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Could also be tangential. I think you need to be a certain amount of obsessive in order to be a programmer. Seems a lot of people just get frustrated and give u
by snek_case 5y ago
Could also be tangential. I think you need to be a certain amount of obsessive in order to be a programmer. Seems a lot of people just get frustrated and give up quickly. Lots of people seem to also not really have the ability to decompose a problem into parts recursively. There's this old story about into to programming classes, with 50% of the class doing great and the other 50% failing. It's not a myth IMO, I've taught a class with 70 people and I've seen it myself. If there's a biological explanation for that, it's going to be unpopular for sure, because it would go against the notion that anyone can be trained to do anything if they just put in the work.
- whatshisface 5y agoThere are a lot of neurotypical programmers too. It's not so much that autism makes you better at cognitively loaded tasks as it doesn't make you worse at them.
- serverholic 5y agoIn my experience the neurotypical programmers tend to be less exceptional. Obviously not a rule but it's something I've observed.
- snek_case 5y agoWe're all speculating without hard data, but just for fun, another pet theory explaining something like this could be as simple as: neurotypical programmers tend to enjoy socializing more than neuroatypical programmers, so they generally spend less time on the computer, and are less proficient at programming, on average, simply because they have less practice. That doesn't preclude someone who is neurotypical from enjoying computers and programming and bucking the trend.
- whatshisface 5y agoOr maybe people who are neurotypical rise to management faster (because they have better interpersonal skills) and so spend less of their career programming.