5 ms·

I've got a pet theory. I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social ski

I've got a pet theory. I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. To put it another way: The technical problem is so big that it occupies your brain for weeks and months at a time. Any social interaction requires context-switching out of the technical problem, which is expensive and stressful. Hence the stereotype that engineers are bad at social skills. If we were ever given enough time to decompress, we'd get right along.

gnarbarian 8y ago
It's because a lot of us are nerds. Also, more socially adept engineers tend to end up in leadership positions.
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eropple 8y ago
Thing is, though--especially as time's gone on--more and more engineers I meet, completely and totally qualified people, are not bad at social skills. Many are quite engaging and charming people. And many who were socially deficient have gotten better over time when they've worked on it, myself included, with no matching decline in their ability to address that so-heavy "weight of technical decision." So I don't think "our big brains are so busy" is a great excuse, even were it a reason (and I don't think it is).
- westoncb 8y ago
  Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated. I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible. I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests). BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions. Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it. When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind. And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.
rimliu 8y ago
There is also a possibility that defintion of "good social skills" differs.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  I think that's true. For example, I think "remembering what you have agreed to do" is a rather important social skill, and I don't think it's one where engineers are by any means below average.
hinkley 8y ago
Trauma surgeons aren't exactly known for their bubbly personalities either. But I get pretty tired of being a trauma surgeon. I think I'd rather be more like a PT.
pygy_ 8y ago
> I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally inhibit one another. Edit: that being said, it means that it's hard to do both things at the same time, but you can alternate between both modes.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally inhibit one another. I don't know whether this is true or not. But I am sure that when I do mathematics, I have very strong emotions. These are of a very different kind than the emotions that you find described, say, in a novel. I came to the conclusion that neither the English nor the German language have words for these emotions.
  - pygy_ 8y ago
    That's very interesting. What I described is the general case, you may have an unusually wired brain, triggering logic/emotions synesthesia. The emotions you describe are reminiscent of the "Martian colors" described by a colorblind synesthete who could see words in colors, including colors his eyes could not trigger in his brain. Richard Feynman was notoriously synesthete. He could see math in color (builtin syntax highlighting :-).
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fjsolwmv 8y ago
That only makes sense if they lost some social skills they had earlier, which seems unlikely. It also doesn't explain how salespeople can socialize while thinking, or why engineers don't suddenly improve social skills at night and weekend.
pdimitar 8y ago
There are likely no small number of people who are like that but... (1) As a sibling comment said, many engineers are quite confident and charming, men and women -- and you cannot determine they are engineers even if you talk for hours on end with them, without them sharing their occupation. Many people told me the latter about me post-factum as well. I simply don't tout it even though I feel it gives me more credentials to talk on certain topics. But I still prefer to invite discussion by expressing healthy skepticism instead of arrogantly claiming that I am the authority on the topic. (2) Those who have trouble socializing usually have a teenage trauma of some sort. I legitimately only met 2 programmers in my entire life who looked and sounded truly malevolent; 99.99% of all engineers I've ever met were normal human beings struggling to overcome their limitations.

gnarbarian 8y ago

It's because a lot of us are nerds. Also, more socially adept engineers tend to end up in leadership positions.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eropple 8y ago

Thing is, though--especially as time's gone on--more and more engineers I meet, completely and totally qualified people, are not bad at social skills. Many are quite engaging and charming people. And many who were socially deficient have gotten better over time when they've worked on it, myself included, with no matching decline in their ability to address that so-heavy "weight of technical decision." So I don't think "our big brains are so busy" is a great excuse, even were it a reason (and I don't think it is).

westoncb 8y ago
Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated. I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible. I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests). BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions. Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it. When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind. And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.

rimliu 8y ago

There is also a possibility that defintion of "good social skills" differs.

mjw1007 8y ago
I think that's true. For example, I think "remembering what you have agreed to do" is a rather important social skill, and I don't think it's one where engineers are by any means below average.

hinkley 8y ago

Trauma surgeons aren't exactly known for their bubbly personalities either. But I get pretty tired of being a trauma surgeon. I think I'd rather be more like a PT.

pygy_ 8y ago

> I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally inhibit one another. Edit: that being said, it means that it's hard to do both things at the same time, but you can alternate between both modes.

wolfgke 8y ago
> That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally inhibit one another. I don't know whether this is true or not. But I am sure that when I do mathematics, I have very strong emotions. These are of a very different kind than the emotions that you find described, say, in a novel. I came to the conclusion that neither the English nor the German language have words for these emotions.
- pygy_ 8y ago
  That's very interesting. What I described is the general case, you may have an unusually wired brain, triggering logic/emotions synesthesia. The emotions you describe are reminiscent of the "Martian colors" described by a colorblind synesthete who could see words in colors, including colors his eyes could not trigger in his brain. Richard Feynman was notoriously synesthete. He could see math in color (builtin syntax highlighting :-).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

fjsolwmv 8y ago

That only makes sense if they lost some social skills they had earlier, which seems unlikely. It also doesn't explain how salespeople can socialize while thinking, or why engineers don't suddenly improve social skills at night and weekend.

pdimitar 8y ago

There are likely no small number of people who are like that but... (1) As a sibling comment said, many engineers are quite confident and charming, men and women -- and you cannot determine they are engineers even if you talk for hours on end with them, without them sharing their occupation. Many people told me the latter about me post-factum as well. I simply don't tout it even though I feel it gives me more credentials to talk on certain topics. But I still prefer to invite discussion by expressing healthy skepticism instead of arrogantly claiming that I am the authority on the topic. (2) Those who have trouble socializing usually have a teenage trauma of some sort. I legitimately only met 2 programmers in my entire life who looked and sounded truly malevolent; 99.99% of all engineers I've ever met were normal human beings struggling to overcome their limitations.