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by cakebrewery
3019 days ago
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That's a very black and white point of view. There's lots of grey areas and varying urgencies for problems. I'm sure most respectable programmers would take care of matters as fast as they could, even if it isn't that urgent. If it takes me an hour to take systems back up after things go bad during the after-hours, it's not because I was purposely not doing my work. It's because that's literally what took me to fix the problem. Programmers aren't magicians and we certainly aren't out there to get you and waste your time on purpose. |
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>Programmers aren't magicians
All right, so this part is tangential but after I posted my (GP) comment I realized that in one sense programmers are magicians. I had left the following aspect out of my black-and-white comment:
(I hadn't considered that) some of the best programmers I know don't REALLY read every word, the way you read my comment or I read yours. There's just no way there's enough time, given the speed of use of totally new information in totally new documentation that I've seen. It would be inhuman if they really read every word.
I think they must skim and scroll and use magical ways of picking out just what they need.
So when someone links a 500-page specification and tells you to "read it" (which might take, say, two weeks of an hour a day to read, starting at the first word and ending on the last -- perhaps they legitimately expect you to "read" it in 1 minute 48 seconds, since that's how long it takes to "read" it.
Back on topic
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You've directed most of your response to how long it takes to do something. But I had actually directed my comment at how long, when designing (documentation/installation/whatever) you expect people to spend doing something.
With the tangent I just added, I realize that perhaps some of it is misleading. If you direct someone to do something that takes 15 hours, that doesn't mean you don't expect them to be done within 3-10 minutes. Because programmers have magical abilities at times.
So it is far from as certain as I had said.