“When I write a program, 50% of the code comes from me guessing what you want because you don’t know what you want.”
Yup. I’m a woman in the IT field. Originally RPG programmer turned system admin/enterprise-wide scheduler. The users really don’t understand much, that’s for sure. Often I’d spend weeks (or months) on a project to learn they “forgot” they needed this or that. Meaning? Starting from scratch and doing over again.
Or they purchased something from out of house and it didn’t come close to what the salesperson claimed....and did they include IT in the research for this new application? Course not! Even worse there were times this glorious new product wasn’t even compatible with our own system apps. Drove me crazy. In one case had to purchase middle-ware to get the thing to work and product the reports in the “pretty way” the users wanted to see them. Argh!
“Originally RPG programmer”
I’ll add you to the prayer list.
Much of what we do now is interface systems.
Same here, engineer who moved to IT. I did software testing, documentation and training from a super-user point of view.
I was tasked to meet up with users for software requirements gathering, and when you had different people in the room for a second meeting, the priorities and must-haves could be very different.
Gathering super-users for testing rarely used paths, such as “what do you want it to do here”, was always herding cats.