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My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- srl 15y agoAnd the gcache'd version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHiyqmkJ:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...
- mwhite 15y agoStill loads intolerably slow for me, here's the text-only cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHiyqmkJ:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...
- DrJokepu 15y agoThanks a lot, I simple can't figure out how to get to Google Cache on touch screen devices as it looks like that their instant preview thingie is triggered by the mouse hover event.
- sasha__b 15y agoAvailable in Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/&hl=en&biw=1882&bih=1243&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- dangrossman 15y agoDiscussion from last year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595950 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595950
- bitops 15y agoGreat article and it goes both ways of course. Curiosity about another person is the only way to keep things fresh, regardless of how platonic the relationship is. For geeks: remember that sometimes there are much more interesting things in the analog world than whatever you're immersed in digitally. ;)
- aen 15y agoReally nice post. I'm a designer/developer and I'm lucky my wife understands the work I do.
- StefanKarpinski 15y agoIn college, my girlfriend (at that point of two years) knew I was into incomprehensible theoretical math, but apparently I had never mentioned anything about computers or programming, which I was also pretty into. One day we were both working in my room and a bunch of LexisNexis links she'd saved earlier just wouldn't work. She was on the verge of tears and panic — she'd spent days collecting these links, and now none of them worked. I said "lemme see" and sat down with her computer. I poked around with her saved links and tried some stuff on LexisNexis. Then I wrote a perl one-liner to munge her URLs. Voila: the munged URLs all just worked (the links had IP-based auth token that I just s///'d). At no other point in my life have I been looked at with quite that degree of amazement and hero-worship.
- petercooper 15y agoAnd if you don’t have even a basic understanding of what your spouse does with 40+ hours of his/her week, then you’re not on a team. That's quite the generalization. My wife has almost no knowledge of most areas of my work, but it's never been a negative or caused any friction in my non-work life. That said, I don't really have much interest in sharing it either, as there's more than enough to discuss and do as a family outside of my work hours.
- __ingrid__ 15y agoI agree. Expanding your horizons is great, and if you get to do it with a loved one, that's even better, but it's not a necessary part of every relationship. I've dated guys who knew nothing about programming, and I wouldn't be ashamed to take them to company parties to mingle with my fellow programmers, and I don't look down on spouses I meet who don't program either, they're often interesting in a different way. EDIT: Oops, typo.
- narcissus 15y agoI, too, agree... for me, at least, I don't care that my wife really understands what I do (although she gets it to a point). For me the important thing is that she isn't bored by me talking about it :) That is to say, while she doesn't really understand it, she will let me talk/vent about it as much as I need to. Just as I don't really understand what she does, but I'm more than happy for her to talk about it.
- _jb 15y agoI do not have a family but I have yet to be a in a good relationship with a girl that didn't understand (or cared enough to try) what I do. I also have to be highly interested in what she's passionate about. I'm not that 40-hours type of guy (right, no family). Programming & stuff is my job but also one of my hobbies – that probably makes it far more important for me than non-passionate geeks.
- jroseattle 15y agoMake sure not to confuse "non-passionate" geeks with those who have multiple interests. Keep an open mind to other things besides "programming & stuff".
- pgtart 15y agoin simple words he's a minor god of the digital age
- jroseattle 15y agoAt a certain level I agree with the OP, but only where "basic understanding" is something that can be decided between two people. Characterizing whether or not my wife has an appreciation for the tools I use in my job as a measure of the strength of our relationship is, for us, completely invalid. My wife can barely explain what I do for a living. But she knows that I love what I do, and she's supportive within the context of what she understands. This post really just speaks to how this particular person measures her relationship with her partner. Anyone else drawing out this singular aspect of a relationship as a gauge for matrimonial harmony is on a fool's errand.
- johnnyn 15y ago100% agreed. My wife is a labor and delivery nurse. I ask her many questions about her job but I have no interest in learning to how give an IV or check for effacement. If someone you're dating is not interested in learning your programming language, don't hold it against them. Most likely, there are other reasons why they are dating you in the first place.
- mr_luc 15y agoThis is something that I think about a lot, actually. If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those things? Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and so on. But please consider the other viewpoint. Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion? My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others. Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance of sharing gists with? I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck. Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you, or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or coding with your SO, then you're lucky!
- jerf 15y agoTeachers should only marry teachers? Nurses should only marry nurses? It doesn't work in the "other" direction, why should it work in this? (Remember, gender disparities entirely as strong as computer science exist in the other direction; people just don't angst about them as much.) I'd present an alternate point of view, as someone who has been married to not-a-programmer for 11 years now... passion != monomania. You probably ought to have something other than programming you can talk about and incorporate into a relationship. I won't quite say monomania is "bad", but it isn't without costs, and certainly ancient wisdom has expounded the benefits of being a well-rounded person for a very, very long time. It's not wrong.
- Suncho 15y agoTeachers should only marry people who understand what a "teacher" is.
