Programmers and Memes

As a programmer, your job is to write code. And to write code you must have a positive approach towards programming. You should not do programming if you’re not interested in it. So if you are in it, you need to maintain the positive approach you had when you started with it in the first place. There are a lot of things that will try to bring you down or start spreading negativity around you, but you need to stay positive or it will be more like a burden rather than fun.

Sometimes the negativity is spread without you knowing it and you’re in the constant influence of the negativity. One of such negative influences are memes found on multiple social networking platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

What are memes?

Memes are a pictorial method of spreading humor. They are spread in social media and is entertainment to a lot of people just scrolling through their feeds. Memes are intended to be fun and to make people smile, but sometimes they go wrong and cause a negative impact on society.

What’s the problem?

People publish negative memes intentionally and unintentionally for whatever reason and it does a negative impact on the entire community associated with it and they, in turn, tend to spread the negativity to others, more like a chain reaction.

Some young students are just starting with programming, and most of them are pretty excited because they chose to program themselves. Now that they have made the choice, they tend to follow similar topics on their social media, it may be Facebook or Instagram, or any other platform. They come across memes and what happens is, it makes a first impact on them about programming. The first impact is always important because you set an image about how programming will be, and how would be the life of programmers.

This has happened to me personally. When I was learning to code, I came across a lot of memes, and since I had no work experience, I started thinking that what the memes say is absolutely correct. One of the myths shared was that as a programmer, you are an introvert and you do not communicate much with anyone and you’re supposed to be in a dark cubicle programming all day. This is wrong because programmers NEED TO communicate. When you are working as an employee, you need to collaborate with your team and check the status constantly. As a freelancer, you need to be in constant communication with the client and maintain trust. As a programmer, your communication skills matter more than your programming skills (of course, you need programming skills too).

Another myth spread by such memes is that clients you are dealing with are annoying and you have the pressure of the entire universe on your shoulder. This is not correct. Clients are not always bad and annoying, yes there are some who might annoy you, but most of the clients are professional and won’t bother you if you’re doing their work on time.

How to fix the problem?

Now that you know that whatever memes say is not the reality of life, they are just to spread humor and could go negative most of the time, you need to know how to tackle such problems and stay positive throughout your programming journey

• Leave any community which is spreading negativity constantly. If this is intentional, there’s no question to ask, leave immediately, unfollow the group or page.
• Have a fixed mindset about your life and goals. Of course, your goals might change over time, but make sure you are not letting a picture on the internet change your goals or spread negativity.
• If you find yourself getting more negativity into yourself, try joining some community where you can help others in programming, you would not encounter memes most of the time, and people in the community will give you a realistic idea about how things are in the real world.

Final words

It’s very important to consume content that provides value to you. I do not mean to say stop looking at memes. Memes can be a good way to bring a smile to your face. It always cheers me up even now! But I never make it so that it influences me in any way.

Hope you got some value from this article!

Subscribe to my mailing list here — https://bit.ly/atharvadeosthale-mail-list

You can also follow me on Instagram at atharvadeosthale or click here.

Atharva Deosthale