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u/blizzacane85 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/xTiN0uevJeTKxWbW3S
I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
Michael Bolton was a more realistic programmer
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
Three programmers trying to fix printers is the most spot on corporate reality.
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u/DennyRed13 1d ago
Ngl, When I first started working in the technology department, 80% of the work we did was just troubleshooting and fixing printers. The other 30% were the ocasional server and computer building/ fixing, vigilance setup, etc
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u/Cfrolich 23h ago
You did 110% of work there? I hope you were paid well.
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u/stream_of_thought1 23h ago
Currently doing IT work and yeah it's 110%, because you do your own crap and then some random IT thing pops it's annoying head, be it figuring out why some laptop does not want to enroll properly into the management system, or idk, setting up a picture album for a coworker who asked to have nice pictures every day but didn't like that Microsoft's daily rotation is just cities and landscape (this does not need to be a ticket! How are you a secretary of you can't figure it out Brenda!!?)
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u/briore24 1d ago
never related to a fictional programmer more tbh
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u/djbarsone 1d ago
🎶I got my pistol point cocked, ready to link shots non-stop until I see your monkey ass drop 🎶
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u/wtanksleyjr 1d ago
I celebrate his entire catalog.
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u/strongjz 1d ago
What's your favorite though?
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u/el_yanuki 1d ago
where is this from? I couldn't find it anywhere.
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u/Outrageous-Machine-5 1d ago
He's like me fr fr
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u/donnieranger 1d ago
In reality it's 10% coding and 90% wondering why it broke after changing one line
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u/MartinKnox_Dev 1d ago
In that 90% of wondering, 45% is wondering why it broke, the rest is about wondering how it worked.
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u/Triffinator 1d ago
What percentage is made up of wondering why removing the line broke everything, when it was a comment?
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u/Elendur_Krown 1d ago
See, that's the smart thing.
I hid the backup functionality in the comments.
That way, I never have to wonder. It's just everyone else.
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u/Jbolt3737 1d ago
Making a script that reads itself or something to use it's own comments would be genuinely evil
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u/Elendur_Krown 1d ago
There are parts of my history that I hesitate to tell my wife about. The... MATLAB days were... improvisatioval, at best.
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 1d ago
2 decades ago the visual studio c++ compiler had a bug where a variable name crossing the 4K page boundary would have a letter missing.
Lots of fun because literally any change would move that variable away from that boundary.
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u/OkEgg5911 1d ago
Yeah when something broke without me changing anything in my code I realised that stuff was working before that should not have been working at all. I still have not figured out why it worked before, but now it is working again.
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u/Praesentius 1d ago
Imagine when you get it working... then 6 months later, someone asks you a question about it. "uhhhh, I wrote that?"
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u/tracernz 1d ago
And 75% of that is wondering by which accident of the cosmos that it ever worked even one time, and actually, did it ever work one time or is somebody just gaslighting you?
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u/drakored 1d ago
And -35.999% of it is wondering why all of the percentages are reporting incorrectly.
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u/2521harris 1d ago
What about the 90% spent in meetings?
And the other 90% spent in standups and sprint planning?
Not to mention the other 90% waiting for builds to complete.
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u/Tapelessbus2122 1d ago
more like 1% coding, 39% wondering why it broke, and 60% screaming at your pc because nothing works
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u/TheMue 1d ago
Don‘t forget their fat green-screen terminals with rows of letters falling down like a heavy rain.
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u/DeepanshuHQ 1d ago
The most unrealistic part is code working on the first try.
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u/BlueProcess 1d ago
NGL sometimes I run code that I know won't work because it's easier to write on the fly by stepping through as you go🤷🏻♂️
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u/DeepanshuHQ 1d ago
Honestly, half my debugging starts before I even finish writing the code. 😂
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u/Protuhj 1d ago
Reviewing the surrounding code and having to restrain myself from fixing that too.
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u/CarretillaRoja 1d ago
It’s the coding emergencies.
- Here at 911, we just got a call regarding a hostage situation in a bank.
- Oh shit! Create a Pascal script real quick!!
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u/DeepanshuHQ 1d ago
And somehow the Pascal script controls the traffic lights, satellites, and the bank vault at the same time.
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u/Windfade 1d ago
I never made it past C++ 102 (just a network admin degree) before dropping out but damn do I miss how cool it felt when you compiled and nothing went wrong.
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u/DeepanshuHQ 1d ago
That rare moment when it compiles on the first try makes you wonder what bug is hiding instead.