- flyosity 15y agoReading this makes me appreciate that my wife is also a software engineer and instantly understands things I talk about. We've been together for a long time (met near the end of college at RIT) but it's one of those life perks that I take for granted sometimes because I forget that it's definitely not the norm.
- araneae 15y agoI think generally this might not be about relationships per se, but simply what kind of person you are. It would seem weird to me to be in a relationship with a person and not get involved in their field; but that's just because I'm that kind of person. I view everyone as a potential teacher. When I dated a physicist, I got into physics; a computer scientist, computer science; a Go player, I learned to play Go; an epidemiologist, I learned epidemiology. But not everyone is like that, in fact probably most people are not... so it probably has less to do with your relationship and more about personality type.
- 51Cards 15y agoMy partner also had no clue what I do, so she asked to learn. Not to learn how to code, but what it involves. So we took a couple nights and we wrote a small program together just so she could understand what it means when I say 'function' or 'UI'. At each step I explained why we were doing things and what it entailed and what some of our options could be, but stopped short of actual code semantics. At the end we had a working program and she understood how it was put together and in turn, what my daily routine entails. To this day she doesn't get that blank look and is able to ask questions. The fact she took the time to do that meant a lot to me.
- ryanwaggoner 15y agoKeeper.
- brandall10 15y agoI think sharing passion is great. Perhaps it isn't reasonable to expect unless you met through that passion, but simply 'entering your world', just a bit, is oh so important. What you guys did is amazing. You surely have a strong foundation in your relationship. Unfortunately I just broke off an engagement to a lady who does event planning for a museum. When I met her almost 4 years ago she was working clothing retail on a hiatus from school. I encouraged her to finish her degree and to apply for internships before graduating. She didn't know what she wanted to do and the museum gig fell into her lap thru an acquaintance, but she loves art and consequently loves her job. I went to most events she hosted over the period of a year she had the job and we were still together. I chatted up dozens of her co-workers, hung out dutifully, walked thru the exhibits with her as she explained them. I enjoyed it even though it wasn't my thing, it was fun to learn and I was proud of her. During this period I went to two Startup Weekends. I asked her to come visit. Esp. the second one where my pitch was selected and I built a team of 7. I wanted her to see the final demonstration, to simply be there - for nothing else I was presenting in front of a crowd of 100 people and I was nervous. She would not come. She did "not like computers, that's your thing", paraphrasing. That was the major turning point... It's not about learning to program, or to even take a passing interest or understanding. It's simply, "this is my life's work, please support me." I think if you can't get that out of a relationship that's a major red flag.
- nzjames 15y agoI just asked my wife and she said she just tells people I'm a spy. When I pressed her for why she said what I do is too technical therefore I'm keeping it hidden from her and that must mean I'm a spy.
- metaobject 15y agoMy wife isn't a programmer, but understands some of the stuff I do at a high level. I think that it makes conversations much more efficient. I can come home bummed out a little, she asks "what's wrong?", and I tell her that my code keeps crashing, or that I can't get some library to build, etc - and she gets it - end of conversation about that. It also helps out when I have to put in extra hours to get some stuff done ... she knows that this work can sometimes require a great amount of effort.
- x2y 15y agoAnyone receiving a 404 like me?
- Jun8 15y agoThere's a subcontext here that is separate from the appalling notion of being not interested in what your husband/wife works on. Consider the statement: "My husband's specialty is comparative literature and I don't know what that means" or "My wife is an art historian and I don't know what that means". If I heard one of these statements I would think (to myself) "what an ignoramus!". Well, if it's not OK for those, why is it OK for engineering or science? This brings us to the classic the two cultures debate, articulated simplistically by C. P. Snow but echoed by many, many other scientists. I think the gap has widened in the past decades.
- ravloony 15y agoMy Christmas present from my wife was a presentation of screenshots of her programming tutorial. She's been learning python in secret, to show me that she wants exactly what the article advises: to understand what it is that I do for a living. I feel privileged to have married her.
- outworlder 15y agoThat's awesome.
- ravloony 15y agoThat's what I thought!
- dgroves 15y agoThe simplest metaphor is that Programmers are teachers who instruct the severely developmentally disabled to do routine tasks in a foreign language. I say that they teach the severely developmentally disabled because computers are very, very simple compared to humans. Thus programers are disciplined to break everything down into the seemingly simplest and mundane of details; because if they don't, the students will get even the simplest of tasks incorrect. Programmers speak a foreign language because the computer is to literal minded to speak a language where words have multiple definitions; and so the Programmer must speak with the computer in a foreign language where words have only one precise definition in order to instruct the computer to do its task. This is very metaphorical; and programmers may or may not appreciate the metaphor. But, as a former programmer I believe that at a very simple level, this metaphor very closely resembles what a programmer does. In actuality the very detail oriented programmers know that the map is not the territory, and that exceptions exist for even the most basic expressions of ideas. A metaphor obviously doesn't map well to all the numerous exceptional cases that exist in practice, however, it is map enough for you to understand 'what it means, and what he does.'