What other things do you do as a programmer?

[ProComputerGaming]

I know you write code, but what else do you do? Do you do any graphic design? Do you do any video editing or photo editing? The reason im asking is because I want to be a programmer when I grow up, im only 14 now, and I am programming on a gaming pc I built. When i go to college I want to switch to Mac, or a little before college. Im only doing programming in Visual Basic 2012 at the moment, and I feel limited to things that look like solitaire. I know the other languages offer more creativity, at least I think they do. I want to learn C, and then C++, but not until im out of High School, because the programming classes here only us VB. Which sucks... but hey, you take what you can get 😛.

Thanks,
Programming Kid

 

[Zenthar]

In my own experience, it mostly depends on the size of the team/company you end-up with and the nature of the job itself. The bigger the team/company, the less chances you have of doing things "out of your job description" because chances are they have specialists to do that.

I would say the job of a typical programmer doesn't include much multimedia editing of any sort; the most I ever did was adapting icons (16x16 pixels) for some user interfaces. As a programmer you might have to the following:

• 
  ■Write user documentation (like manuals)
  ■Write SQL to query DB in the code and/or to modify DB between versions (sometimes done by DBA if a dedicated one is present)
  ■Help determine specification (with clients and/or internally with coworkers)
  ■Tests (write documentation, make unit test scripts and/or manually test applications)
  ■Support (help clients having issues ranging for "code 18" to legitimate bugs)
  ■User interface design/implementation (native or web) (might be more multimedia work in that branch than any other)