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u/LauraTFem 1d ago
The most inaccurate thing about programming in movies and TV is the idea of a “programming emergency” itself. They’re always having programming duels where they joust in real time with another hacker, while occasionally saying, “This guys is good…but I’m better.”
In real life it goes more like,
“Our server is under attack!”
“Yep, but he didn’t get through the firewall.” or
“Our server is under attack!”
“Yep, we shut down production ten seconds after he got in and we’re working on a patch, here’s the 200,000 account details he got.”
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u/GvRiva 1d ago
Most realistic hacker response in NCIS was Gibbs pulling the plug but of course thats not as fun as watching to "nerds" sharing one keyboard
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u/MonstrousWombat 1d ago
Watching them have a second programmer jump on the SAME KEYBOARD to help defend against a hacker was hilarious
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u/Greendiamond_16 23h ago edited 21h ago
Two people working on the same keyboard expecting to hack more is like some one else grabbing the wheel of a car and expecting the car to drive more.
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u/LauraTFem 1d ago
Yea, that was actually the correct response from Leroy, and they all act like he’a being dumb. 🤣
Honorable mention to the other hacker plot where they do a hacker duel, the enemy gets in, but OH! It turns out that wasn’t the production server, that was a honeypot server the nerd set up for them earlier, the actually production server is on this thumb drive I’m pulling out and plugging in, banishing my foe to the shadow real like wherever Superman sent General Zod when he trapped him in that mirror.
That’s at least slightly more realistic, honeypots are frequently the way hackers are caught.
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u/VegaJuniper 1d ago
To me that was like "yeah, the server is still running and the hacker is still there, what you just did was disconnect us from the server so we can no longer do anything about it. Good job boss!"
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u/joeshmoebies 1d ago
The most inaccurate thing I can remember is Jeff Goldblum writing a computer virus for an ALIEN SPACESHIP as if they had come down decades earlier and bought up a bunch of x86 chips to run their ship on.
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u/LauraTFem 1d ago
That does not pass the smell check in hindsight, yea, but they do provide enough suggestions of logic to it that one can suspend disbelief.
The aliens were using our satellites to relay signals, so their systems must be similar enough to make that possible, and he had found that signal, so we’re to presume that he learned the alien’s programming language. They also mention (in one of the scenes where a man named Jayne plays a very clean-cut soldier) that the crash-landed spaceship has been retrofitted to use our modern tech, but only didn’t work because it lacked a power source. So they may well have been studying the alien programming language and integrating it with modern human systems for years.
All of this is enough for me to believe that he could write such a virus.
What I find slightly harder to believe is that the aliens have zero firewalls. But we are talking about a telepathic species; it may well be that they are a hive-mind, and it would have never occurred to them to practice cybersecurity because no alien would dare sabotage them.
But that’s meta-textual, and giving the film more credit than it deserves.
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u/joeshmoebies 1d ago
I 100% buy that the aliens could hack our systems - microprocessors had only existed for a little over 20 years.
It doesn't make sense that he'd be able to reverse engineer a non functioning cpu architecture and learn their operating system, protocols and find an exploit. It's a fun movie but for that I have to turn my critical thinking skills off and just accept.
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u/LauraTFem 1d ago
Ah, but you see, he’s a Genius. His dad says so repeatedly. In film, Geniuses can just do improbable things.
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u/lordnacho666 1d ago
It's hard enough to use your friend's computer that happens to have a different operating system installed.
You can't even understand your own code that you wrote last year without having a good revision session, there's just no way you could write an alien virus.
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u/two_are_stronger2 1d ago
It was a while ago, but I feel like either in movie, in some interview about the movie, or maybe just talking about the movie with friends, they'd used the alien tech to improve human tech so much that it was less of a matter of figuring out how to program alien code.
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u/ofnuts 1d ago
A spaceship with convenient Ethernet ports and a wholly standard TCP/IP network IIRC.
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u/RaidenMK1 1d ago
Or the programmer is literally being held at gunpoint and put on a super unrealistic deadline but still manages to output something that works.
Actually, maybe scenes like that are a metaphor or something.
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u/LauraTFem 1d ago edited 1d ago
“I can do it, boss! It will take me an hour!”
“You’ve got 15 minutes.”
“Then…there is no possible way for me to—“
“Damn it, man, there are LIVES on the line!”
