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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[–] qdozaq@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago

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.