Nowadays? Not so much."
Yeah, I call BS on that. This bubble us techie live in it paints this sort of boring. Try go on the country side or in another industry and suddenly you are looked upon as some sort of god - it's almost cringy they way they treat you when you spend 5 minutes fixing something that half the village tried to fix it in past year and then they gave up.
Related to this I was recently a bit saddened after helping some family members getting their new WiFi and Apple TV set up because, after I was done setting it up one of them was like, “you should work in tech support, you are so good at this”.
Now the reason that it saddened me was because while I appreciated that they appreciated the help, and that she ment nothing but to compliment by saying that, but the thing is that doing tech support would literally kill my soul. And I realized that to a lot of people there is no discernible difference between doing software development and doing tech support. It’s all just working with computers right? And they know that I like to work with computers.
But where I actually derive joy from computers is in creating things. Writing code, optimizing my algorithms and data structures, improving the speed and robustness of software that I write, making software that is as ergonomic and sensible as I can. Both when it’s APIs that other developers will use or I myself will use and when it is user interface stuff that end users will use. Those kinds of things are what gives me satisfaction.
To sit on a phone line and guide someone through a thousand steps of troubleshooting and finally in 90% of cases having them reboot a machine, that’s just.. not even close to being enjoyable.
I always like to help people, and if someone asks me, whether they be friends or family or others I will help them. But when I do that, I do it for a different reason. I do it because it is easy and I know it helps them. Not because I enjoy doing that in its own.
And I don’t mean to talk down at people doing tech support or anything. Nor do I want to seem arrogant. What I am getting at is just that it’s not the same. Not at all the same.
I didn’t want to get into all of that then and there of course, so I just carefully said that tech support wouldn’t really be for me because what I like most is to create stuff.
But yeah.
I can stand clueless (and largely thankful) end customers. What I cannot stand is people that should be better at what they're doing and simply don't care.
I've experienced something similar. Whenever I'd tell people I'm studying electrical engineering, they'd think I was studying to be an electrician.
I think it's just a matter of what people are more exposed to. They're more likely to deal with tech support reps and electricians on any given day.
They were truly amazed by this, while my reaction was "wait, I could totally do something like that".
I get caught off guard by such situations quite often.