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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[–] lasagna 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?

That is a behaviour I commonly see online. Working in scientific programming, my experience has been the opposite. The programmers I interact with aren't afraid to ask for help and will usually recognise their mistakes. Not once have I been mocked for my crappy code, not for a lack of opportunities.

As with any field, the less a person knows the more they boast to know.