For those of you that aren’t programmers or don’t understand what a programmer does…

Have you ever had that sinking feeling where you’ve just realized that the last thirty minutes that you spent explaining some concept in programming to a person isn’t sinking in one damn bit? Or how about when your boss or someone you’re doing a “favor” for doesn’t understand why you haven’t finished their project before they even asked you to do it? Well, if you haven’t, my friend you are in for a real treat.

It so happens that as a favor to my boss I’m writing a computational model for a Ph.D student here at the university.

Side note: For some background, I work for a Research/Professor who is an applied mathematician that studies ecological/biological mathematics, mostly dynamic systems and biodiversity. I work as a programmer and research assistant since my boss isn’t that great of a programmer, and my interests (distributed systems & concurrent real world simulation) deal with similar problems.

Anyway, continuing. So my boss asks me to help this Ph.D kid out with a program and of course it takes far longer than it should to hash out how this program should work. He has no way of clearly generalizing his problem and I have no way of understanding the specifics of his problem. So after a couple weeks we finally get some pseudo-code hashed out that I can work with (mostly). No more than a day after we’ve finalized the pseudo-code, the kid starts hassling me about it. I first try to explain why this code can’t be written in 30 minutes but that strikes out so I just flat out tell him its going to be at least a week before I have anything conclusive and of course he whines/nags about it a bit but none the less he leaves me alone. *queue sinking feeling*

What really irks me though about this is that I didn’t actually want or have to do this for this kid. I’m not particularly interested in his model, nor what he’s trying to find. I’d just appreciate it if the non-programmers out there would leave the programming to the programmers and trust that we’ll work on your project in due course, its just going to take a bit of time because YOUR program is not at the top of my “things to get friggin’ done” list.