Software Engineer: Professional Joke                                                                                                  SP    Time to Debug                                                                                               East Brunswick, New Jersey                                                                                                                                            October 28, 2020

Informant Data:

SP was born in Bharuch, India on December 6, 1978. He completed his undergraduate education in chemistry, with a concentration in organic chemistry. After deciding that he did not enjoy it too much, he decided to pursue a master’s degree in computer science. He moved to the States in 2008 a few years after his marriage, and he has been working in the computer science field ever since he moved here. Although he has been working in different companies, he has always remained in IT. He has two young children, a five-year-old daughter and a fourteen-year-old son. He has now been working at JP Morgan Chase & Co. as a software engineer for six years.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: JP Morgan Chase & Co. is a multinational investment bank that is headquartered in NYC. By total assets, it is considered the largest bank in the United States and the seventh largest bank in the world. It is also ranked as one of the best companies to work for. In the company, there is a hierarchy of different roles that you can have, including investment banking analyst, equity research associate, and software engineer, making it a very versatile company. SP’s branch, the software engineering branch, deals with the structural programming backbone of the company’s banking system. In other words, it is very nitty gritty and usually deals with just different codes and programming languages.

Social Context: This joke is a little simpler, and is used when a coworker is complaining about a problem at home, whether it be the kids, a spouse, mortgage, or anything else of that nature. The person is probably complaining to you about how nagging that problem is for them, and is just venting to you. The person who is listening to the problem would respond with this phrase as a way of sympathy for the person who feels trapped by the problem.

Item:

“Whoa, seems like that’s a pretty big bug that you’ll have to get rid of,” or “Whoa, that seems like something you’ll have to debug!”

Collector’s Notes: 

A bug is a problem or a blockage in a computer program that is preventing a code from compiling properly. It is also something that often irritates the programmer because until they get past that bug, they will not be able to continue the program, so before continuing, they will have to debug. Similarly, in life, the problems that exist at home (or anywhere, for that matter) must be “debugged” to continue moving on with a normal life.

Tags:

• Jokes
• Verbal folklore
• Verbal humor
• Computer science/IT

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020