What's an innocent misconception about your hobby/profession that drives you up the wall?
Like for example, how someone thinks because you work in IT you can fix their TV, or how if you're into music you must be able to play any random instrument.
I just like hearing pros rant about about their very niche problems.
To give my own examples: As a pixel artist it drives me nuts when people call anything pixel adjacent "sprite art", because a sprite is just any art made to represent an object/character in 2D, and can be pretty much any art style or even be a 3D model in some cases.
Similarly, the weird conflation people seem to have of voxel art with pixel art. They both have very different design principles, and turning pixel art 1:1 into voxel art doesn't often work as intended for either style.
For romhacking: that because I know how to romhack that I'd automatically just be willing to "do a quick hack for them" that actually is just stupidly hard and complicated to pull off (like a multiplayer hack for a single player game).
Yep, I'm pretty sure a lot of hackers don't hack because they want to see the world burn, but because doing a regular cybersecurity job is just too boring.
there are hacking themed cybersecurity jobs. Pentesting is an absolute blast. Other Cybersecurity jobs seem pretty boring though, was a SOC analyst for a while and it was so very dull.
Working IT: The entire family thinks I'll always be happy and eager to fix all of their computer problems for them.
Being an electrical engineer: People think I'm an electrician.
I feel this. Not just family, too -- anyone who hears that I'm in IT. Or, even worse, when my family offers up my IT services to others without my knowledge, and those people call me out of the blue. There is no world in which I am happy or eager to deal with some rando's computer problems.
I feel this. I get so annoyed when I am "voluntold" to help someone with their stupid computer problem. I spend all day at work fixing people's problems. I don't want to come home and do the same thing!
For me, it's actually more fascinating than annoying how programming became known as this asocial profession where you sit all day in a dark room typing out some complex algorithms without ever talking to a human being. Meanwhile my daily work is mostly discussing requirements with architects / product owners, setting up meetings with other teams to see if maybe they have some experience with my current issue, training newcomers, helping the tech support deal with customers' cases... sometimes I go weeks without touching any code, and even when I do, it tends to be an hour of reading docs and discussing potential solutions with teammates per five minutes of actual coding.
And there is a widespread assumption that these tales were told to and for kids, while they were really entertainment for all ages (and some are downright X-rated).
I blame Disney... and the Brothers Grimm, who did their own part to "censor" folk tales.
Guitar - that it's hard to get into. It's not difficult, it just (generally) takes a lot of time people don't want to spend just getting acquainted with the instrument. I suppose the same is true for any instrument, really.
I work in professional B2B sales in the chemical/industrial/pharmaceutical spaces. People always assume that 1) all sales people are pushing used cars or something like that and will do anything to make a sale, 2) that I work on commission. I don't work on commission, my end of year bonus is loosely based on how much I sell but really just more dependant on how much the owner wants to give. What I do is much closer to protect management than sales... Some sales take a year plus to close. I'm also dealing with project managers, purchasing agents, engineers, and maintenance supervisors, I'm not ever dealing with the general public.
We don't have a ton of competition since our product lines are pretty niche. We don't sell PVC/CPVC, or stainless. Most of it is fiberglass or other composites, and we also have a field service crew to service existing material, so that is usually a pretty good way to ensure people go with us.
I've worked closely with people selling B2B IT Consulting services for years. If they didn't have a basic command of project management and what the solutions were capable of, they'd never be hired. If they didn't know those things like the back of their hand, they'd never succeed. Most of them still had a lot of drive and need to be persuasive, and it could be annoying, but for that kind of sales, there are many more important factors: mastery of product, communicating legitimate advantages (including downplaying minor objections and knowing when the product was a bad fit that would leave everyone unhappy), and maybe above all (except basic, baseline competence) relationship building.
Yeah you're putting it into words better than I did; people hear "sales" and think it's just selling a product. The people who are only able to do that and nothing more will be selling cars or working in a call center trying to sell in volume. Professional/B2B sales are so much more involved, for the reasons you stated. Dealing with large companies, having to get approvals, do takeoffs, build relationships with clients and suppliers, manage workflow on projects that can sometimes take years, knowing when to no-bid a job if it's not a good application for the product. There's a saying I've heard floating around: "we ain't selling steak knives." Edited to add, I've been doing it for 10 years and it definitely took me a little while to figure out the flow but now I like it quite a bit and I don't see myself making a change any time soon.
Yeah, my background is in law, but lawyers are miserable, LOL. I've been working in orgs that support approvals, bid/proposal quality validation, and contracting for most of my career. That also results in pretty frequently being the Grima Wormtongue in negotiations. I'm a couple of layers removed right now, but I worked directly with the sales reps for most of those years. Bad ones tended not to stick around for long.
