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How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

smo.nu

91–100 of 147 posts

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#91
post #87
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Try going analogue, find a hobby that doesn't involve a computer (music, cooking, hiking etc.) I would suggest to find a hobby that involves other people.

Or rephrased, you're doing it wrong if those three normally group activity examples don't involve other people and you're an extrovert looking for relationships.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#92
post #85

I don't think I really get how to have relationships. It seems a lot of developers fail bad at relationships. I see beauty in math and algorithms. I'm sick of people, who just see such things only in dollar terms. However, I think there is a greater cultural attack on technological professionals. I feel like we are devalued as some sort of machine that cranks out code. Many play into this as well. I don't think it is…

I see beauty in math and algorithms. I'm sick of people, who just see such things only in dollar terms.

Try seeking out people who also see beauty in maths and algorithms and you might have a better experience. Finding people who have similar values to you goes a long way in having good relationships (as long as you don't entirely limit yourself to like-minded people).

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#93
post #87
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Try going analogue, find a hobby that doesn't involve a computer (music, cooking, hiking etc.) I would suggest to find a hobby that involves other people.

Unless, of course, you don't particularly like having to be around other people.

Hiking by yourself is glorious.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#94
post #85

I don't think I really get how to have relationships. It seems a lot of developers fail bad at relationships. I see beauty in math and algorithms. I'm sick of people, who just see such things only in dollar terms. However, I think there is a greater cultural attack on technological professionals. I feel like we are devalued as some sort of machine that cranks out code. Many play into this as well. I don't think it is…

> I'm sick of people, who just see such things only in dollar terms.

This statement is more accurate if you remove the comma. What you wrote makes a blanket claim about all people (which is highly unlikely to be true for even a majority). Without the comma, it's a useful heuristic for what kinds of people you should avoid so that you can have a more fulfilling circle of friends.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#95

Personally, I don't think that having healthy relationships as a developer is much different than having healthy relationships as anyone else. As with any other technical job, it can be hard to explain exactly what your job is, but a bit of humor and an ELI5-style explanation goes a long way. One thing specific to programmers is the ability to whip up a little program to help people. Someone spends an hour every day…

Author here, I agree to an extent. As I said in the "Spend Time With Them" section, a lot of developers also program as their hobby. In fact, you pretty much have to program in your free time in order to keep up with all the new paradigms and frameworks.

Jobs that have been around a lot longer, like construction or accounting, allow you to just leave your work when you go home.

In that way I think developers face a unique challenge. We all know how prevalent burn out is in the industry, it's tough making sure relationships don't burn out as well.

Thanks for the feedback!

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#96
post #85

I don't think I really get how to have relationships. It seems a lot of developers fail bad at relationships. I see beauty in math and algorithms. I'm sick of people, who just see such things only in dollar terms. However, I think there is a greater cultural attack on technological professionals. I feel like we are devalued as some sort of machine that cranks out code. Many play into this as well. I don't think it is…

There is some evidence that developers are better at relationships. When it comes to marriage they have a relatively low divorce rate of around 10%. It can be partly confirmation bias that the worse relationship outcomes are most obvious to us.

There is nothing wrong with seeing beauty in math and algorithms, because it's certainly there. But taken too far, it can become self-validating by judging other people as lacking value, and refusing to see beauty in other people with different interests.

This might be part of what you view as an attack on technological professionals, where we're stereotyped as people with only an interest in computers/math and have no interest in actual people.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#97

> 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.

Yeah he also assumes that you have a dad, what about if you have 2 moms! Also, he assumes that your grandma is still alive!

And BTW, "girlfriend" could apply to gay coder chick.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#98

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 both a blessing and a curse. As a bisexual man in a relationship with another male software developer the way I understand my partner is something that trumps my wildest dreams. On the other hand, it's very easy to let software development get the upper hand in the relationship, especially when your day consists of waking up, going to work together, literally working back to back at the same startup for 9 to 14 hours, and then going home to sleep. I do feel knowing what my partner does all day makes me connect to him better on an emotional level as well, which is a really nice bonus.

