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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[–] loklan@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

"we should use X, it's obviously the best"
"but nobody here knows how to use X except you"

At which point the terminally engineer-brained will short circuit and throw a tantrum, because they are used to information just flowing from one data structure to another with the right tweaking, but human brains and education don't work that way.