As someone in IT, we are the digital janitors of the world. Which I'm sure is not how the CS majors feel.
It's like being a mechanic vs a car designer.
this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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Every tech support technician has a cockroach story.
It depends on how the IT team is named, I suppose. Security blue teams are often just IT guys who also develop and respond to incidents.
imagine you went through life being unpopular because your personality is trash but thinking you were actually smarter than all the people who disliked you, then finally you are rewarded for this belief by being given several hundred thousand dollars per year to be very smart at an adult daycare. Imagine what sort of person that produces
Having done both, the main reason is because software development is a completely (high paying) white collar job while IT in the sense of tech support is a (not as high paying) white collar job with blue collar characteristics. For people who specialize in printers and security cameras, it's pretty much a blue collar job, not all that different from a plumber. Like many blue collar jobs, it's dirty as well. Like, security cameras covered in bird shit, old PCs filled with cockroaches, ancient switches caked with dust, cables chewed off by rats, printer toner getting everywhere (FYI, toner dust is carcinogenic), and so on. And this isn't even getting into help desk, which is completely indistinguishable from customer service, except you're getting yelled at boomer coworkers instead of boomer customers.
There's also a "wool pulled from your eyes" and "learning how the sausage is made" moment. You see the front office that's all nice and fancy looking, then you get to the server room and you see mission critical file servers running Windows 2000, boxes piled up blocking the circuit breaker just barely covering the label specifying that obstructing the circuit breaker with random shit is an OSHA violation, box fans everywhere because the boss cheaped out on AC. Executives pretty much treat the dev team as the golden goose while tech support is treated like some red-hair stepchild. The favoritism is very obvious, which probably also contributes to CS R*dditors thinking they're hot shit. The funny thing is that developers and certainly R*dditor developers are nowhere near as tech savvy as they think they are.
One of my favorite genre of online rants to read is when a CS person experiences mild trouble figuring out a user interface. They then declare something like "imagine how much difficulty the general public must have when even I, an Incredibly Technical Person, have trouble with this!" Often people will have no real difficulty with it at all, and the CS person has simply massively overestimated the technical abilities gifted to them by their ability to search stackoverflow posts.
I love the "PC power user" not understanding and complaining about Mac controls even though it takes like 5 minutes to figure out and it's mostly having to fight against muscle memory rather than any form of complexity. Honestly, the vast majority of PC g*mers are just as tech semi-literate. If anything, they're even worse because at least developers can code.
One other thought I have related to this that I'm putting in the comments since it doesn't really warrant another post
On cs career questions and similar spaces I see a lot of "the job market is saturated because of dumb normies who were brainwashed by tiktok 'day in the life of a software engineer' videos, they deserve to be unemployed for chasing trends 
" which I fucking hate because prior to the tech job crash last year, the rhetoric for the preceeding 15ish years was "you're dumb if you try to pursue anything other than software engineering, every college major that isn't CS is a useless underwater basket weaving degree that won't get you any jobs"
how are they not connecting the current over-saturated market to the "code or starve" rhetoric of the 10s (which tbh was materially true to an extent), and instead try to make some "dumb sheeple normies" argument, I hate (almost) everyone in tech fuck em
Another contradiction in my capitalism? Starting to think that employment shouldn’t be market-based!
the rhetoric for the preceeding 15ish years was "you're dumb if you try to pursue anything other than software engineering, every college major that isn't CS is a useless underwater basket weaving degree that won't get you any jobs"
Well, if you’re looking for a relatively stable career that pays well, then STEM is basically the only accessible option as it requires almost nothing if you’re exceptional, and relatively cheap for the average person.
Other careers like medical and law require huge up front investments, i.e. tuition, and many years of schooling. MBAs are the butt of the joke in the “technical” degree side of college, but if you’re good enough at talking you’ll land a decent job. Almost everything else, whether they’re inherently more useful than STEM, will get you either nothing for years or the salary is barely tolerable.
my low-info guess, mainly off vibes because one has a culture of start-up grindset shit and the other is a lot of office workers
Programming as a profession really isn't that hard compared to many other STEM fields, it's highly paid in some sections, and it currently has outsized impact on the economy at large. It practically breeds overinflated egos sometimes.
Now, to be fair, the vast majority of programmers at large are fine and decent. However those people generally aren't posting on 
, so those online spaces have an outsized representation of egotistical assholes.
software engineer egos screaming and evaporating when confronted with a derivative that kids in grade 11s easily solve
/r/cscareerquestions is mostly really dumb college students who want to be the next musk/zuck/tim apple. Stay away from there. /r/engineeringStudents has a very similar vibe, but there the MechEs know how to make neat flow graphs to visualize their 499 rejections and 1 job offer.
/r/ExperiencedDevs is the far more sane version of that sub.
One thing I will say, a single IT/Sysadmin has a much larger effect on a project than a single dev. A bad one wont know how to set up infrastructure and will ghost your emails as you're begging and pleading for something to do your work. A really good IT/Sysadmin will plumb up those pipes so well that you'll assume its magic until a bad IT/Sysadmin comes around and breaks it.
Reddit is just a cesspool. Use matrix or IRC to get to the cool people.
The difference is staggering because “cs career” is vague and encompasses anything from Netflix cloud engineer to electronics repairsman. Contrast that with “IT career” which is specific and the glamour and spectacle, if any, are already known and no one feels the need to brag about it.
TC or GTFO
(...or did r/cscq stop doing this on every post at some point?)
I think the people who post that moved to a different site called teamblind.com, they were too insufferable even for the average cs career questions poster
Blind seemed neat in theory but god it was toxic as fuck. Like of course it's full of dirty capitalists trying to make bank, whatever, but Blind was just chock full of misogyny and queerphobia, to a more upsetting degree than even Reddit.
I went there for the first time just now and it’s so much worse than I expected 
cscq folks are just temporarily embarrassed blind posters