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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[–] alertsleeper@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago

I think that the reason is precisely the difficulty. Someone is asking for help with something that (for others) is not that difficult. Some people think "ha, poor fool, I've solved this, they're dumb and shouldn't be programming", while others go ahead and actually help the person in good faith without being a dick.

TLDR: Some think programming is a competition and they must be the winners, others realize it's a community effort where we step on each other's shoulders to go higher.