I hate debugging
Friday, June 13th, 2003 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerBack in the 1980s, I considered taking a course in IT. The government had decided that thereweren't enough IT professionals around, and were offering "conversion courses" to arts graduates to train them to become microserfs. I thought about it for a while, then decided instead to sign up for an "A" level course (Amercians read "high school diploma") in computer science to find out more about the field. I didn't end up with a job as a result of this, but what the hell, I wrote a statistics program that fitted in 32KB of RAM and found out that the BBC Micro was a triumph of budget hardware engineeering.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd become an IT professional. Sometimes it looks appealing, but most of the time I'm happy that something I do for fun isn't something I have to do. Take systems stuff. I'm responsible for the computers in my department, which means that when somebody's Windows box crashes, they run to me in a panic and ask if I can help. If I can fix the problem, I get major kudos; if I can't, I can say, "Well what do you expect from Windows?" and sweet-talk our techie into doing R2 (Reformat, Reinstall). If it were my job, I would have to solve the problem. People would expect me to get it right, and not give me any pats on the back when I do, and complain loudly if I can't. And no techie is allowed to say "Well what do you expect from Windows?" - they've paid for the system, and it damn well should work, even if it's designed not to.
But the thing that really convinces me that not becoming a code-monkey was a good move is debugging. I've spent most of the evening trying (with no success) to debug a Perl script . It's not even a clever Perl script, just a simple web form. Whatever I do, I just get "Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at (eval 28) line 11." It's work-related, but thank God my job doesn't depend on this.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I'd become an IT professional. Sometimes it looks appealing, but most of the time I'm happy that something I do for fun isn't something I have to do. Take systems stuff. I'm responsible for the computers in my department, which means that when somebody's Windows box crashes, they run to me in a panic and ask if I can help. If I can fix the problem, I get major kudos; if I can't, I can say, "Well what do you expect from Windows?" and sweet-talk our techie into doing R2 (Reformat, Reinstall). If it were my job, I would have to solve the problem. People would expect me to get it right, and not give me any pats on the back when I do, and complain loudly if I can't. And no techie is allowed to say "Well what do you expect from Windows?" - they've paid for the system, and it damn well should work, even if it's designed not to.
But the thing that really convinces me that not becoming a code-monkey was a good move is debugging. I've spent most of the evening trying (with no success) to debug a Perl script . It's not even a clever Perl script, just a simple web form. Whatever I do, I just get "Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at (eval 28) line 11." It's work-related, but thank God my job doesn't depend on this.
