I hate working in high-tech and I don’t want to go back there.

The BBQ Pit
1

For the past 20 years or so I’ve been working as a programmer of one sort or another. A couple of years ago I got laid off during the great dot-com bust, and I’ve been living on investments and odd jobs since then. I really haven’t missed working, but I’m running out of money and I made a New Year’s resolution to start actively finding work. I thought I’d start by reading up on some new technologies – at least technologies that were new for me – so I started by looking into .NET Framework. In short time I came upon a page promoting the benefits of weblogs.

Well, this is great, I’m thinking. I’m going to get right back into this stuff. No problem. Let’s continue.

:eek:

WTF was that? Did I read that right? Let me try that again.

Wait a minute. It’s a joke, right. They’re going to say “Gotcha, didn’t we! We were just pulling you leg with this blather.”

I look in vain for the punch line but only get a link to a page of more links with pages and pages of stuff like this:


-- <rss version="2.0">
- <channel>
  <title>MSDN: .NET Framework and CLR</title> 
  <link>http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/</link> 
  <description>The latest information for developers 
on the Microsoft .NET Framework and Common 
Language Runtime (CLR).</description> 
  <language>en-us</language> 
  <ttl>1440</ttl> 
- <item>
  <title>MSDN Chat Transcript: Debugging Visual Basic 
.NET Applications (12/16/03)</title> 
  <pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2003 08:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
  <description>Microsoft VB.NET team members help 
users debug problems with their code, including 
issues with Pocket PC menus, plus how to set up 
remote debugging for server apps and other 
configuration issues with the debugger.</description> 
  <link>http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/
vstudio/vstudio_121603.asp</link> 
  </item>
- <item>
  <title>MSDN Chat Transcript: Debugging with 
Visual C#, Present and Future</title> 
  <pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2003 08:00:00 GMT</pubDate> 
  <description>Microsoft C# and debugging 
team members answer user questions 
about configuration of the debugger, partial 
class generation, and more.</description>

And I’m reminded again of one of the many reasons why I hate high-tech. People don’t even try to communicate. They are much more interested in marching out their latest list of buzzwords than actually trying to explain or inform, and they get away with it because all too often people are too intimidated to challenge them.

I’m sure other professions have to deal with their own blowhards, and indeed I’ve had first hand experience with some in the legal and medical professions. Still, techies seem to be the worst, but maybe that’s because I have to deal with them more often.

Well, anyway. Enough bitching. I better get back to where I was. Something about exposing my aggregates…

2

If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about (the way tech professionals seem to go out of their way to make what they know seem vastly more complicated than it is, even if they are supposed to be helping you/teaching you), it’s what turned me right off having a programming career and nearly made me fail my degree.

I am not afraid to brag that I was refered to as a natural programmer by college lecturers. That talent has gone wasted because I grew to HATE everything about software engineering.

3

It’s telling, I think, that your quoted RSS feed makes perfect sense to me. That whole aggregator thing does, too.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Using buzzwords makes you feel smart, so I imagine that’s a big part of the reason. It’s not like spouting “RSS aggregators” gets us chicks or anything.

4

Nort, that’s a Sign From God® that you have mentally advanced beyond what you were and are ready for your next step down the path to another career. Learn Autocad–it stays pretty much the same from revision to revision and the 1987-model dropzone would get up to speed on the current version in a couple hours. Terminal obsolescence comes far too quickly in programming.

Or maybe you have even reached the point where you could get a job where you TALK TO PEOPLE! They pay good money for people who can interact with others.

5

I’m right with you here. Almost sounds like me too. I graduated Brown Institute (now Brown “University”) in Minneapolis in spring of 1981.

I quit my job in August of 2001 and have been living off savings and investments since then. But like you, it’s running out.

I quit because, after suffering a major stress related back injury, I was disciplined for taking time off for medical reasons and was told, at the end of June, that I would be required to work every day, weekends and holidays included, through the end of the year. Yes, I was the Project Leader on two major projects and part-time on a third, but this went way beyond the pale.

So it came down to saying “F- you, I quit”. (I still say it’s the best decision I ever made.)

Heck, even now, more than 28 months later, every freaking morning as I get into the shower I say “I do not want to be a Programmer anymore”.

The pending divorce settlement will take me out a couple of months, but after that, I’m back into the job market, like it or not.

Ugh. Corporate America sucks donkey balls. I am really not looking forward to doing that stuff again.

Especially since IT Managers and Directors are some of the most self-important F**ks on the face of the Earth.

6

Heh. Forgot I was in the Pit.

FUCK YOU, YOU SELF IMPORTANT JACKASS IT MANAGERS AND DIRECTORS!!!

Program yourself a clue about Life, scumfuckers.

