Programming

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Programming and Humility (self.programming)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by sisyphean to c/programming

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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

As a programmer, I have tried to remain humble because I have been surrounded by smart people who think they’re above everyone else and are just too smart for the world to handle. In any hobby/job that requires being reasonably smart, there are always going to be those people that have god complexes because they’ve associated their value as a person with their ability to do x or y thing well. If they humble themselves then they’re left with nothing in their eyes. I’m sure this is just one demographic of people out of the larger dickhead programmer population. People are dicks for all sorts of reasons anyways. I’m sure everything everyone has said is true about someone.