Why are so many programmers arrogant?

Young people with a natural affinity for an in-demand skill often are. A hundred years ago you could have written this about pilots. 500 years about painters (apprentices to the great masters in the Renaissance were notorious for it).

As an aside, for every genuine Aspbergers case, there are 10 who simply think they have a god-given right to act like dicks. It's like dyslexics, you can always tell the real ones because they're quietly getting on with it, not making a huge attention-getting fuss.

They're not really arrogant, they just come off as such. Programmers usually are pretty clever cookies and as a rule are more often right than wrong, even if the subject is not programming, that alone is enough to mark them as arrogant. We also tend to be an opinionated bunch.

Some of them compound the problem by no longer considering other people to be occasionally right and them being wrong and do cross the line in to arrogance.

It's fine as long as people agree on things but as soon as one party starts to ignore the other when they disagree then you have trouble.

For an encore, check 'mathematicians are arrogant', 'physicists are arrogant', 'surgeons are arrogant' and so on.

Anybody that has a job that requires a ton of study and a lot of brain work will tend towards this, it's human, nothing specific about programmers.

That doesn't help you when you're faced with a nice sample of a prima-donna arrogant programmer though, they do happen, just no more than in other 'brainy' professions.

Is it really more severe in programming than the rest of society? Most of the programmers I've met have been quite nice, the only people I can recall meeting that I actually thought "I never want to meet them again!" have been a pair of young lawyers.

"The wild programmer (Scriptus exemplarus aspergerii) is generally a shy creature when in its natural habitat. While some deviant boisterous specimens do exist, they are the oddity rather than the rule.

He is content with spending his life staring at rectangular pieces of backlit canvas, and occasionally bashing on rectangular pieces of polished material. Come to think of it, most of his activities revolve around rectangles: the rectangular nutrient clumps he tends to favor eating, the rectangular primitive communication device he always carries around, the beige or black boxes he is so attached to, even organizing his workspace into cubes."

I was just chewing my favorite rectangle shaped cereal when I was reading this.

Depending on your interests and how much time you spend reading, learning and engaging you may end up being knowledgeable on a whole stack of subjects. When you interact with others without this same intensity your bound to come off arrogant.

For programmers many things are complementary, interests in Maths, Physics, Finance can easily stem from loving the numerical and mathematical aspects of programming. Effective programming also requires good communication skills and tends to require more formal written language to precisely explain more complex or abstract concepts that come with programming, this can lead to other interests to.