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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[–] HiDefMusic 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Programming often makes you feel powerful and in control. Humans love that feeling and it’s intoxicating. But I think that feeling of power and control gets easily conflated with being right all the time. If we’re wrong then it’s like we have to admit we’re not in control anymore.

Source: my ass / own opinion

[–] sotolf@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

You got an upvote from me for the source attribution :D