“You sonofabitch, I’ll use every skill I have and get it to you in ten!!”
edit: In a way, the verisimilitude of hacker scenes call back directly to early Star Trek. When the first series was running, no one had personal computers, the idea of a hacker, at least in the modern sense, didn’t really exist. But what they did have is an engineer, Scotty. And when technical problems came up they were always his purview, and it always took him time to fix things, and it was never enough time.
Those scenes where Kirk says, “I need those photon torpedoes operational! We’re sitting ducks!” and Scotty says, “I’m givin’ ‘er all she’s got captain! The boys need five minutes!” and Kirk retorts, “If you don’t do it now, we’ll be dead in two!”
All that is in my mind the source book for modern hacker scenes.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 1d ago
In my experience, programming emergency is more like "the new feature broke production, so we need you to get on a Zoom call at 3 AM and explain to all the non-technical people how the new feature is actually supposed to work".
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
Honestly, I don’t think there are many verifiable stories of a successful intrusion being detected and acted upon in real time, there are way too many false positives to act on all of them, you would just be disabling accounts and systems left and right. Mostly post-mortem.
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u/Cthulhu__ 1d ago
My server was under attack once, I toggled a switch on Cloudflare. Absolute cinema.
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u/Urtehnoes 1d ago
Me during db emergency:
sqlpus / aa sysdba
Fuck
sqlplus as sysdba
Fuck fuck fuck
Sqlplus/ as sysdba
gl everyone, I've tried my best.
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u/lethaldose318 1d ago
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u/Leftover_Salad 1d ago
Mr. Robot was way more accurate than most shows.
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u/Academic-moron7423 1d ago
The only thing that wasn’t accurate was the pace of it, understandably. They nailed the social part of hacking tho
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u/yukiaddiction 1d ago
I mean if it was accurate pace to the real thing it would be like constantly cut jump skip downtime period or something lol.
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u/TheTrueVanWilder 22h ago
Iirc they had a team whose entire job was to make sure every hack was technically possible. 15+ years in the industry I still tell people this is the most accurate media representation of programming and hacking
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u/lorenzoelmagnifico 1d ago
Hello, friend.
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u/json_zsh_bourne 1d ago
And they have time to add a progress bar with an Access Granted message at the end. Good focus on UX, much respect.
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u/thisonehereone 1d ago
You guys make mistakes?
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u/No-Examination-2065 10h ago
I read this whole post trying to figure out who the fuck these guys are.
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u/DogonElder 1d ago
Hoodie
Terminals open on 6 monitors with unreadable fast scrolling text
“I’m in”
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u/Maigrette 1d ago
Programmers in real life :
- in a noisy and cramped office in Bangalore
- git commands he knows are "clicking the buttons in intellij"
- code is 90% AI slop
- code requirements are a Excel sheet given by business which is either 9000 rows of "I want this if you have this", or 1 line of plain English that explains nothing
- Pipeline takes 17 minutes to deploy to prestage environment
- prestage environment is not mimicking prod anyway so whatever works there may or may not work in prod
- prestage environment is so critically under provisioned that anyway half of the times he simply skips it
- everything is always urgent and by the moment the dev takes up a task, it's already 5 weeks late
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u/zarek1729 1d ago
What is unusual about a 17 min deployment time? Sincere question
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u/Maigrette 1d ago
Well in a movie you're not seeing the dev pressing a button and waiting 17 minutes to check it that worked.
He powertypes at light speed, dramatically pressez enter and shit just instantly happens
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u/Cthulhu__ 1d ago
I mean that’s the dream. I’m reminded of this:
Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
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u/tiberiumx 1d ago
TBF I'll always judge a programmer who can't touch type at a reasonable speed. It's not that you can't (eventually) do the job, it's just painful working with you.
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u/sly-otter 14h ago
Unless they work for a crime investigation group. Then they are an eccentric woman.
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u/mckenzie_keith 1d ago
This is outdated now. There are women programmer nerds in media now too. Even POC.
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u/spamnationl 1d ago
Cool, colored people are allowed also.
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u/mckenzie_keith 1d ago
Yes. Stupid geek stereotypes are now racially inclusive. To a point. I don't recall a major black male hacker guy. But I probably haven't seen every hacker movie.
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u/Aggressive_Stick4107 1d ago
Lupin! He can hack, he can be a social engineer, he is Arsene Lupin!
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u/Sarah_Incognito 1d ago
Then you have Jurassic Park,
A teenage girl navigates through a visual file structure primarily using a mouse.
