Inspired by @h3ll, this is a combination of current and former coworkers:

Awkward Wizard:
This guy has the social skills of a microwaved dog turd. He is a genius, but working with him is about as uncomfortable as sticking a grill skewer in your eye and twisting it repeatedly until close of business. He laughs at inappropriate times, and every time he does, an unborn child tears its own ears off. He explains things in a way that only himself and Satan understand, then talks to you like you're a child when you don't follow his logic. He is the guy you hide when the CEO is around. His code is immaculate.

Backstab McGillacutty:
This bowl of bile is the son of a bitch that takes credit for everybody else's work. When you do something good, he was miraculously involved, but when you mess up, this twat is the dicknose that brings it up in retrospective and calls you out by name to the boss. You can usually find these guys talking shit about the CTO, until the boss quits. Then they buddy up with the CTO and become a Joel Osteen-esque evangelist for everything the CTO wants in a shitty, underhanded attempt to climb the ladder. Fuck this guy.

Professor Fuckwaffle:
This coworker used to teach Computer Science classes. Their resume is amazing, and they can speak to the most complex of design principles. This is the shitstain that you hire because of their skill and knowledge only to find out that ol' fuckwaffle can't apply the shit they spout to save their wretched lives. You'll spend more time listening to fuckwaffle lecture than you will reviewing their code (because they cant fucking write any!) You know the saying, those who can, do, and those who can't, teach? Yeah, that shit was written for Fuckwaffle.

Last but not least:
Scrumdumb:
This guy isn't even a coder. This guy is worse than the the scum you pour out of the bottom of a slow-cooker that you forgot to wash last time you made chicken. He's a non-technical PM. You know the type, right? He usually says "cloud infrastructure," "paradigm," "algorithm," "SDLC," etc but has no grasp of any of them. He often opens his dumpster to spout off something like "You can just create a new class for that" while talking about HTML. I won't waste any more breath on Scrumdumb, he already creates enough work for me.

Me and a junior coder are working on a project. However, he likes to think he's funny and say "Ok google" to stop me from using my phone.

He said "Ok google, search midget porn" when I was calling my mom so naturally I need to get back at him, so when he's in the rec room, I backed up all his code on my flash drive, and copied it to the clipboard, and removed all project files from his computer.

He came back while I was in the bathroom, and when I reentered the room and was balling his eyes out, that his project was gone. I said to him, don't ok google me again and I handed him the flash drive back. He has never done anything bad again.

This is absolutely true !

How people see me:

Father: computer nerd (he's a coder too)
Mother: website maker and computer nerd
Brother#1: some computer wizard
Brother#2: noob web coder (he codes as well, but systems programming) - thanks bro!
Colleagues: The ALIEN™
Girlfriend: 404 not found
Friends: The NERD™
Dog: some hooman spending lots of time behind those lighty rectangles

Fyi, I am passionate about computers in all domains and always helped debugging people

My solution to not being overwhelmed with futile demands? Talking to them in complicated words, so they will only ask questions about true problems and not garbage :D

"Enigma machine kep private the communications done by Nazi. It was a really difficult code to break because it changed each day. There was a man in England, Alan Turing, who broke it. He's nowadays known as one of the fathers of the Computer Science. I will show in the next lessons how you can simulate Enigma coder just with an easy C program of 60-70 lines. In the WW2 this was considered a military-level safe code. Thanks to mathematicians, computer scientist and analyst and thanks to their work in the last 60 year, you have access to a systems of several orders of magnitude more efficient and secure when you buy a videogame online."
That really fucking inspired me.

Mom: Go outside a play.
Me: One I finish a couple more lines..
Mom: Get your #ss of the damn computer and go outside! BTW, I'm a 11 year old coder/programmer if you were wondering..

Wannabe college coder starter pack:
1) SUN Certified JAVA Programmer
2) W3Schools Certificate
3) I know all computer languages
4) I'm going to Join Google by the end of college.

So I'm sick. But my inner coder tells me that I could atleast do some basic design for my project.

So I go to sit down at my home computer and immediately feel my nose literally start dripping of snot as soon as I lean in to sit. So lile any normal man i take a tissue, wipe and blow my nose and it's now time to login on the computer.

*Wrong password*

Oh, I've must been to quick

*Try again*
*Wrong password*

Wtf?!

*Slowly type my password in*
*Wrong password*

*Fuck it, show password*

A space is missing.
Alright I'll just add it in then.

*Tap spacebar*
*Nothing*
*Tap harder*
*Nothing*

So I rip out the space bar and find a two little drops of snot that must have juuuust fallen between the cracks.
I tried to wipe it away and put the space bar back, but it's dead. :(

Thanks God,
I'm in computer science
And moreover a #coder

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

So I'm a junior in University for Computer Science and software engineering and while I'm a decent coder, I've noticed that I'm not as interested in the Coding aspect of it as others. I don't really think about doing projects of my own and tend to just focus on the schoolwork. I feel like I recognize patterns rather than fully understanding what's going on. I did extremely well in the Coding bootcamp I went to, better than most. But I'm worried that I'm not as into being an engineer as I think I should be. I love working with computers and the process of making something, but I'm always second guessing being an engineer.
Am I just worrying too much? Imposter syndrome?

In freshman year at college, 1992, I met a guy with a fancier computer than I had. The dude was awesome as a C coder and already had a job as one. He let me use it to play around with Persistence of Vision Raytracer which was an open source 3D scene generating language/platform. His computer was also what I used for accessing BBSes and IRC chat rooms for the first time. I was hooked from then on.

All I needed to do was temporarily change a 4 row by 5 column css-based <div> layout to a 2 row by 3 column css-based <div> layout. The layout is now right but links don’t work for no damned apparent reason. I really really really really really suck at my job as a coder and I just need to go live in a cave and never, ever touch a computer again.

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

Automate this!

I'm an aspiring coder working some chappy administrator job just to pay the bills for now. My boss found out that I may actually be more computer literate than I let on.

Boss: "I want you to make X happen automatically if I click here on this spreadsheet"

Me "X!? That means processing data from 4 different spreadsheets that aren't consistently named and scraping comparison info from the fronted of the Web cms we're using"

Boss: "if you say so.. Can you do it?"

Me: "maybe.. Can I install python?"

Boss: "No..."

Me: "what about node.js or ruby?"

Boss: "no.. I don't know what you're talking about but you're not installing anything, just get it done"

Me: "Errm Ok.."

So here I am now, way over my head loving the fact that I'm unofficially a Dev and coding my first something in Powershell and vb that will be used in business :)

Sucks that I still have to keep my regular work on target whilst doing this though!

Home grown coders or college grad coders?

For those of you that taught yourself too code, or those who studied in schools, which style has prepared you the most for the real world?

I've met so many self taught coders who can program circles around some of my colleagues, but does a computer science/programming degree ensure you success over those who may know more?

Thought it would be an interesting discussion for you lot, personally I'm a mix of both but primarily a undergrad coder.

Keep it clean :)

My father was working in IT, I once saw him writing a simple code in Basic. I was impressed that You can force a computer to do whatever You want it do do. When he got a Windows PC, I started coding in Pascal with him, and I really liked it. Needless to say, I'm a coder now :-D