Programming

17488 readers

106 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

122

Programming and Humility (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sisyphean to c/programming

50 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Part of it is also "engineer brain", where you see problems in terms of a rigid system of rules and forget that most problems in real life outside of engineering depend on rules and systems but also human beings. Unlike a structural member in a bridge or a piece of code, human beings are weird, proud, scared, emotional and smart enough to get out of following rules when they don't want to.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The dirty secret is that many problems inside of engineering are that way too. There's a million equally valid solutions to any given problem and the one that gets chosen is all human factors.

Like: Greenfield REST CRUD App. What language do you choose?

Sure, you can make a million technical arguments for any given language, but there's no real right choice. I'd choose Elixir because I like Phoenix/Ecto for that particular problem. I'm likely in the minority. The answer for most apps will be more borne of social politics than engineering.

[–] [email protected] 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.