this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Programming

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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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[–] ndotb@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I found for myself that part of the journey in career advancement was looking at code, thinking "wow this really sucks! how could they be so stupid to do this!" and then realize that I wrote it a year or two prior.

Humbleness comes. I've since adopted it as a metric to determine if someone is really a senior or lead or level 60 paladin or whatever.