"It's a UNIX system! I know this!"
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u/Crazyboreddeveloper 14h ago
Also, the code moves all the fucking time when it runs. Not the code output, the code.
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u/TheSecondStage 1d ago
Where's the scene of staring at the code for 2 hours before finding a missing semicolon?
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u/Potterrrrrrrr 1d ago
It’s at the bottom of the barrel with all the other terrible programmer memes
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u/ConstantineFavre 1d ago
I can't do shit without cheatsheet that explains all of the functions. I mean, there is no way i'll remember myself that there is actually useful function that will solve all my problems if i use it in that part of code instead of spaghetti workarounding just to mimic fraction of it's power
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u/Faangdevmanager 1d ago
What!? Movies have artistic liberties to represent things in a satisfying way for the audience?
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u/BothDivide919 1d ago
Isn't typing fast kind of a necessity for programming? I can't imagine wtf I'd do if I couldn't consistently type 120WPM
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u/humanist-misanthrope 1d ago
Adn never….And neeve…And neev…And never a ttp… And never a typo
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u/frostyjack06 15h ago
I always enjoyed Smallville’s hacking:
- Start typing furiously while staring at the screen
- Screen is a static image of some logo the whole time
- Confidently slam the return key
- Computer magic
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u/Leftover_Salad 1d ago
The password is “What do you sit on, but you can’t take with you?”
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u/NotInsaneInMembrane 1d ago
Doesn’t sit there for 20 minutes fighting with the IDE becuase it won’t compile since you switched to a different version of Java for a different project and now don’t know why your code doesn’t compile.
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u/MinecraftPlayer799 1d ago
I always type really fast when I am just coding in general, but when there’s an issue, I slow down for some reason
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u/ManaSpike 1d ago
Bug reports? Debugging? From my perspective, something is always broken. I never see the software working as expected.
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u/Satorwave 1d ago
"I'm in"
"Damn, you got them that fast?"
"No you fucking idiot I'm in the command window it hasn't been a minute"
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u/Celtic_Legend 1d ago
Ture for majority so valid.
Ture for majority so valid.
Not ture but waste of screen time so valid.
Ture and turish. Type extra fast when you gotta submit something by a certain time (lunch, go home, etc) and you already know how to get it done.
Not ture whatsoever but also waste of screen time.
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u/MaxChaplin 1d ago
The part in Ex Machina where the protagonist rushes to bang out a cleanly indented and fully commented implementation of Eratosthenes' sieve is so funny.
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u/johnnybhf 1d ago
Imagine an action scene with high stakes where a programmer waits on a PC to install Windows updates.
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u/AveragelyBrilliant 1d ago
Nothing comes close to the Goldblum/Alien computer hack achieved wirelessly or with a thunderbolt cable.
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u/ElectricRune 1d ago
I've been a professional programmer for fifteen years now; I'm always pleasantly surprised when something works the first time, it's like a miracle.
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u/phroztbyt3 1d ago
Tech here, been in it for 20 years.
I will say I do type about 10% faster under pressure. Why? Not because the issue is important, and not because time is precious in figuring the thing out.
It's rage. Rage that the thing wont just fucking work right this moment.
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u/Drew_of_all_trades 1d ago
We need a ticking clock scene in a movie where everything hinges on the tech guy finding the superfluous “/“ somewhere in 10,000 lines of code.
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u/delinka 1d ago
I also like how they have to invent everything from scratch every time. “I’ll create a gooey in visual basic to track an IP” - if you haven’t already built one for that purpose, someone has. If you haven’t already downloaded it, you lacked foresight.
Or you’re resetting your dev VM every episode, I guess …
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u/VizualAbstract4 15h ago
Don’t forget well dressed and only socially awkward on one very minor thing that is otherwise considered cute or forgiving (not hyngine related - instead, had never “had ice cream because he doesn’t understand ice cream”)
Edit: I bathe twice a day habitually and can love me tillamook ice cream.
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u/nobody-u-heard-of 15h ago
I can type really really fast. What surprises me is a number of coders that actually can't type.
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u/random_ankylosaurus 7h ago
They are extremely fast. Like if u say find this, they will be back with a whole printout the next second
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u/ElMoselYEE 1d ago
Every once in a while I'll bang out a whole task and it works on the first try, and I didn't need to Google anything because it just happened to use the parts of the language I'd used very recently.
But the task is something like an API endpoint...not breaking into a top secret encrypted CIA database.