3 ms·
The question is too broad, but along the lines of Norvig's answer... There's a particular micro-expression I sometimes notice with people who are working on a
by crispyambulance 6y ago
The question is too broad, but along the lines of Norvig's answer...
There's a particular micro-expression I sometimes notice with people who are working on a software problem. I notice it when something goes wrong unexpectedly.
People who aren't particularly talented at SW development, for a brief instant, give a facial expression of disgust when something crashes or behaves incorrectly. People who are awesome at development, instead, have a look of amusement like they're actually looking forward to see what happened. These facial "micro-expressions" are really fast and subtle, you really have pay attention and it doesn't always work but I've seen it enough times to believe it shows something.
I think this goes back to the impulse to "improve" things that Norvig mentions. You really have to enjoy the act of programming, to be willing to improve on it. It's a kind of feedback loop. Just MHO.
- one2know 6y agoA pro will additionally want to delay fixing a problem so that the root cause can be determined if there is no major financial cost. Management will want to brute force solve the problem right away and forget about it. Usually this involves restarting something: machine/instance.
- NortySpock 6y agoIt's a lot easier to be interested in a surprise failure mode when you're not under the gun to deliver on a deadline. I find failures interesting too, but I'm not feeling happy when I expect the reason will be because the tooling I'm using hides information behind insufficient logging or the answer I seek is probably on a system I don't have permission to access.
- catwind7 6y agoThere's also another side of disgust that motivates you to improve things. Some of my favorite work were born out of sheer anger
- 0xcoffee 6y agoI agree, a bug can lead to excitement. A bug somewhere deep in a framework that is now causing issues on production, no amusement to be found.
- crispyambulance 6y agoThe thing about micro-expressions is that they're involuntary. You can't hide them unless you're specifically aiming to do that. Your face might very well betray a few hundred milliseconds of amusement immediately before you shout a swear-word.
- chrshawkes 6y agoNah... I constantly say ah... fuck this shit! I then proceed to fix the bitch of whatever problem it is. I'm a real programmer though.