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mosbat
mosbat

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"Devs do nothing all day"

Jealousy or Pure Ignorance?

Have you heard before any comment or remark from non-Engineers implying that we just sit behind computers, having fun coding and do nothing?

If the answer is yes, you aren't alone. There has been recently a rhetoric among non-engineering communities accusing us of being a burden to society accompanied by the overall societal frustration with the negative side effects brought by big tech such as the negative impact of Instagram on mental health and the dating dynamics since dating apps made dating harder for the average person.

Unfortunately, as a person who has both tech and non-tech education background, I had to face the reality that such people exist.

I can't tell if this is due to jealousy or pure ignorance; but for sure, it amazes me.

Each Dev goes through real struggle to land a job and has to go through a broken recruitment process, gets tons of rejections and unrealistic expectations. We didn't yet mention the mental health toll on the Developer themselves.

Devs need to understand a very large number of subjects such as different stack technologies, data structures,algorithms, data storage, version control and non-tech aspects such as having proper communication skills and understands Agile. We didn't talk yet about cybersecurity and Dev-Ops.

Some people have no idea what is a binary tree and have no idea how their computers and smartphones work, yet they are critical of us Devs at a time when a grocery store is requiring Google level Devs to write a simple html website.

The difference between a marketing job and a Dev job is that you can do marketing even if you aren't really that much interested or passionate about it; but to work in tech as a Dev, it requires absolute dedication and pure passion or love for what you do.

Writing code, is like writing a book, it's an art that requires significant mental cognitive thinking and translating real world problems into a machine code is another level.

I personally do not react defensively towards such comments/remarks since I understand where they are coming from. I try to not alienate anyone and to be as much inclusive as possible. Sometimes I do have the tendency to become defensive, instead I'd encourage them to dive deeper into the topic. Sometimes, they will change their minds and say something like "No no, I'll leave coding to you" but then, it amazes me when people criticize us Devs if they aren't themselves willing to do what we do.

What are your thoughts. Have really been in such a situation before?

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