34
AleCx04
4y

Story Time:

When I first started working where I currently am, the manager at the time decided to send us off to a conference about one of the products our institution was purchasing at the time. She also thought that it would be a good way for me, the new guy, to bond with the rest of the staff.

During the presentations we found out that the people surrounding us were not exactly developers because of a couple of things:

1. Some examples were done with php and javascript for adding functionality to said product. The product gave you the opportunity to script on top of it (think of some sort of CMS, but it does not use PHP as its backend language) EVERYONE from the "class" in this particular workshop said they were developers. But at the sight of php in a group of 80 people or so, only about 7 recognized it, including myself and my team.

2. When they showed an example with Javascript, in particular jquery, one of the dudes in the workshop said (with extreme senior level confidence might I add) "yeah I never liked Javascript because you really can't connect it to any database in a website" <--- my face went 0.o and one of the actual developers doing the presentation did a Jim from the Office and looked at some out of screen camera.

3. During a conf talk, one PHD dude showed an example in the template language the CMS used (an obscure Java based template language)in which he was proudly calling out a technique he used to include one snippet of code into another one.....at that time, one of my coworkers squinted his eyes in disbelief, got close to me and said "is this man telling everyone in here that he discovered how to include a file? like, as a new thing?" me: "lol yes", him: "this is a waste of time, do the docs for this thing show how to do it or is he doing some sort of strange maneuver for something the platform does not support?" me: "let me check....nope, it is included, for some reason he made a function that takes the...name of the file he wants to include and passes it over to that call inside of the body....which as per the docs it is the include function...." him: ".....fuck, what a waste of time and money, fuck it lets spend a couple of more minutes here and then go get a drink or something"

That last part was my favorite really, the man speaking was not just any phd holder, but a comp sci phd holder. To this day my dude would walk into my office and say shit like "I DISCOVERED HOW TO INCLUDE A FILE WITH PHP!"

Comments
  • 7
    Me at that conference:

    ( ⚆ _ ⚆ ) - 'bro wtf...'
  • 4
    @Jilano ngl we had a blast and just had to hold our laughter or our "bruh" faces. People there were severely nice. There was this one workshop trainer, she looked like one of those instagram fit girls, really bubbly and nice. At one point during the php script portion she said that the believes that php will definitely be the future of overall web development. And made it sounds like it was a brand new tool.

    I was so confused, did not had the guts to tell her lmao she had such a great attitude didn't want to neckbeard correct her hahaha
  • 4
    @N00bPancakes lmao that is exactly how me and my crew were and the other few developers we met there. We all went for beers afterwards and made fun of the whole thing, but not in a bad evil way you know? more like in "lol that was funny" way
  • 4
    @mcfly dude yes hahahaha some people looked at him like "wow that dude knows what he is talking about " XD
  • 3
    Meanwhile the rest of the audience was like, "...no shit? I had no idea you could use an import like that. I gotta tell my buddy about this tonight like it was my idea."

    I'm convinced most people attend conferences to compile a list of talking points to parrot for the next 6 months as a defense mechanism.
  • 1
    @SortOfTested

    I think there's sort of 'conference culture' that has a whole grouping of subsets of groups within that.... and despite I'm not sure it has anything to with anything ...

    I was at a local conference once and someone who runs the conference comes up and tells me about how they're super excited for this next speaker.

    This lady comes up and she's energetic, but just rolls out this stream of consciousness of developer platitudes and it's just so empty and dumb.

    Meanwhile I just want to hear other devs talk about doing the thing. I don't even care if it is "So I toLowerCase() everything and it worked...." but god damn can it be about a thing...
  • 3
    @N00bPancakes
    Yeah, I don't attend conferences for similar reasons. That and I'm too cheap to pay for them.
  • 3
    @SortOfTested it really felt like that. The conference audience was looking like they were legitimately looking at something cool and unknown to them.

    I enjoyed our time there, specially since they took us to some really nice places (my favorite was one of those fancy bars with hipster stouts)
  • 1
    @AleCx04
    In the land of the blind, the one eyed woman es la reina.
  • 0
    @SortOfTested 💃sigan a la reina!
  • 1
    Are you sure it wasn't some kind of "revolutionary" autoinclude? I find it hard to believe a CS PHD would go spastic over wrapping an import call. I'd like to think he was trusted with much harder tasks during his dissertation.
  • 1
    @cprn most definitely. I looked at the docs while the dude was going over it.
    I can't remember the code exactly, but in pseudocode is was something like:

    @highlight
    function include_file(file_name_with_path) {
    // invoke the include function provided by the template system
    include(file_name_with_path)
    }
  • 1
  • 0
    @cprn it was just so pointless it made me wonder if he was an actual phd holder
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