Narcissism
Programmers’ emotions
21–30 of 143 posts
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#22I don't know if confusion should be considered an emotion. Depending on the situation you can be confused and feel fear, or you can be confused and be excited. Same applies to "silliness" and "hesitation".
I agree with you that my categorization is questionable, and subjective. The comments here make it clear to me that different people process things differently, and even give different names to similar feelings.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#23> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can.
Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others.
Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not justified. But that's true of any emotion. Even positive emotions can make you reckless and take too much unwarranted risk.
One might argue that for a programmer those statements are more accurate, but I'm not so sure. Blow some deadlines because of too little anxiety and too many positive emotions and you'll take a hit for sure.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#24> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can. Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others. Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not jus…
On a societal and evolutionary level they're necessary feelings, on an individual level they're just burdensome. You can reason your way to the same results.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#25> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can. Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others. Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not jus…
I edited this sentence to make it clear that I mean only it in the programming context.
I believe that we could use positive or neutral emotions instead of negative ones, at least in most cases. Curiousness instead of inadequacy as the drive for learning; humbleness instead of shame; desire to make something great on time instead of anxiety.
Of course, the more difficult question is how to do that.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#26> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can. Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others. Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not jus…
I watched a Robert Sapolsky lecture which made a lot of sense on this topic. His point was that our psychological reactions to things evolved because they were useful to our ancestors, but not necessarily because they are useful to us.
The classic example would be the stress response. It's perfectly useful to go into a flight-or-fight mode if you need your body to be ready to escape an imminent threat like a lion you spot in the long grass 100m away. But when you have the same physiological reaction for weeks at a time due to a looming work deadline, this is not something our minds and bodies evolved to tolerate.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#27I just completed a work package that was bugging me for a while causing a lot of frustration.
There is a lot of happiness in getting stuff done.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#28> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can. Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others. Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not jus…
I edited this sentence to make it clear that I mean only it in the programming context. I believe that we could use positive or neutral emotions instead of negative ones, at least in most cases. Curiousness instead of inadequacy as the drive for learning; humbleness instead of shame; desire to make something great on time instead of anxiety. Of course, the more difficult question is how to do that.
Your personality largely determines your emotions and you can't generate them at will.
"Twin studies and other research have shown that about half of the variation between individuals results from their genetic inheritance and half from their environment. Researchers have found conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, and neuroticism to be relatively stable from middle age through old age" [1]
What if you don't feel any curiousness? Or you feel it for something that is counterproductive at the moment?
What if your desire of making something great clashes with your boss order to make some more boring CRUD software because that's what the client wants?
In these cases, anxiety and inadequacy could be the very emotions that recenter you on what you should to do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#29What is it about programmers that makes them (in general) not expressive, effusive, gregarious, ...
I have a deadpan face most of the time, people complain about not being able to read me. When I was younger, I rationalized that I don't want emotions to cloud the logic of a conversation. But I ultimately realized that I was deadpan all the time, whether in work/reasoning discussions or personal interractions. Regardless, my lack of reaction frequently confuses others and gets me into trouble.
Re: Programmers’ emotions
#30> Anxiety, inadequacy, and shame are just not helpful. It is good to reduce them if we can. Uhm, not really. All emotions have evolved because they are useful. The ones listed here could keep you from doing something stupid, dangerous, or potentially deadly. They are also likely to make you notice something wrong earlier than others. Are those emotions not helpful in some cases? Absolutely. Sometimes they are not jus…
On a societal and evolutionary level they're necessary feelings, on an individual level they're just burdensome. You can reason your way to the same results.
Can you? A lot of psychological literature shows that we are far from being masters of ourselves.
Depresses people cannot reason themselves to any result at all. Addicted people cannot reason themselves out of addiction. You can fix many things with therapy, but that's far from just "reasoning" and takes a lot of time and work.
Emotions come from a much older part of your brain than the one for your reasoning skills, and thus have a far stronger pull on your actions. That's not to say we are completely at the mercy of our emotions. But controlling them is a matter of practice and reinforcement, not pure logic.