How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#41

Post by playing_colours » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 8:39 AM UTC

bowmessage wrote: post #2

What's it like to date / be married to another programmer? I've always wondered if this would help or hinder the relationship.

It's pretty OK for my wife and me. The pros are we can easily talk about work, questions and issues. It's nice, that we can go deep into details and we don't need to try to explain what we do like to a 10 y.o. person. We can share some practices. I am backend focused, and my wife is a frontend developer so we can learn something new from each other. We can both understand that we we sometimes to code at home.

Another pro is we don't have a big gap in salaries being more or less well paid (in Germany).

The drawbacks are that you are quite limited in scope, you don't learn something new outside of your programming domain. The mindsets are pretty similar: sometimes I think my wife is too logical, and we have a similar way of thinking after many years in the profession, which can be a bit boring.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#42

Post by dasboth » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 8:45 AM UTC

rjbwork wrote: post #36

>Our brains automatically group similar memories together in order to save space. As developers, years can feel like weeks if we don’t actively pursue different experiences. This hit me hard. Feels like the years have just slipped on by since I graduated university. Not particularly sure how to stop it though...maybe a few more years and I can just take a few months off and travel or something?

Try going analogue, find a hobby that doesn't involve a computer (music, cooking, hiking etc.). I find if I do even a small amount of a few different activities in a day, it feels a lot more full. A day spent coding, then going home to cook dinner and read a book always feel better than a day spent coding, then going home to browse the internet or even work on a coding side project (if I get around to those, they're restricted to the weekend).

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#43

Post by Jean-Philipe » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 8:50 AM UTC

> Call your grandma, friend, dad, girlfriend, anyone

A bit offtopic, but the author seems to assume you are a straight coder guy. This was probably not his intention though. Why not replace "girlfriend" by something more neutral, like "your better half"? Being inclusive doesn't cost much, really.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#44

Post by saiya-jin » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 8:54 AM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #33

ramblenode wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see this as an Ask HN.

By experience, the answer is quite easy: when both have the same occupation it gets boring very fast. It's much more enriching having the opportunity to learn about a different field than coming home and continue to listen about the same. Rationally I would never pick somebody from the same field as me.

yes and no... my fiancee is an internal doctor, and let me tell you, we have it damn easy behind the desks and computers. nothing really important at stake, no risk of killing somebody and ending up in jail because of some simple mistake under heavy stress, after 10 hours at work, say at 5 am.

seeing people dying and suffering will change you, especially the young ones. a lot of those stories is not something you actually want to listen to after hard day at work...

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#45

Post by toyg » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:03 AM UTC

rjbwork wrote: post #36

>Our brains automatically group similar memories together in order to save space. As developers, years can feel like weeks if we don’t actively pursue different experiences. This hit me hard. Feels like the years have just slipped on by since I graduated university. Not particularly sure how to stop it though...maybe a few more years and I can just take a few months off and travel or something?

> Feels like the years have just slipped on by since I graduated university.

If it can make you feel better, I don't think that's related to development as much as "getting a job and growing up". Most people feel the same, which is why the "school reunion" trope is a staple of modern cinematography.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#46

Post by toyg » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:09 AM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #33

ramblenode wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see this as an Ask HN.

By experience, the answer is quite easy: when both have the same occupation it gets boring very fast. It's much more enriching having the opportunity to learn about a different field than coming home and continue to listen about the same. Rationally I would never pick somebody from the same field as me.

> when both have the same occupation it gets boring very fast.

It gets boring even when your occupations are so alien to each other, that there's little you can share beyond bog-standard office gossip.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#47

Post by cel1ne » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:38 AM UTC

rjbwork wrote: post #36

>Our brains automatically group similar memories together in order to save space. As developers, years can feel like weeks if we don’t actively pursue different experiences. This hit me hard. Feels like the years have just slipped on by since I graduated university. Not particularly sure how to stop it though...maybe a few more years and I can just take a few months off and travel or something?

I do exhausting sports almost everyday (martial arts).

Two hours if sweating put your mind in a very different state.

Music is good as well. Anything that starts up other brain areas than "watching" and "reading".

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#48

Post by ubertaco » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:41 AM UTC

asadlionpk wrote: post #26

jdminhbg wrote: post #22

> Talk About Your Work I strongly disagree with this one, although I'm not sure if my reasoning is broadly or only personally applicable. The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day of work is recap what I did. Even in the best-case scenario of a day full of victories, it's just exhausting to try to relive all of them with the added burden of explaining the decade-plus knowledge base you'd need to understand…

I understand your frustration but I disagree. You should try explaining your work to a non-programmer. It's a challenge to 'dumb it down' and you only succeed if you truly understand your work. Sometimes the non-programmer is successful in suggesting a very possible solution which turns out to be a fun conversation.

Yeah, I find that when I take the "implementation details" out and explain the general problem, my fiancée both loves hearing about how my day went, and sometimes has good ideas how to solve it (and sometimes she doesn't, but the process of distilling the "essence" of the problem helps me to see the problem myself more clearly). By stripping out the technical details, I explained to someone who thinks that the monitor is the computer and the tower is the "CPU" what the Maybe monad is and why it's needed.

That being said, I also find that some problems are strictly-technical in nature, and can't really be distilled to anything informative (e.g. Ionic's livereload dev server randomly serves up an old build rather than the most recent build due to weird interactions with gulp watch). In those cases, sometimes it's okay to just say something like "our tools were being frustrating."

The goal, at least with my fiancée, is to make an effort to communicate with her how my day went, because on a deeper level what I'm communicating is that I want to share my life with her, and that we're a team.

There's a lot of implicit emotional elements to human communication, and sometimes to communicate one thing implicitly, you have to work really hard to communicate something seemingly-unrelated explicitly.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#49

Post by timwaagh » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:44 AM UTC

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #43

> Call your grandma, friend, dad, girlfriend, anyone A bit offtopic, but the author seems to assume you are a straight coder guy. This was probably not his intention though. Why not replace "girlfriend" by something more neutral, like "your better half"? Being inclusive doesn't cost much, really.

Wow

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#50

Post by danieltillett » Tue, Aug 09, 2016, 9:45 AM UTC

galfarragem wrote: post #33

ramblenode wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see this as an Ask HN.

By experience, the answer is quite easy: when both have the same occupation it gets boring very fast. It's much more enriching having the opportunity to learn about a different field than coming home and continue to listen about the same. Rationally I would never pick somebody from the same field as me.

Both my wife and I are scientists (neither of us are working as scientists) and I love this. It is fantastic to be able take a background knowledge base for granted.