Doing takeoffs, i.e. going through the customer's drawings/blueprints on a project and coming up with a materials list, then coming up with a schedule to be able to get the materials there on time. Then there are usually contractors that I will need to bid that material to. It almost always involves site visits to look at the work site so that I can make tweaks to their plans or help them complete their plans. Lots of meetings (in person and zoom) to hammer out details. I've gone some cool places, like lead mines/cobalt mines, factories, power plants, steel foundries, etc. The worst place I have ever been makes cottage cheese, I almost puked when I walked in there, the smell was unbearable. Another one I didn't love was a plant that makes Liquid Smoke. Couldn't get the smell off me or out of my car for what seemed like weeks.
I work in a hospital lab. Medical dramas have people thinking doctors are down here doing all the diagnostic work, so most people think I'm a clerk or a phlebotomist. Even nurses don't know we are degreed, licensed pros.
I used to be a journalist. People were jealous that we get to go everywhere "for free" and get "special" treatment, especially paid/exclusive events. It's work. I'm not "enjoying myself". I'm busy trying to collect information, speak to the right people, and watch out for newsworthy incidences. And often, it's not even an event that I enjoy attending.
Not a programer, but in IT. I think most jobs in IT, engineering, construction are bound to be un-original. We all work with chunks of stuff that just works, tailoring to an needs; writing original stuff for those big problems.
The most intense I ever have to get at work is when I have to look over something’s data sheet to find where the singular bit in the program is wrong, and when it flips it fixes the issue. I think it’s because we tricked machines into doing math, and mathematicians crib from each other as a rule
Yeah, sometimes you'll spend all day to make a single line change for a bug fix. Identifying where to make changes can be a considerable chunk of time. Plus collecting requirements and planning for changes.
After you write your big chunk of original code, good odds it doesn't work, too, so you'll spend a while debugging it.
You'll regularly have to learn new systems and libraries, as well as parts of your codebase that other people wrote. So a lot of time is spent just reading code and docs.
Movies made it look like the entire time is spent typing away. They're probably partly to blame. But movies especially conflate programming and hacking. On that note, the movie portrayal of hacking is even worse.
I'm a photographer, I carry a camera around my neck at all times. Very often while I'm outside, I'm asked to take pictures of strangers with their mobile phones. If I'm not in the mood, I simply reject their request but that takes spoons. When I do take their photograph, they look at the screen afterwards and expect something exceptional. It never is. It's still a mobile phone and you are still the same person, what do you expect me to do? Will the perfect light for the scene into existence? I can read the slight disappointment in their face and I just die inside.
Oh god this sums up that feeling so well. Too many times I’ve done so no see them all looking at the phone swiping at all the photos I took while I walk away. Still hurts a bit when you see them try to take a selfie afterwards
I’m a lawyer. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard “oh you’re a lawyer? You must have been good at arguing when you were a kid”…or that I must be “good at public speaking”.
It’s funny cause I do commercial real estate contracts and business law…I don’t ever go to court. Most of my day is spent staring at a computer and trying to figure out the best way to change three or four words in an obscure contract provision to best protect my client’s monetary interests. I don’t really ever argue in a professional setting, but I have learned how to think differently, how to see things from various perspectives and anticipate all sides of a negotiation and how I’d best respond.
I also can’t stand all the constant “hey can I ask you a legal question” from friends and family. Or friends and family sending me random contracts and asking me to “look it over for them”. It’s like they assume that just because they know me, I can do that for free, when I spend 10-12 hours a day billing large commercial clients for that same type of work.
That leads me to my next pet peeve: people in my life assuming that my “office job” is a simple nine to five. No. I represent clients all over the world so sometimes I am up at 4:30am to get on an international call at 5:00an. Sometimes I’m working late into the night to finalize a big land purchase contract or commercial office lease; sometimes doing that after putting in a full 9 hours at the office. I don’t get paid time off; I can work at my own pace, sure, and take “days off” here and there, but the work and business and the need for legal advice is constant and I have to catch up somehow, sometime whenever I take “time off”.
I know I’m in a privileged position so I feel kind of shitty about complaining about this, but it gets pretty old. I also recognize that I definitely need to figure out a better way to improve my work/life balance…because this won’t be super sustainable for much longer.
About the privileged position thing... I'm a blue collar worker with a massive chip on my shoulder, but the only people I complain about being privileged is people with do-nothing jobs, and people who work from home. When I think lawyer or doctor, I think ridiculous hours and lots of work.
Yeah but you can also do laundry, walk the dog, run to the store. You're not on a factory assembly line, there's downtime. And downtime at home is massively different than downtime at work. That's privileged.
Dude, lawyer is literally one of the,"My kid is a big success" jobs. It's privileged because it requires a ton of work and study before you're even allowed to do it. Not to mention the insane amount of work the job itself is.
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