I'd say in general it helps the relationship, but it does not come without pitfalls.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that my wife appreciates hearing some about how my day went. I don't go into any really deep detail, but talking about how hard a problem was and how good it feel to solve it, or venting about something stupid that a coworker did are things I've come to enjoy. The technical details and why it was hard to solve aren't the parts that matter.

> I know that my wife appreciates hearing some about how my day went. I believe that. My girlfriend really pushes me occasionally about my day, and I think it's because she knows that talking about her day really helps her. I'm happy to listen for her, but I've just come to the conclusion that trying to recap things I've done makes me more stressed out, and the fifteen seconds of "no, I really don't want to talk abou…

"trying to recap things I've done makes me more stressed out"

Its about the same in low pressure full time work.

So to my annoyance at work my happy sea of happy freebsd has gained two unavoidable ubuntu, and ansible worked on them precisely once after initial install and then never again. Incredibly frustrating. Obviously must be a problem with our standard sshd config although ssh into the boxes works fine... Turns out ansible does NOT just use ssh, but speaks sftp which is a subtle difference in protocol and is handled completely differently inside openssh and I never use sftp other, apparently, than every time I ansible-playbook something (all scp here for generic file transfer) so I never noticed it. To make a long story short sftp is implemented in a loadable subsystem module located in /usr/libexec/sftp-server which is specified by FULL PATH in sshd_config on a unix-like OS but on Ubuntu its in /usr/lib/sftp-server. Thanks Ubuntu, wish you were a unix! Also if sshd tries to access its sftp loadable module and fails because of wrong path in sshd_config, there is no error logged to any file and running the client in verbose mode tells you nothing other than connection dropped, almost like a firewall dumped a RST packet on us. There is no way to indicate the problem, the only symptom even if you run the client -vvvv option is the connection just drops, nothing in syslog on the server side, nothing auth.log, nothing. Once the problem was found all I need to do is have ansible provide /etc/ssh/sshd_config with slightly different OS specific paths based on specific OS which is a good 30 seconds of work. So no small amount of my work time is pounding head on desk swearing and annoyed until I isolate the problem and then the fix takes about 10 seconds. Actually given that I'm pretty good at this stuff and highly experienced and I know the business problem domain very well and I know my toolset, the easy stuff is all automated or avoided or well known and all I do all day is pound head on table for hours until truly obscure problem is isolated, then implement fix in about a minute, repeat. Figuring out the correct solution is about 99% of my day and endless judgment calls takes a lot out of a brain.

After that end of workday I had no interest in talking about SSH or ansible or any of that, in fact it took near 24 hours to cool off from that one and write this post, went home, ate an awesome homecooked meal, took whole family to hiking trail and tried to catch pokemon, generally hung out and had a good time and enjoyed the nice park and nice weather. My wife used to program PBXes and did something with ACD call routing on an old fashioned physical PBX (don't remember the language, its all obsolete now replaced by VOIP and doesn't matter) but even back when we had similar-ish jobs I think we both just need time to chill out away from work. If work is stress, I don't need constant stress or constant work, no interest in talking about work outside of work.

Re: How to Have Healthy Relationships as a Developer

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like Feynman said in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM , when trying to explain how magnate works to the reporter. I think it's hard for someone else to actually understand the problem when you two are not in the same knowledge framework. Cause then she/he will be perpetually asking the why and how question and being not satisfied. edited.

Nevertheless Feynman made many successful lectures to the public and undergraduate students and was able to explain things as complex as quantum electrodynamics in layman terms. Recently I tried explaining how Akka clusters work and what partitions are to a completely non-technical colleague. Not only was I able to explain the parts I understand well in a way that she understood, I also quickly found out there are parts that I don't understand at all.
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