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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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[–] catacomb@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

If I didn't have some level of delusion a few years in, continuing might have been very daunting. At some point I believed I was the best but, looking back, I was just starting to get competent at reading documentation and moved away from trial-and-error. It was healthy in that I remained enthusiastic but I think it may have held me back sometimes. I ignored good advice from a very experienced person many times.

Maybe there's some filter there where you kind of have to inflate your opinion of your own work to keep at it? It's better to balance it with some doubt, make sure your opinion is based in reality and continue to learn but, for those I've seen who don't really do that... at least they're still showing up. That's half of it.