Not really a dumb reason, but back in the day I was stuck in the WordPress developer loop and tired of it. I was pretty familiar with a handful of languages, but wasn’t doing much more than setting up themes and building out pages with builders.

One day I heard the CTO talking about a tool he would love to have but couldn’t find anything that worked how he needed it to. The CTO was a big buzzword guy and recently shared an article with my manager at the time about how C++ was “the best language”. So naturally I chimed in and told him I could build that tool easy peasy and I would use C++ obviously because it’s the best language.

It was such a simple tool, basically just matching phrases and categories and spitting out a list of options. It took me months to make, but I learned a lot and it kind of worked for the most part and everyone was happy. I eventually got a de-facto department in the company where I would just build internal tools and handle some legacy codebases that they were previously outsourcing.

I later on got my current job because of that leap.

TLDR: I learned C++ because I was bored and lied that I already knew it.

I do something similar, I’m on a dev team of 2 and a while back we started going in once a month for a “planning day” where we spend a couple hours in person planning out our month and spend the rest of the day talking to the teams who actually use our software to get feedback and ideas. At first the owner would take me and the other dev out for lunch but we’ve turned it into a whole office thing. So usually the whole offices shuts down for about 2 hours for a nice free lunch when we come in. One day a bunch of us went out for mini golf after lunch on the bosses dime. Another month a couple of us played old Xbox games and smoked cigs in the basement while we “brainstormed”.

This is why whenever my toddler asks for Mac and cheese I give him a dry salad. Gotta build that character.

I would love for robots to take over the boring jobs like making art, I think it’s a great advancement that our overlords have engineered for us. Now we can get back to things we really enjoy like shoveling shit and suffocating in mines.

Thank god they didn’t make robots more useful for everyday life tasks, freeing up a portion of the day. I have a hard enough time deciding what to do with my free 25 minutes every week as it is.

Got to go, my mining shift at the shit factor… Never mind they made robots to mine shit now, guess I’ll go starve to death in line waiting for free bread crumbs.

To a lot of people that’s too much effort for “no reason”.

People care, but not enough to put any effort in whatsoever.

I generally agree with this, there’s specific circumstances but for the most part its true.

I went from a C# position to PHP, to Python, to perl all with little or no experience with what I was jumping in to. There’s different nuances and the syntax might take a bit to get used to but as long as someone understands the how and why of what their code is doing that can be pretty easily transfer to most other languages. It’s all about the fundamentals.