While maybe not professional IT people but Linux users are quite known to be passionate about finding solutions. It’s quite recent that you can have a hands off experience with Linux, it was always a tinkerer’s OS before.
I remember in high school having friends who were going crazy at the chance to be the one who could solve an OS issue, like an IT medal of honor.
You reminded me about this crazy stuff where people with objdump made game 35% faster.
IT professional here, can confirm, Linux is superior and my choice of os.
… despite my work being mostly Windows Server.
Also: IT professionals usually have some experience and/or start out with Help Desk (hell), where you quickly learn what is and is not a good issue report.
This is pretty US centric thinking. Linux doesn’t have licensing. That means it’s used extensively in other countries, especially poorer ones. Some countries entire governments use it. It’s pretty huge in India too. Africa. Places where common folk, not IT professionals, use it but either have rough or no Internet and aren’t communicating in English, especially not GitHub.
Do you know any Linux users that aren’t IT professionals? If I know any, it’s because they’re the children of IT professionals
I’ve been using GNU+Linux since 9th grade because that’s when I got a computer. My parents have absolutely nothing to do with computers. What got me there was simple lack of understanding. I barely knew what OS was, but I needed to get one. And soon after, I misunderstood Windows as another distribution, so I went with Linux Mint.
I just had good luck.
I’m an actuarie and a Linux user at home. At work I’m forced to use excel but I do everything I can on python.
I think Microsoft recently introduced Python support in Excel, so maybe you can combine both.
Not an IT guy, just a dude that got tired of the Windows blue screen of death back in the day and discovered Linux many years ago as an alternative. I can’t code to save my life, but I know enough to use GitHub to report bugs I encounter. It can be time consuming and tedious but when I help alert others that know how to fix the problem I’ve helped in a way that gives me a little bit of pride that I always cherish knowing I’m giving back to the community.
It probably also helps the report rise to the level of “exceptional” if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don’t know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically “X isn’t working [picture of x not working]”. Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS…I don’t know any of that. I don’t even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place… My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn’t just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that’s not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I’ll probably disregard it if it doesn’t have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
This matches at least my personal behaviour. I’m a programmer myself, so if a game or application has a bug I’ll instantly start thinking about what could’ve caused it and what data would be useful. It’s advantageous for me because the bug may be fixed, and (hopefully) advantageous to the Dev because they get the information they need to fix it. It doesn’t always work though. At one point I sent an entire stack trace and all kinds of debug info to an app developer. I got the response that they’d look into it, but nothing ever comes of it. I’d accept it if they just admitted that it’s not worth their time, but somehow that’s also too hard to say.
Can you get a PE license in software engineering? Serious question
Edit: PE = professional engineer.
In most parts of the United States the title “engineer” or “professional engineer” is a title with legal requirements & responsibilities in the same way calling yourself a medical doctor or lawyer would be. Folks with the credentials to be a professional engineer are tested & licensed by the state to practice engineering, similar to the way the bar or medical board would vet lawyers & doctors.
The dude certifying the structural plans for the bridge you drive over every day is in this category. Same with other categories of critical engineering from the fields of chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, environmental, etc.
That said, TIL software “engineers” aren’t part of this group. Maybe they should be
No. That’s an exam for computer hardware engineering, not software.
There used to be a software engineering PE exam, but it was discontinued in 2018 due to lack of interest.
(I regret not taking it when I had the chance.)
A computer engineer is something else entirely. Basically, they often work with electrical engineers to write low level drivers or something, and rarely do much in user space. Software engineers are the opposite.
