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Programming and Humility (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sisyphean@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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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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[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] DekkerNSFW@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Man, that instantly reminded me of two people I know, one in webdesign and the other a professional programmer. It's a pain.

[–] mattreb@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.