The Three Perspectives Of Programming Reality

The classic "glass half full/empty" philosophy gets the Stack Overflow treatment. While optimists see potential and pessimists focus on what's missing, Stack Overflow users just mark the entire glass as deprecated. That special feeling when your question gets closed because "drinking water is no longer supported" and you're redirected to "Why is water wet?" which was answered in 2011 by someone who no longer exists.

Content Stack Overflow invented 2008. Programmers before 2008:

Content Catalin Pit catalinmpit Let me break it for you. Coding is: - 1 actually coding -40 debugging - 15 coffee breaks - 30 googling errors - 9 staring with your colleagues at the screen - 5 trying copypasted solutions from Stack Overflow

The universal IT support flowchart, as passed down from father to son. Nothing quite like frantically following an ancient Reddit thread at 3 AM where some hero named xX_CodeWizard_69_Xx solved your exact obscure error message in 2015. And somehow that random solution works better than anything in the official documentation. The real tech support was the strangers we met along the way.

The eternal struggle of being the "tech person" in the family. First you're desperately trying to explain that programming skills don't magically transfer to printer repair, then five seconds later you're elbow-deep in printer parts because—let's face it—you actually can fix it. Not because of any programming knowledge, but because you've developed the sacred debugging mindset after years of staring at error messages that might as well say "something's wrong lol good luck." The real programming skill is knowing how to Google the right question while maintaining the illusion that you're doing something complicated.

Content Original Pancake grubes14 My biggest fear is that I'll one day run into a problem that hasn't been solved on StackOverflow and I'll have to restart my project with a different technology 10:57 AM 03 Sep 19 Twitter for iPhone