This is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Programming is an activity that makes you face your own fallibility all the time. You write some code, compile it or run it, and then 80% of the time, it doesn’t work exactly the way you imagined. There’s an error message, or it just behaves incorrectly. Then you need to iterate on it and fix the issues until you get the desired result, and even then it’s subtly wrong, and causes an outage at 3am on Sunday.
I thought this experience would teach programmers to be the humblest people in the world.
I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?
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Because we all have Dissociative identity disorder with flexing between God Complex and Imposter Syndrome
Part of it is also “engineer brain”, where you see problems in terms of a rigid system of rules and forget that most problems in real life outside of engineering depend on rules and systems but also human beings. Unlike a structural member in a bridge or a piece of code, human beings are weird, proud, scared, emotional and smart enough to get out of following rules when they don’t want to.
I think one of the big problems in software dev is that the ‘code doesn’t care about your emotions’ is just an easy out to not put in the effort to work with other people. We seem to forget that although the nuts and bolts of our work is engineering, the only reason we write any code in the first place is to support human endeavors. Yes one line of code can be provably right or wrong, but absolutely everything else piled on top of that is understanding and emphasizing with other people. I wish more of us would take a step back from the line of code in front of us once in a while and just, you know, look around us.
My thought is this: we often have to deal with people who are absolutely certain about a thing, that’s… completely wrong. Disregarding the user’s thoughts to fix the user’s issue is quite common.
But that wouldn’t explain all of it, because anyone in customer service deals with the same stuff, and they usually aren’t that bad when they drop the customer service mask.
That may be part of it but I’ve also observed it among fellow programmers.
You give your opinion about something and your coworker has a smug, arrogant knee-jerk reaction based on some cargo-cult belief without actually thinking about the details of the problem. Then you need to walk them through why what you said is not what they meant step-by-step, and while it may be wrong it is still a valid opinion. If you succeed, they completely change and become cooperative, and you can have an actually useful discussion. But you have to be super patient, like when taming an irritated feral cat that wants to scratch you. If you’re good, the cat becomes cuddly and cute.
This works but I’m extremely tired of having to perform this dance with 60% of the new coders I meet.
I mean, it’s a scientific job, you have to prove your arguments… with that said they should help you to do so, if you feel them as arrogant, they are bad at their job…and since programming is a complex job, there are a lot of not so good people
You’re right, they also have to prove their counterarguments, and those who don’t do it are often bad programmers. But I’ve also experienced the same with some actually brilliant people.
Programming often makes you feel powerful and in control. Humans love that feeling and it’s intoxicating. But I think that feeling of power and control gets easily conflated with being right all the time. If we’re wrong then it’s like we have to admit we’re not in control anymore.
Source: my ass / own opinion
Why is that?
Programmers are humans and that’s the way humans behave. You’ll find plenty of ego everywhere, you just selected yourself into our profession and probably don’t meet too many people on a different professional path.
I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?
That is a behaviour I commonly see online. Working in scientific programming, my experience has been the opposite. The programmers I interact with aren’t afraid to ask for help and will usually recognise their mistakes. Not once have I been mocked for my crappy code, not for a lack of opportunities.
As with any field, the less a person knows the more they boast to know.
I’ve definitely run into this, which is so weird to me cause I think it makes you a worse programmer to think like that.
Highly recommend checking the blog posts on https://compassionatecoding.com/blog
So many programmers I feel lack empathy especially when it comes to working with other developers. Pure “logical thinking” is primarily for computers. Writing readable code, good docs, good communication I think really separate an average dev from an exceptional one given the same skill set. All of those require a certain amount of empathy to do well because it’s about understanding humans not just computers.
I feel it’s caused by two things:
- In industry, most people do more reading than writing, so you see a lot of other people’s mistakes and have to fix them rather than your own. You don’t make enough code to feel humbled.
- Out of industry, there’s often a vacuum. You code one way and make a thing and you’re proud of it. You never hear criticism, and you’re defensive of your abilities. This could be programmers who are new or just out of college or do it as a side to their main job. You don’t share code enough with people to learn better ways and be humbled. Good enough is enough to be proud of.
There’s an in between state that can open up the door to humility. Maybe a person who works at a company and thus deals with customers, non-programmers, and a team but still works on open source and in their free time build lots of side-projects and open sources them. You’re making enough code and putting it out there enough to really receive good criticism. Those people would be more likely to be humble I suppose
