> Q: How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb?
> A: I'm sorry, that's a hardware issue.

>> I jist don't git it! First of all, it may be the jargon...

It's about blame, and shifting it away from oneself as deftly and
decisively as possible.

It goes like this. You write some software. It runs superbly on the
machine you wrote it on. If ever a glitch should occur you just dive
into the trace files, or run the debugger, or restart the
thingummy-doodadulator module, fix whatever trivial hiccough it was
that temporarily interrupted the living marvel that is your fabulous
digital masterpiece, and carry on blithely as if nothing has happened.
Oh joy, oh happy innocent days.

Then the dreadful moment comes when your marvellous creation has to be
deployed into a production environment. Meaning, in the first
instance, that it has to run on someone else's computer. Possibly a
lot of other someones' computers, all with their own peculiar
configurations...

All the time you were developing, you were running with full
administrator privileges over your own machine (developers are *way*
important, nothing less than Total God powers will do). A bunch of
stuff breaks straight away, because your software will only work if
the user has Total God powers too, and it's the job of any system
administrator worth his salt to disempower users to the greatest
degree commensurate with their actually getting any work done (and
ideally even more than that - the wisest policy really is just to take
their computers away from them and make them work with abacuses and
scraps of paper. Sitting in a circle. On a dirt floor. Keeps the
blighters off the internet, at least).

So you fix the issues to do with system privileges, having failed to
persuade the sysadmin that its absolutely essential that all users of
*your* hyper-important and mega-business-critical application be given
the rights to erase all the data on the shared network drive, change
their Windows wallpaper to images of Jade Goody morphing into a pig,
download arbitrary spyware from Russian porn sites and change the
managing director's password to 1m4W4nK3r. Great, now the users can
use your software. Great: now the users can break your software.
Testing? We were supposed to allow time for testing?

Now it's time for all the little hiccoughs you used to smoothe over
without thinking about it to happen to your users. Who, mirabile
dictu, do not have Visual EasyDev Grand Poobah Edition installed on
their desktops, and consequently would not be able to run a debugger
even if they knew what one was (I discount the users who *do* know
what a debugger is, the sarky know-it-all bastards...). When a
hiccough happens to them, they don't get magically transported into
some special hiccough-fixing mode, complete with breakpoints and stack
traces and CCTV footage of rogue variables making their getaway. No.
Their computer crashes. And it's your fault.

Dealt with the hiccoughs? Delivered sufficiently withering put-downs
to the sarky know-it-all bastards who said things like "well, I'm no
expert obviously, but it looks like you've failed to handle that
exception from the asynchronous worker thread, which has consequently
been left in an inconsistant state leading to nondeterministic
behaviour probably caused by a race condition in the out-of-process
RPC marshalling code"? Congratulate yourself on your fine
troubleshooting skills. Truly you are a credit to your profession.
Unfortunately there are a few issues remaining...

One is the user who emits electromagnetic radiation that causes any
computer within a ten-metre radius of them to exhibit erroneous
behaviour so weird and undocumented that even Google hasn't heard of
it. Fortunately for you, their colleagues have long since identified
them as a freak of nature, and will be supplying them with an abacus
and a patch of dirt floor to sit on some time in the immediate future.
More worrying, however, are the users sat at the bank of PCs in the
corner of floor 3, who have only 64 megabytes of RAM on their pitiful
and ancient machines, and who complain that your software rapidly
consumes all available system resources and then hangs, interminably,
while they twiddle their thumbs and arrange to call their customers
back at a more convenient time, like when they have an abacus handy.

Frankly, it's an insult to your craft and your integrity as a l33t
h4xx0r that your software should be expected to function at all on
such dilapidated hardware, and it is through gritted teeth that you
recommend they all upgrade to a level of computational capacity more
appropriate to the demands of modern business applications. Memory
management? That's not your problem - the programming language you use
has nondeterministic garbage collection, ferchrissakes, it's so
incredibly efficient even you have absolutely no bloody idea how it
works - and anyway, what are a few little memory trickles between
friends (hugs super-high-spec developer workstation with fierce pride
tinged with erotic longing)? Nope, that's a *hardware* problem, and
quite out of your domain of professional concern. Better get tech
support to take that nasty little grey box away and replace it with
something more stylish...

regards,
Dominic