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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Lies Programmers Tell Themselves?
snydeq writes: "Confidence in our power over machines also makes us guilty of hoping to bend reality to our code," writes Peter Wayner, in a discussion of nine lies programmers tell themselves about their code. "Of course, many problems stem from assumptions we programmers make that simply aren't correct. They're usually sort of true some of the time, but that's not the same as being true all of the time. As Mark Twain supposedly said, 'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.'"
The nine lies Wayner mentions in his discussion include: "Questions have one answer," "Null is acceptable," "Human relationships can be codified," "'Unicode' stands for universal communication," "Numbers are accurate," "Human language is consistent," "Time is consistent," "Files are consistent," and "We're in control." Can you think of any other lies programmers tell themselves?
You meant, of course, discrimination FOR women:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-over-men-stem-faculty-positions
"That error condition will never happen because I trap for it."
"No one will ever put that kind of stuff into this form field."
"No customer will ever need more than X number of records for $DATA_ITEM." (kids names, addresses, cars, phone numbers, etc etc etc)"
"TLD extensions will never be longer than X number of characters."
"I can positively validate an email address with my home-grown code."
"No one has a one-letter name." ...and on and on and on....
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"I am worth what they pay me."
"I am an engineer."
"Users wish they knew who created this wonderful software."
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
These should be required reading for programmers AND designers. I'm looking at you Mr. shitty designer/programmer that only lets me put 13 characters in for my (first) name.
* Falsehoods about Names
* Falsehoods about Time
* Falsehoods about Computers, aka, Murphy's Computers Laws
* 97 Things Every Programmer should know
All throughout school, everyone told me there are jobs for programmers. Everyone lied. I have multiple advanced degrees in computer science. I have started open source projects. I have contributed to open source projects. I debug software for fun. I live and breathe code. And yet, I have no job, and I have no prospects. I apply for jobs, and nothing happens. In my experience, all job listings are lies, and there aren't any jobs out there. There's absolutely nothing at all.