7

Eh, the buzzwords are different, but the concepts are the same. As long as you can map the buzzword du jour to the basic idea, you’re fine. Whether or not you’re willing to put up with that BS is another matter…

8

I just finished reading a book called ‘What Should I Do with my Life’ by a guy called Po Bronson…charts about 60 real stories of people who get into the shower every morning saying ‘I don’t want to be a Programmer/Accountant/Whatever anymore’. Well worth the read and might make you think twice about the jump back into the jobmarket Chimera

9

Maybe you should find a job where you enforce or educate programmers to be more informative and descriptive in their manuals and explanations.

10

Part of my job is interviewing programmers for the software company I work for (I speak geek, but my degree was in anthropology). A question I often ask is, “I’m a beginning computer user. Tell me about the mouse.”

I don’t base my hiring decision on just this question, but I want to see if the interviewee can communicate in plain English. Ideally, I’d like to feel comfortable putting the programmer in front of a client. What I don’t want to hear is talk about peripheral devices and device drivers. I’m looking for something like, “When you move it, it moves the pointy thingie on the screen there.”

11

Even though I’m good at the stuff, I hate the field and the people and have chosen a career that will be the polar opposite of anything tech.

12

From Whatis.com*, I found this definition of RSS (RDF** (or Rich) Site Summary) aggregators. Note that one of my pet peeves is “nested acronyms”.

*A great site for deciphering acronyms and techie jargon. Almost essential, particularly for a branch of technology with which you have no working familiarity.
**Resource Description Framework

13

I’m a programmer. I work with other programmers. We need to communicate with each other in technical language and someone who can’t talk the talk can’t play because there’s someone right behind them who can.

Proper technical language does obfuscate and is not the “buzzword du jour”. Usually people who think so are people who have a difficult time with the abstract concepts behind the language and like to blame the language.

And, I’m not talking about crap terms like “intergrate interpersonal solutions”. I’m talking about actual, in-the-field, technical language, like “RSS” that people don’t want to explain to those who haven’t kept up with the group.

Guess what, mechanic, you might be able to fix an engine but if you’re working in a garage and tell a guy to help you connect the thingy to the whatzit, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time and money.

(lobsang – no offense (this is the PIT, though) but, college lecturers are not necessarily the best people to judge actual programming skills.)

14

can we change that to “does NOT obfuscate”.

15

I don’t want to start a pissing match, but this isn’t really a good example of buzzword terminology. That sentence is technically accurate and says what it means to. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, or what an aggregator is, then it might look obtuse, but these aren’t buzzwords. They’re actual things. Try Wikipedia if you need to catch up on some terms.

Otherwise, maybe you can give us an example of how that sentence should have been written to convey the same information, without “buzzwords”?

16

I have no doubt that you understand the RSS thing, but that’s not my point. While you may understand RSS feeds, syndication and the rest, what you don’t seem to understand is how poorly the writer communicates to his audience.

Let me explain. Notice how he starts off: “Web logs, or blogs are they are more commonly known, are Web pages or sites…” Here he seems to assume that his audience is made up of technically unsophisticated folks who need their hands held while he explains the basics to them. That’s fine, if that’s who your audience is.

Then, POW, by the next sentence he starts with the RSS stuff. Did he think that by explaining that a web log is a blog that suddenly his audience is over the learning curve? Did he care? I suspect that, while the writer is technically proficient, he is absolutely clueless about how to explain the concepts to others. And high-tech crawls with those types.

Do you understand that someone that needs to have blogs explained to them won’t understand RSS feeds and aggregators, and that anyone who does understand the RSS stuff won’t need blogs explained to them?

It doesn’t make me feel smart. It makes me feel like a pompous blowhard.

17

Simulpost, doh. Anyway…

Actually, that’s a good point, and I agree. The author suffers from a lack of consistency in who his audience is.

I’d still argue that your quoted sentence isn’t really a fair example of buzzword usage. Especially when there are so many good examples used in technology marketing…

18

Well, maybe you might want to work overseas for awhile, or the rest of your life.

There is a good website called “Escape Artist” at www.escapeartist.com where there are a lot of opportunity to move overseas and start over and/or do what you want to do. I have done it, and many other people have too.

Many of these people teach English but there are other businesses to get into like owning/running a guesthose, restaurant or whatever.

Whatever you want to do, life is short and there are options.

19

This isn’t true at all.

The technical person already knows what RSS feeds and agregators are. They need to be taught what that technology is being applied to. That technology is used for a lot more than BLOGS (I think – not my area of expertise).

My company might adverstise a job for someone knowledgeable about using OpenGL in VC++. When that person is hired, we can explain to them what “Video Conferencing” is if they don’t know.

20

If you need to explain video conferencing, maybe you should hire someone else.