What's the Schrödinger's cat equivalent in your profession/main activity?

Code is both great and terrible until it compiles.

As a bicyclist, I see that we have Schrödinger's Cyclist: Too poor to be able to afford a car like "normal" people, but also a rich elitist who can afford to commute by bike.

Also, Schrödinger's Bike Lanes: A conspiracy by car-hating politicians to punish drivers, but also an amenity that only rich elitists get in their neighborhoods.

For work I use a database written in COBOL. Reports are simultaneously running and frozen until I either get the report results or sufficient time has passed that I'm certain the system has crashed.

Employee salaries in HR; they are both correctly paid(employer perspective often), underpaid (employee perspective often), and overpaid (company and co-worker perspective). Depending on how and how often you open the box, any of these views can be accurate.

Well, I work as a bartender, and here in Finland it's strictly against the law to serve alcohol to, or even allow a "visibly intoxicated person" to enter the premises (a law which almost every bar breaks at some point, intentionally or no), and I think I've witnessed multiple times myself how a customer's level of intoxication reveals itself only after you have served a drink to them and they've payed for it. Could it be called a Schrödrinker's cat?

I guess the best one for me may be elite university students are “just smarter” than others until I have to read their term papers.

For some reason it’s always the non-native English speakers who write well.

Autonomous vehicles are at times both amazingly advanced and bedshittingly idiotic.

I've ridden ~25k miles in them for work, and I trust them more than 95% of the drivers on the road. But I've also experienced them acting in ways that are still quite far from the way humans would.

A person that has a lot of certs or a high title is both extremely smart or extremely unintelligent. You don’t know until you start talking with them about things more than surface level.

Projects will either be done next month or take at least a year to complete. Also, if you ask my team to calculate how long a project will take, and then ignore the estimate, the project will take infinite time because you are an insufferable moron.

"The Computer never makes a mistake" is true and also probably responsible for people believing LLM-hallucinations uncritically

In computer programm single threaded programs are pretty predictable (apart from human errors). As soon as you have multi threading that goes out the window. Modern CPUs in most devices you use have what's called a scheduler that schedules when to let different things actually use the CPU so you can actually do multiple things at once. It's a super important concept for what we want to do with devices. But because of that you have no guarantee about when (or if) other threads of your own code will execute. Apart from truly insane edge cases, single threaded programs act pretty deterministically. Multi threaded ones do not. It's very similar to the "it's alive and dead until you check" idea because you just don't know. So much so that there are data types we use called things like Maybe where the result is either a success or a failure and you write code for both.

Also much like the cat in a box thing, programmers don't really view it as magic, it's just sort of a side effect of the uncertainty.

Print jobs are both completed successfully and failed until someone checks the queue.

As an animator, the client simultaneously knows everything about what makes a good animation, colour theory etc. and is utterly incapable of doing it themselves or providing any specific feedback beyond "I don't like this" or "make it feel more pink but don't actually make it pink."

This state persists until you introduce an invoice for all the extra work it'll take to redo all the stuff they agreed to two weeks ago, and then the waveform collapses and suddenly everything you sent them in the first place is fine.

I'm not sure I understand the question

If you're looking for a "something is two opposites at once until met" then that's anywhere any unsureness exists. Lesson plans are decent and lacking until taught to students. Visual art is pretty and dismal until witnessed by another beholder. Speeches are rousing and dogshit til spoken at the mic.

If you're looking for a "something that's explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)" then that's like a subset of all misconceptions.

• Monads in programming. Lots of people say they "get it" after a simplified explanation, but actually don't get it (judging by blog posts that recite a simplified explanation, but actually don't get it).
• Tariffs. Lots of people learn middle school mercantilism (zero sum wealth) then guess that the economy is still import export balance, and that if we make people exporting to us more expensive then we get more of the zero sum pie. (Obviously wrong, and a basic macroeconomic lesson on consumer welfare in a system with a world price is useful)
• A lot of physics terms tbh. "I get momentum, that's when it's hard to stop when you're fast." Often they mean something closer to inertia. "I get the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It's when seeing something changes it!" It's closer to uncertainty in the measurement of tiny things because of the physical implication of what we measure it using. (e.g. by reading a photon off of something, we know we're kinda inaccurate cuz the photon was discharged)

Not quite Schrödinger's cat, but in programming we have Heisenbugs named after Schrödinger's peer.

It's when you have a bug/crash that is not reproducible when debugging it. Might be that you're reading some memory that you're not supposed to, and the debugger just sets it up differently. Maybe you have a race condition that just never happens with the debugger attached.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and... Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there's usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay "must" is a strong word) be obeyed.

Software both works perfectly (on the developers machine and most deployed instances) and fails dramatically (on some significant subset of deployed instances).

This makes the software both a success (since it works, and can generate revenue) and a failure (since it is unreliable, and may alienate paying customers).

The contrast is either too little or too much and I won't know unless I look at the drawing again the next morning

The Heisenbug. Once you try to observe this kind of software bug with your technical means, it simply goes away.

The drill bit is good, until you get it to surface.

Schrödinger's fatigue crack. With old enough steel, you don't know if there is a crack propagating until you see it.

The container can both stand directly in front of me, and the system can still claim that it's waiting for loading in Malaysia.

Relevant SMBCs https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

And

Until I actually show up to the EVGo charging station, it’s both online and offline. The only way to know for sure whether there’s a working charger is to drive there and plug my car in.

It could be something not working or maybe the operator doesn't know you have to push the big green button that says "START" to start the machine. I'm a mechanic at a food processing plant.

I'm lifeguard, all my day is like that

You see, as a nuclear physicist...

Schrodinger's Cat

Kids are pedophiles.

Another good example is reading book reviews then reading the actual monograph. Sometimes there’s just nothing there