this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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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] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean, it's a scientific job, you have to prove your arguments... with that said they should help you to do so, if you feel them as arrogant, they are bad at their job....and since programming is a complex job, there are a lot of not so good people

[–] sisyphean 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You're right, they also have to prove their counterarguments, and those who don't do it are often bad programmers. But I've also experienced the same with some actually brilliant people.