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Ask Slashdot: How Can Programmers Explain Their Work To Non-Programmers?
Slashdot reader Grady Martin writes:
I disrespect people who describe their work in highfalutin terms... However, describing my own work as "programming solutions to problems" is little more than codifying what just about anyone can perceive through intuition. Case in point: Home for the holidays, I was asked about recent accomplishments and attempted to explain the process of producing compact visualizations of branched undo/redo histories.
Responses ranged from, "Well, duh," to, "I can already do that in Word"...
It's the "duh" that I want to address, because of course an elegant solution seem obvious after the fact: Such is the nature of elegance itself. Does anyone have advice on making elegance sound impressive?
An anonymous Slashdot reader left this suggestion for explaining your work to non-programmers. "Don't. I get sick when I hear the bullshit artists spew crap out of their mouth when they have no idea wtf they're talking about. Especially managers..."
But how about the rest of you? How can programmers explain their work to non-programmers?
Responses ranged from, "Well, duh," to, "I can already do that in Word"...
It's the "duh" that I want to address, because of course an elegant solution seem obvious after the fact: Such is the nature of elegance itself. Does anyone have advice on making elegance sound impressive?
An anonymous Slashdot reader left this suggestion for explaining your work to non-programmers. "Don't. I get sick when I hear the bullshit artists spew crap out of their mouth when they have no idea wtf they're talking about. Especially managers..."
But how about the rest of you? How can programmers explain their work to non-programmers?
Don't even bother, waste of effort. If you want to expend energy, then focus it back on yourself and learn to accept that unless you're talking to peers you're always going to be misunderstood, not out of malice or intent, but simply because there's almost always a large collection of context and assumptions that you simply cannot impart on to those who ask the question.
Just keep it simple even and deal with accepting that it'll grind your soul. Same applies to a lot of other fields of work. Try hard and you'll just come off as self-important.
Like a medical doctor would explain a disease to you in layman's terms, you would describe what you do in layman's terms. Since they aren't professional, they wouldn't know anything about visualizing branched undo/redo histories. Use common words in contexts they understand. They won't understand the depth of what you do, but as long as the get the gist, that's all you can hope for.
I tell them that my type of programming is almost all mathematics. Few programmers use this much math. I look at all kinds of problems and find solutions for them.
I use linear algebra all the time. You might have been exposed to matrix math, using 3x3 and 4x4 matrices, multiplying them together, finding inverses and transposes, working with vectors and dot products and cross products. That's the basic math of the 3D world, much like addition and subtraction are the basics of the math for processing a budget. I do linear algebra on paper and on calculators at my desk, plus I tell the computer to do that stuff. I read technical math research papers about many systems, often two or three per month, and I implement the algorithms they describe.
I look for errors in code and fix them. When people say "this isn't working right", I find the errors and fix them no matter who wrote the buggy code. Sometimes it is very difficult to understand other people's code, sometimes it is like a giant knot that needs to be untangled so it can be understood. When people say "this is running slow", I study the math that they use, I figure out what math can be faster, and I tell the computer to use that math instead.
I work with designers who say "I need a game system that does such-and-such", I figure out a way to make that happen. For example, on {project they would understand} I programmed the computer how to {action they would understand}.
Many times I am given very difficult problems that are studied by mathematicians and scientists, problems that are known to be impossible to solve at speeds games need. That's why the impossible problems, intractable problems, and fast-growing problems are important to study in college. In those cases my job is to figure out other ways to solve the problem that are fast enough to run in microseconds. Usually that means cheating and taking shortcuts. As one example, finding the perfect organization for objects inside a container is very difficult and slow, since the perfect organization requires testing every option. Instead we can cheat by taking the biggest items and stuffing them in the container first, getting smaller and smaller pieces until they are all present. Another is choosing the perfect path which takes a lot of processing, versus cheating and taking the first really good path. It often isn't the perfect solution, but it is good enough for what we need.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
"Well, you see, that form is actually an instance of a subclass that inherits from that object which can be stored into that templated array thanks to polymorphism", then no more question from the non-programmer.
