but i use ddg btw
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Imagine graduating in medecine and your employer respects you to be an expert at everything all at once that is related to the human body and being able to perform open heart and brain surgery and doing x-ray imaging and MRIs and being a gynecologist and an an optometrist and a pharmacist all at once.
That's what being in IT is like. You're expected to know how to program microcontrollers to mainframes to fucking VCRs and knowing every programming language ever created since electronic computers exist as well as networking and cloud technology and databases, etc. AND you have to be certified in all these things to prove you know them on top of your degree.
And vaginas, and MRI machines, and hearts change dramatically every couple of years. Plus the human body grows new organs and limbs every few months and you're expected to immediately have 5 years experience with these new organs and limbs that have only existed for 2 months. Perfectly healthy suddenly people fall unconscious for no reason, despite all of their organs operating perfectly. When you check your human body documentation you discover that the lungs no longer work as of today, and you now need to use the sclurtleplussy instead. You have no idea what a sclurtleplussy, but you better figure it out immediately, or all these patients will die.
Why do programmers complain about expectations all the time? Just say "It needs more time" or "that's not possible unless we change a lot of things". Set the expectations, don't accept them. You're the expert. What are they gonna do? Do it themselves?
It's not that things aren't possible, it's that there's always more, and often better, options to pick from. Going back to medicine, it's like surgeons have to learn new techniques, but with the difference there there isn't anywhere near the same degree of specialization.
A better analogy would be if there were 10,000 ways to cut out a tumor but the patient only wanted the doctor to use one specific method because that's what they have heard about. It'll either be the method, "everyone's using these days" or it'll be a method that was popular in the 1990s but the tools available to perform that kind of surgery are hard to find these days because they were obsolete 20 years ago.