I’m doing it. I’m taking the plunge and moving over from Visual Basic 6 to .NET. Visual Studio 2013 tells me I need to.

If sounds like gobbledygook to you, ask your IT team what I’m talking about.I’m roughly 20 hours into learning this new programming language and feel that I’m yet to even scratch the surface.

We’ve worked with a handful of IT development teams over the last 14 years, and while there have always been an abundance of positives, there have often also been late deliveries, faults in the coding and some lacklustre design work.

As a client, it gets on your nerves but I know first-hand how difficult developers have it. I feel their pain and hope that after reading this post, you will as well.

We don’t realise half the work they’re doing

“Why doesn’t this work?”

“What do you mean you can’t run this script?”

We probably ask our developers more questions than any other provider since the average person rarely understands half of what precisely it is they’re doing, or how they’re doing it.

Making the transition to the VB.NET programming language has opened my eyes into the tedious additional code developers deal with. I thought I understood what they were dealing with, but these new discoveries have been a real wake up call.

They work in a jungle of languages

At Today Translations, we handle more than 200 different languages. IT geeks seem to handle at least as many.

Most of us will have come across a handful of programming languages just from everyday, generally mundane, computer usage. We will have come across JavaScript, for example, and perhaps even Python and PHP.

But what about Eiffel, Cobra and Fantom? Or COBOL, Common Lisp and OCaml?

Confused? Ask your developer and they may be able to tell you what they’re for and why they even need to exist.

They work in an ever-changing environment

And deal with changes dictated to them by behemoths of industry – the Microsofts and Googles, etc.

I was perfectly content with the database I developed for my business. It performed perfectly, did everything I asked of it and the code made sense.

Now, for it to run in Visual Studio 2013 (and I suspect future versions of Windows) I need to convert and re-programme a good chunk of it. I’m frightened to think how long this may take me, and fear that time may also be of the essence.

This is just one programme (which is still working just fine) and it’s already taken up so many hours of my time, as well as keep me up at night.

So, spare a thought for the developers who need to deal with dozens of faulty programmes at a time, while handling the pressure clients are putting on them. Instead of losing our patience, let us appreciate the incredibly demanding and technical work they put in to help their client’s boost proficiency and business.

Technology is driving us as a society forward, and it’s thanks to the hard work and innovation of developers.