if you're looking for a way to justify your existence (as opposed to *genuinely* explaining what it is that you do to an outsider) then i would suggest prefacing that with, "i'm going to start at a high level. i'm then going to go into detail. my ability *to* go into detail is precisely why you employ me rather than someone who can do stuff with a spreadsheet. please feel free to stop me at any time when you have heard enough"
followed by going into detail and not stopping until they tell you to. when they've had enough, you can finish up with, "so do you now appreciate that this is far beyond the skill set of a lay person, to cope with this level of excruciating detail? i deal with it so that you don't have to. it's extremely challenging and tedious in a mind-numbing but extremely rewarding way for me, but only in that it's a massive challenge well achieved. can we please, therefore, in future, keep our conversations to the high-level requirements, and more than that, when i tell you that i *don't know how long something will take* please be patient and trust me to work through it until i know more, okay?"
if on the other hand they *genuinely* wish to know about programming, my favourite way to explain that is as follows:
okay, the idea is, you're going to give me a series of written instructions - a recipe - which i can give to absolutely any person, for them to follow in order to get from one corner of a tiled room to the other, negotiating around obstacles. that person will be BLINDFOLDED so that they only have a sense of touch in any direction of distance equal to ONE tile.
you then give them the following example:
step 1: go forward one step
step 2: if you didn't bash into an obstacle, go to step 1
step 3: go right one step
step 4: if you didn't bash into an obstacle, go to step 3
step 5: are you in the far corner? if yes HURRAH
step 6: repeat from step 1
*we* know what the flaws are in that algorithm... but they won't. so, you LITERALLY get them to walk through it. as in, LITERALLY follow those instructions on a tiled kitchen floor. then you DELIBERATELY place obstacles so that they will get stuck, and ask them, "ok, so now how would you fix that?"
and when they go, "ahhh okaaay i get it. it's step-by-step stuff but you can get into trouble if you don't give the right instructions", then that really is the lightbulb moment for them in *truly* understanding the basics of programming. at *that* point you can explain to them that, unlike that very simple 6-step algorithm you write algorithms of TENS of THOUSANDS OF LINES every few months, and that the linux kernel is what... thirty MILLION lines or something insane, then they'll finally start to really and truly Get It.
if that's your boss they might even actually give you a payrise or at the very least treat you with a little more respect.
[perl...] If they can understand that, they cannot understand anything.
dude. i am a software libre advocate and developer of 25 years experience. i've worked with million-line codebases for two decades. i have done reverse-engineering of ARM and x86 instructions. i've programmed PICs, Z80 and 68000 processors in assembler. i'm going to be working on designing and bringing to market a libre RISC-V SoC... and *I* do not want you to explain perl to me.
Porn.. it's why you have it 24/7.
In the case of porn especially, it's "24x7", not "24/7". Try those two formulas in excel, you'll see.
lucm, indeed.
I say its like cooking. A program is like a recipe. Its a series of very detailed instructions on how to take a bunch of ingredients and turn them into something else. For the computer program the ingredients may be numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, keystrokes, mouse clicks, ... all sorts of different things; the instruction are how to manipulate those numbers, letters, pictures, sounds, etc. Bugs are like a recipe where something was written down incorrectly or left out and you end up with something that tastes bad.
Yes its dumbed down and oversimplified but people usually get it. Its how the professor explained it on day one of the "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.
I sort of go along the same lines.
"A computer can follow my instructions quickly and flawlessly, but they have to be VERY simple instructions and they will make NO attempt to deviate from their plan regardless of what comes up. So I have to train something much stupider than your average four-year-old how to reliably perform a complex task, despite the child being both blind and deaf."
They usually either "get it", or insist it can't be that difficult.
If they want more, I usually start going into how the key is to plan for as many different situations as you can, make as few assumptions as possible at the beginning of and throughout the process, and add in as many contingencies as is practical. Imagine a car repair manual where you have to specifically tell the mechanic to shut off the engine and open the hood when describing an air filter change. (or any of a limitless number of other relatable examples)
My specialty is process automation, so I tend to go the extra mile to make my code as autonomous as possible and log the piss out of everything so malfunctions are easily identifiable and can be coded for down the road when Murphy starts getting extra-creative.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Fire up a computer
Click on a program, or a game
Then, turn to that non-programmer and say "All these happen because of programmers"
They will still have gobs of clueless questions that will waste even more of your time and leave them still without a clue.
This problem was addressed many years ago. It's not in English (or German, really) but the meaning still comes through.
ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FUR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!
ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKEN.
IST NICHT FUR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HANDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.
HTH
HAND :)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
"What do you do?"
"I'm in computers"
"Ahh...ok"
Then the conversation proceeds about other, more important stuff, like what to have for dinner, what time to meet for the movie, trip, etc.
Nobody really wants to know what other people do in detail unless they are considering a career change into that field.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.