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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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[–] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel it's caused by two things:

In industry, most people do more reading than writing, so you see a lot of other people's mistakes and have to fix them rather than your own. You don't make enough code to feel humbled.
Out of industry, there's often a vacuum. You code one way and make a thing and you're proud of it. You never hear criticism, and you're defensive of your abilities. This could be programmers who are new or just out of college or do it as a side to their main job. You don't share code enough with people to learn better ways and be humbled. Good enough is enough to be proud of.

There's an in between state that can open up the door to humility. Maybe a person who works at a company and thus deals with customers, non-programmers, and a team but still works on open source and in their free time build lots of side-projects and open sources them. You're making enough code and putting it out there enough to really receive good criticism. Those people would be more likely to be humble I suppose