Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programmers’ emotions

blog.sidebits.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 143 posts

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#91

Post by throwaway2331 »

open-source-ux wrote: post #55
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…

Lack of empathy abounds among programmers writing user-facing software. I am increasingly convinced lack of empathy is over-represented among developers. It's a controversial thought, and feel free to shoot it down. But why the lack of empathy? Is it because developers are more comfortable with computers than with people? This is a common stereotype about programmers. Perhaps it has more than a hint of truth to it? E…

I don't think it's that programmers are, on average, less empathetic than "non-programmers/techies/whater."

In my experience, it's always been that people who are technically-minded, usually don't have the soft skills to make it look like they care -- without really getting emotionally involved at all.

Most people are just trying to go about their day and deal with their problems as they come up. Whether they be financial, emotional, inter-rational, mental, or what have you; everyone is primarily focused on themselves.

Most people will feign empathy and side-step such things with some tact, because their livelihoods and current level of comfort relies on other people liking (or atleast tolerating) them. Whereas programmers have a little bit more insulation -- a moat if you will -- for being tactless jackasses, because other people will still tolerate them (for the moment), so long as they ship that code and stay in their caves, away from real people.

The same is true about many BB IBankers: what's the point in being a decent human being? You're getting paid fat stacks to brown-nose. The best, most soul-less brown-nosers get rewarded by making MD/VP. Whether or not you have empathy is irrelevant to your compensation, i.e. your comfort and livelihood, i.e. your goals.

t. someone who used to be a virulent jackass thinking meritocracy was the be-all, end-all

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#92

Post by sethammons »

amelius wrote: post #5

Addiction. From the endless edit-compile-test cycles. Dopamine circuits go completely berserk.

I recently changed over to management after being a principal engineer. I miss my regular dopamine hits. Now feedback can take weeks, months, or longer. It is a change for sure.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#93

Post by dasil003 »

Jensson wrote: post #90
dasil003 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My goal was not to refute you, it was to offer a broader perspective based on decades of experience caring about the same things you seem to care about.

The words I used were "overly reductive". Yes, what your manager thinks is important, but so is the broader company culture and what you believe to be right. If the entire company doesn't value something and you do then you're fighting a losing battle and you should get out before your internal motivation is replaced by cynical survivalism. On the other hand, if the company does but your boss doesn't, then the trick is to keep your boss happy and work on the stuff that matters to you with the people that do care.

Keep in mind that managers come and go, if you subvert your own values and judgement simply to align with your manager, you may get a better performance review in the short-term, but in the long term you lose yourself and won't gain the kinds of leadership skills that are key to long-term success.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#94

Post by DangitBobby »

Findecanor wrote: post #87
stackbutterflow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also blame things that were actually your fault on systemic problems. People will believe you.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#95

Post by voidfunc »

I stopped feeling shame for my code after a couple years in business. Every line out there is someone’s little piece of shit. We are just little shit machines producing ever more shit. Sometimes we even use shit to patch up the gaps in existing shit. We are also known to get bold sometimes and start fresh shit piles usually because we have realized flashier shit gets you promoted.

All code is shit.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#96

Post by gmfawcett »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #12
csours wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if shell scripts should be considered a programming language.

What a snarky reply. Don't know if you get off on things like that, but I hope it increased your mood.

I didn't see any snark? He's making an interesting point, if an oblique one.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#97

Post by Karrot_Kream »

open-source-ux wrote: post #55
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…

Lack of empathy abounds among programmers writing user-facing software. I am increasingly convinced lack of empathy is over-represented among developers. It's a controversial thought, and feel free to shoot it down. But why the lack of empathy? Is it because developers are more comfortable with computers than with people? This is a common stereotype about programmers. Perhaps it has more than a hint of truth to it? E…

It probably started out as a character trait among early programmers, but these days I'm convinced it's mostly a cultural thing. It's not actually about the software as much as these folks want to say it is by saying things like "RTFM"; it's selecting for people with similar emotional reactions to themselves. Consequently, you're also going to see more abrasiveness in very online programmers. Devs that don't want to deal with the abrasive gatekeeping and bikeshedding online and just want to get shit done either work on projects and share them in private circles or quietly write cool software for industry. I know folks working on microkernel stuff and capability-security that just don't want to get into online language flamewars or complexity flamewars, so they just don't publish their stuff on the big link aggregators.

Entire online software communities (suckless, PL enthusiasts, etc) have been created around cultures of rewarding gatekeepers; things like "our software sucks because we're forced to write it for _normies_" (suckless) or "oh those capitalist, Fordian idiots causing us to use sad programming languages that aren't Haskell/Ocaml/Lisp/etc" (PL enthusiasts). It's sad because it holds these developers back from understanding why people don't buy into their philosophies. But for a lot of these folks, I don't think writing and sharing software is the end goal. They want to form a community and a culture with other people where they can shit on the normies or Fordians because it offers them pleasure in some form.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#98

Post by plutonorm »

And this is why programming is a horrible job. Once you lose the satisfaction, which happens pretty quickly all that is left is irritation and confusion and anger. Its absolutely miserable work. But I'm completely stuck in it.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#99

Post by Smaug123 »

NateEag wrote: post #86
n8cpdx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

+1 on this. If I'm not careful, my default mode is to get in the zone for hours, and then eventually realise my body is tired and hungry and cold (or whatever) and I have to do some big intervention like collapsing into a vegetative state for a while. Expanding your awareness, learning to maintain a general sense of how your body is doing while you're absorbed in the actual fun stuff, is a chore; but it's one which pays off when you can notice you're hungry after an hour and fix it quickly (rather than after four hours, at which point the problem is much worse and you might lose an extra hour just recovering from having no energy). And the easiest way to get to a constant gentle awareness of your physical state is to practice by consciously interrupting yourself every so often to do the checks, until the habit gradually fades into your background processing.

Re: Programmers’ emotions

#100

Post by AnimalMuppet »

plutonorm wrote: post #98

And this is why programming is a horrible job. Once you lose the satisfaction, which happens pretty quickly all that is left is irritation and confusion and anger. Its absolutely miserable work. But I'm completely stuck in it.

I still feel the satisfaction. Not as often as at the beginning, but I still feel it sometimes, even after 35 years.
Post reply on HN