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Programmers’ emotions

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81–90 of 143 posts

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#81

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

shynrou wrote: post #31
mberning wrote: post #14

I think a highly conscientious developer might feel all these emotions. However, I am sure we have all worked with the developer that is absolutely shameless.

Shame is not really constructive though, if you know what you are capable off, accept that you will always have to learn more and do your best each day. There is no need for shame. Even if your PR comes back with 20 issue even though you didn't see any.

I don't think that's what shameless means in this context.

Shameless means being as unconscientious about all work as possible in a consciously cynical way.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#82

Post by rockmeamedee »

The number one thing that got me to senior engineer, and will get me to staff as I improve (though staff has more of a relationship management component) is emotional management.

Staying in a long debugging session without ragequitting and getting to the fix.

Pushing through when I feel really dumb for not knowing how a react hook works or how to test a particular feature.

Not getting bored (or recognising it and pushing through) when fixing a bug that is "trivial" but complicated.

Not getting angry when the codebase is not architected well or is hard to understand.

In every one of these situations, better emotional management has made me more productive, calmer, and I had a better outlook of the situation in the end, so my suggestions to external stakeholders about what to do next were more accurate.

And I'm still learning! I get bored and take 3x too long all the time.

This is maybe an exaggeration, but after you learn about for loops and functions, the rest of the job is emotional management.

Ok, maybe EQ becomes important a little bit after for loops, but way earlier than you think. Maybe after 1 year of experience.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#83

Post by NateEag »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #29

What 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. Regardl…

I think programming appeals to people who don't natively do a lot of emotional display or read emotions well.

Emotional responses and awareness have very little relevance for the acts of writing and testing instructions for computers. Machines don't know or care how you feel.

Thus, people to whom those things seem less relevant often drift towards software development, IMO.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#84

Post by agent327 »

Attummm wrote: post #78

Looking at the comments, Having emotions is normal, but at work we should try stay professional. In the article there is a reference to his own bugs and during code review what he called a nitpick. I found that a bit immature, should we wait until its a bug in production? I think the industrie would benefit if we all abide by egoless programming. https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ten-commandments-of-egoles...

Are you saying everything brought up during a code review is relevant, i.e. that nitpicks just don't exist at all? Because I feel that's a rather extremist point of view.

Note that a bug isn't a nitpick. A nitpick would be something like "that variable name is a bit long" - it may be, but is it really relevant in a business sense? Should either reviewer or programmer be spending time on something like this? Should it hold up an important commit?

Protesting that isn't 'immature', it indicates he understands there is a trade-off between differing priorities. It's something that is surprisingly uncommon among programmers, unfortunately.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#85

Post by parf02 »

Really enjoyed this piece. Many of my developper colleagues like to boast that emotions have no place in our field. However this is going against human nature and is in my opinion futile.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#86

Post by NateEag »

n8cpdx wrote: post #79
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #29

What 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. Regardl…

I don’t fully understand, but I have the same issue. I’ll have a full day of coding work and I’ll have the full range of emotions - joy when t worked, fury when the underlying UI framework is lower quality than my expectations for my work output and I spend days or hours making awful workarounds. Cough cough UWP. Cough cough Xamarin.Forms. And then I try to go out for drinks after and it’s like I’m an actual robot. T…

None of this is well-researched or strongly evidenced, but a few things that have helped me with similar problems:

* Reading Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg. I have very low native empathy, and the techniques in that book have helped me learn to understand and interact better with more emotionally-responsive people. It also helped me learn to recognize my own emotions better.

* Therapy. Finding a good therapist is hard and they are definitely not all good, but it can help a lot when you do.

* 2.5 grams of daily fish oil seems to have actually increased my emotional response significantly. Totally anecdotal, and not why I started taking it, but after about a month of that dosage I started to notice a difference. There's some evidence I may be on the autism spectrum (high-functioning, once known as Asperger's), so this could relate to that.

* Consciously taking breaks throughout the workday to pause, stretch, and think about what emotions I'm feeling and why.

I hope some of that helps you.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#87

Post by Findecanor »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #42
csours wrote: post #6

I've been thinking about this A LOT over the last year. Knowledge work is Emotional work. Software developers make software for PEOPLE. Making things for people requires empathy to be successful or else a whole lot of luck. Having empathy means putting myself out there. It means asking questions that sound ignorant. It means going from feeling like I had a great idea to seeing all the flaws and shortcomings of that i…

Regarding your last sentence, I think technical jobs, and especially people who write code as part of their job, are forced to develop a special kind of humility. Engineers, scientists, technicians, deal with the law of physics everyday. As a developer particularly you get immediate feedback dozens if not hundred of times a day. You can't bullshit your way out of a bug. The computer is cold, rational and executes the…

Sure, you can bullshit your way out of a bug. It is called making a "kludge", also known as "technical debt".

It happens all the time... unfortunately.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#88

Post by cushychicken »

rocqua wrote: post #80
cushychicken wrote: post #18

The sooner you realize that everyone on God's green earth is acting from an emotional place, the sooner that human interactions make sense. How something makes people feel - or how they think doing something will make them feel - dictates the vast majority of human behavior.

I think it is also illumiating, if somewhat obvious, that people tend to have well thought out reasons for doing something. So if you see someone doing something obviously stupid, you are probably not seeing the whole picture. It is extremely worth it to try figuring out why they do that. And in figuring that out it is important not to dismiss the other person's ideas out of hand.

people tend to have well thought out reasons for doing something. So if you see someone doing something obviously stupid, you are probably not seeing the whole picture

I used to think this, until I read more about advertising and how it's designed to trigger an emotional response. More and more, I think it's really emotions that motivate most behavior. There are many people, when asked "Why did you make that decision?", will respond with some variant of "I don't know, I just felt like it."

It implies to me that most people don't really know what they feel, or why they feel that way. The corrolary to that, which I find fascinating (and a bit sad), is that it means most people really have no understanding of why they do what they do. This as true of actions as trivial as picking a brand of gum or selecting a parking spot, to choices as monumental as deciding to get married or have children.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#89

Post by lfowles »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #29

What 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. Regardl…

Personally I was overly expressive as a kid and it irked me that people could so plainly read me, so over time I learned to tone down my outward emotions. Might have gone a little too far on that. Whoops.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#90

Post by Jensson »

dasil003 wrote: post #67
Jensson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people say you need soft skills to succeed they mean you need to have empathy for your manager and make your manager happy, nobody cares about the user. You see software riddled with bugs everywhere etc that would get fixed easily if anyone related to that project actually cared, but hey if the manager doesn't notice the problem then the problem doesn't exist so better not bring it up! What you'll find is that m…

I hear you, but you're conflating two things and drawing an overly reductive conclusion: > if you want to climb the corporate hierarchy it doesn't matter you just need empathy for your boss, so you will get nothing for getting upset when your manager and your peers sacrifice user experience for no reason. The second half of this sentence is true for any concern not just UX: if you get emotional about your manager and…

Right, if your manager cares deeply about UX you should too. That doesn't refute anything I said, it is still the manager that is important.
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