Sometimes users see IT guys as mordac the preventer of information technology from Dilbert. Thank you for breaking my perfectly functional workstation again.
I sent in a ticket recently, and the new IT kid’s response 3 minutes later was a long the lines of “That’s weird. I don’t see anything about it on Google” and he marked it “resolved.”
If this is a situation you relate with, you might be an arrogant asshole.
I help people all the time with computer related issues, and they love that I do that. None of them give me the stink eye, and I never judge them or think they’re idiots for not being specialized in general computing.
I decided to make a career change into IT (didn’t stick). When I was working the other employees were just other people trying to make ends meet and I never judged them for, like you said, not being specialized in general computing. I did however judge some of the other admins for their decisions and attitudes. It was so weird being an “admin” and this being told I’m “above” the general employees.
I mean, you have a bit of a point, they’re not exactly idiots even if they seem that way, but I definitely get the stink eye. You must know a lot of nice people.
I used to provide some user support at a previous job. (It wasn’t exactly my job, but people would ask for help.) And it’d be easy to get frustrated, thinking people were stupid or incompetent, but I’d remind myself that being good at computers isn’t part of their job, it’s part of my job. These people were hired for other areas of expertise. If I had to do take on parts of their jobs, I’d look stupid and incompetent too.
That said… sometimes the level of incomprehension people have really is incomprehensible to me. There’s a level where you’re reaching wilful ignorance. When I point at something on the screen and tell the person to click on that… and they can’t or won’t move the mouse there and click on it…
There should be a basic level of understanding a skillset when using a computer when using a computer is part of your job. Users shouldn’t be required to fix technical issues but they should know the terminology (click the file menu, select properties…, or right-click on your desktop and select an option.
Its amazing how people use these tools daily but never learn how to use them. Imagine using saws, lathes, grinders, etc, but not knowing how to safely use them. It’s the same for computers. If you don’t know basic safety, you’ll infect your work network with malware, encrypt important files with CryptoLocker-type malware, etc. Honestly, companies should force a base-level of competence before allowing users on the network, but a lot of the users causing issues are directors or the CEO.
There should be a computer license, like a driving license, that you need to get before you can operate computers connected to the internet in the modern world.
One thing that's really interesting is that general technological aptitude seems to have peaked with the millennials. A lot of employers are now complaining that gen z lack technology skills of all things.
I can absolutely believe that because personal computing went from being something where you basically have fully powered computer hardware with all the positives and negatives of that and the learning curve to being carefully sculpted and focus tested black boxes.kids aren't good with computers, they're good with facebook and YouTube.
I actually had to refactor configuration module some time ago. These really came in handy. But was it worth it? Well… it saved some time, the time that could be used to debug problems manually, but it made me a lot more confident that the functionality that worked before, worked after.
The ones I have seen so far are probably written by the same people who don’t understand the usefulness of comments, I reckon. And maintained with the same enthusiasm.
I would lose max 3 hrs of work that I already know how to re do. I can live with that. I don’t want to publish too much unfinished/unpolished work. There is always the chance someone might need the branch.
Even if drafts under development, I like to publish something that reaches the standard of my “best” me, not my “Friday evening” me
Because someone else might need to work on something on or from my branches. And I don’t want garbage in my history. There are cases I might not be able to squash merge, so all my history will be in the project history. I want each commit to be clean. It is not a lot of effort, and forces me to increase code quality, because I review my code more often.
Rules for all projects I manage: never rebase published branches and always publish clean code (even implementation is unfinished).
From experience following these simple rules make the whole project management easier and more effective
On one occasion i had to take over a task from a colleague while he was on his day off. He did not push his changes. I am sure he had backups but when i asked him to push his changes he had to drive home to do it.
You should be pushing feature branches as you work on them, so if you have a crash or something, your work isn’t lost. Builds should be triggered from pull requests on the main branch, if triggered by anything. You should never push directly to main. At least that’s my preference.
Our ci/cd pipelines build also feature branches. I do push often, clean code. I don’t push when I am tired enough that I can’t trust my judgment that the code I am pushing is over my personal quality threshold. I add meaningful, concise commit messages. These are my rules.
Thinking that C# is just Unity is a MASSIVE disservice to C# and dotnet imo. Unity’s usage of C# is really crummy, basically relegating a very powerful language to working as a weird scripting language.
Agreed, I feel like if someone starts their C# journey exclusively in Unity, they won’t have a solid foundation in the actual language, just that specific implementation of it as a scripting language.
Absolutely. C# in Unity always seemed to me like a square peg in a round hole.
From my perspective (teaching game programming classes), it’s incredibly clunky for beginners when compared to others. Unity needed a tightly integrated, noob-proof scripting language. Despite C# being the primary language, it’s integration and setup with the rest of Unity seems surprisingly lacking, and, like you’re referencing, you don’t even get convenient use of the broader C# / Mono / .net ecosystem, which makes skills more portable. Even the “bad old days” of Flash/ActionScript were much easier for students, and results in more portable coding skills (e.g. at least transitioning to Web / JavaScript from Flash / ActionScript is easier)
It’s much easier to teach same lessons / concepts using Godot, though sadly Unity is much better known. Hopefully the present pricing chaos might shift the needle a bit on this!
I am curious, what exactly is missing in the latest LTS version from .Net what makes it so clunky to use for students? Afaik it is pretty solidly close to actual .Net 4.7 nowadays.
C++ is pretty good by itself but I end up using mostly C for actual functions, QT, wxwidgets and a few others utilise C++ to a degree but my god does it get messy without the help of a visual aid (blueprints, formbuilder etc)
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