so I spend all my time debugging "I had a problem with the app but it hasn't happened in about a week and I can't remember exactly what the problem was, I need you to fix it or I'm going to escalate to your manager"

Most of programming is just moving shit around; not interesting mathematics like knuth has done

We're 21st century plumbers.

>We're 21st century plumbers.

I tell people this all the time when they ask what I do. I've met quite a few master plumbers, and they are extremely intelligent technical geniuses for the most part. I'm completely convinced that I would have been one of them (or some other trade craft) if I were born 50 years ago.

Modest too, most of ‘em.

- IT: Sanitation engineers

- Developers: Hazmat engineers

- CS: Civil engineers

IT: Garbage truck operators

Developers: Garbage truck service/maintenance department

Devops: Mechanic's apprentice who sometimes has to fill in for garbage truck drivers who no-show.

Contractor: Mobile service tech gets called in to weld up stuff when it's broken beyond what the in-house team can handle.

CS: Guys who plan the garbage trucks' route.

Not everything is "engineering".

Edit: You people take yourselves too seriously.

- IT: Deployment

- Dev: Implementation

- CS: Design

Sounds accurate to me, but I'm interested if people will downvote you because they don't like the IT line.

Looks like it gets worse down the list, so I don't think the IT folk will complain too much.

edit: Yes, whether you feel "Civil engineering" is worse than "Hazmat engineering" is a subjective matter.

My favorite one of these was from a coworker having trouble getting his presentation up. "People outside the tech industry ask 'Will a computer take my job?'; people inside the tech industry ask 'why won't this damn projector work?'"

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