782
What is the result of a programmer's work?
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
782 points (100.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
27811 readers
1462 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm not going to lie, that last one is the hardest thing for me.
After years of trades i always loved having a physical thing you can touch and feel at the end of the day. I'm in university for tech, and i'm still struggling with the lack of achievement. I don't often get to see someone use a thing I worked on, so it kinda feels like I spent a lot of time doing nothing.
A few years ago, corps were just throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Everybody who wasn't a software company decided they were now a "software company". I liked the salary that came with it but the actual projects sucked. Working on stuff you know is DOA is very demoralizing.
You may enjoy the robotics field of programming ngl. Or embedded systems if you still want more coding than engineering.
Robotics (or more broadly mechatronics) is a super interesting field. To do the work at the mechanical/electrical interface is really hard.
The field of industrial controls skips the hard part and just buys stuff that is pre-designed to move. Then those pre-designed pieces are made to fit and work together. It's like complicated Legos and is honestly very fun and rewarding.
If you want to do programming with a physical result, controls engineering is a great option. I would recommend shooting for the hard stuff (real programming - DSP, FPGA, etc) knowing you've got a safe fallback with industrial controls (PLC programming).
I do industrial automation and despite all the difficulties I enjoy it.
I had a gig lined up 20 years ago to write control software for steel-cutting robots at a gulf coast shipyard. I was super-excited about this and had visions of getting them all to dance in unison to The Blue Danube (after hours, of course). Then hurricanes Rita and Katrina hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud, and that was the end of my robotics career. :(
What helps me when I feel like this is making something for myself. A script that automates something I do or a program that I will use. Then I do feel the accomplishment everytime I use that thing
And that's why today is shell script Friday! I always try to do some little thing on Friday that makes things easier for me and my team. Not always a shell script but always something I can finish in a day. I don't always succeed but I can usually come up with something cool.
That sounds much better than "push it to prod Friday" lol
That reminds me, I have a PR to merge.
LGTM
That's why so many programmers want to work in game development. It feels good when you made something that brings people joy.
And that's why game developers are paid terribly
I used to struggle a bit with that. My first full time job was at a startup making puzzle/logic games and I was hoping that at one point everybody is going to play them and I'll be able to say "yeah, I worked on that". Needless to say it wasn't that successful at all, but I learned not to care that much. Money's in my bank account, food is on the table, everything's fine.
On the flip side, software not being material is also a plus - you make it once and distribute it an infinite number of times.
Full stack baby
I feel you. Certain professions have an emptiness to them because you don't know if what you do matters.
I did about 15 years as a medic in a rural area. And while the saying is "You work on family and friends", I often had no clue if the people I scraped up and treated in the back of my bus lived or died. Once I dropped them at the ER, that was it. It was just a black hole that I could very rarely get a glimpse into. It left a real empty spot inside not knowing if what you did mattered.
So, go home tonight, pour a whisk(e)y and do what I did-- pretend it does.
I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That's the best part IMO!