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Ask HN: Would you employ a developer who talks to himself during work?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you employ a developer who talks to himself during work?

#41

Post by niels_olson »

Depends. At the best, you're being paranoid. At the worst, he could be developing schizophrenia. Is he in his late teens or early twenties, does he sound agitated or paranoid? Is his thought process coherent? What is he talking about? A young, paranoid male talking gibberish to himself without regard for who's around would be concerning. If you want a great portrait of schizophrenia, watch "The Soloist": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0821642/

But if he's not acting like that, then maybe he's just helping you expand your definition of normal.

Re: Ask HN: Would you employ a developer who talks to himself during work?

#42

Post by zackattack »

jazzyb wrote: post #32
zackattack wrote: post #29

Talking to yourself is a symptom of stress. Because your working memory is too populated by stressors in order to keep the entire "conversation" inside your head, you externalize it. Think of it as paging out. The only inconvenience is that it can bother people. Well, maybe there are other inconveniences, too, but I'm not aware of any studies that suggest externalized verbal problem solving creates worse results than…

> Talking to yourself is a symptom of stress. Not always. I talk to myself all the time whether I'm happy, sad, stressed, relaxed, whatever. I just seem to solve problems better when I explain them to myself out loud -- see "rubber ducking": http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking

I agree that rubber ducking is a great technique. I also think that you can "have" both stress and the subjective affective state of happiness simultaneously.

Re: Ask HN: Would you employ a developer who talks to himself during work?

#44

Post by runjake »

tzs wrote: post #37

We had an employee once who essentially narrated himself. For instance, if he was installing the latest build of our software to test the installer, he might say something like this: I'm putting the floppy in the drive. I see it on the desktop. I'm double clicking it. I see the new installer. Now I'm opening RegEdit. I'm finding the keys for $OurProduct, and deleting them to test a fresh install. Now I'm double click…

Wow, that's hilarious. Any chance he was taking voice notes to a device?

Re: Ask HN: Would you employ a developer who talks to himself during work?

#46

Post by evilduck »

brandnewlow wrote: post #38
lee wrote: post #4

Is he doing some kind of rubber duck debugging? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging I don't talk to myself, but sometimes by simply talking aloud about my problems to my peers I can flesh out a solution to a hard problem. I have seen other programmers talk to themselves to find a solution when they're stuck, and it seems to work quite well.

What tends to happen with me is I'll hit a snag that I can't seem to figure out or debug myself. So I fire up gmail and write a note to one of the contractors who does odds and ends stuff for me. I describe the problem in decent detail and ask when he/she is available to fix it. Send. Then a few minutes later, the solution appears in my head, I go solve the problem myself, and send an apology note to my developer.

I do this too, but I've found that I don't usually need to hit send, I just save it as a draft then go take a walk. The answer usually comes to me when I come back, but if it doesn't I'll send it.

The act of explaining it in enough detail so another person could understand the problem usually increases my understanding of the problem.

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