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> That said, I think programmers are prone to some of this simply due to the fact that programming requires a baseline obsessive attention to detail that most p

> That said, I think programmers are prone to some of this simply due to the fact that programming requires a baseline obsessive attention to detail that most people don’t want to think about. It requires some careful attention, planning, and some honed skill, but so does building a bridge that spans a river, so does cooking meals for a party of six on time, so does sewing a shirt, so does composing a piece of music, so does drawing a cartoon or a comic strip. Programming isn't the first occupation that requires problem solving skills. A tech boom and high salaries have definitely convinced a lot of programmers who haven't had much other world experience that it is. The way we talk about and treat programmers as an elite class has only helped to grow that image even more. As you said, a lot of highly paid programmers who never cared to learn social skills, or worse, actively despise working with others. However, I don't think this is an accident or a fluke, it's behavior that's been encouraged and reinforced from the bubble. As the tech boom wears off, we might see this change.

tester457 4y ago
> As the tech boom wears off What could cause this though?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > What could cause this though? The Fed having a tight-money policy to control inflation leading to widespread layoffs in existing tech firms and less investment in new ones, and what would make it more durable is some breakthrough outside of computing leading investment in a different direction in the next easy-money period.
ljm 4y ago
We’re just trading speculation here but I think the boom and the bubble aren’t quite that relevant once you just look at the profession and not the way it’s been funded by VC. The field, the industry, the profession… whatever you call it… it’s not even a century old. Cooking, metal work, civil engineering, architecture, etc. etc. go back millennia and transcend civilisations. Humanity has had a hell of a lot of time to get good at those things, each culture throughout history discovering and refining its own methods until now, where we see them fused together in a globally connected world. Software is not even a century old. We are still in the birth of a new industry, everything is rapidly growing and evolving, and we don’t have any historical context to rely upon except perhaps mathematics. We might have hit our limit on CPU architecture and how we write software, as far as we know we’re the first to reach this point. But the next generations, the next civilisations, can take our primitive work and discover something we couldn’t. It’s only going to become more important as time goes on. We all just got in early, in the middle of the chaos. We’re gonna go through this kind of maturity problem quite a lot.
abirch 4y ago
Programming doesn't have the tangible aspect of the examples you provided. If I make a bridge over the river with huge holes in it, you see them. With programming you don't see them until you run into them.

tester457 4y ago

> As the tech boom wears off What could cause this though?

dragonwriter 4y ago
> What could cause this though? The Fed having a tight-money policy to control inflation leading to widespread layoffs in existing tech firms and less investment in new ones, and what would make it more durable is some breakthrough outside of computing leading investment in a different direction in the next easy-money period.

ljm 4y ago

We’re just trading speculation here but I think the boom and the bubble aren’t quite that relevant once you just look at the profession and not the way it’s been funded by VC. The field, the industry, the profession… whatever you call it… it’s not even a century old. Cooking, metal work, civil engineering, architecture, etc. etc. go back millennia and transcend civilisations. Humanity has had a hell of a lot of time to get good at those things, each culture throughout history discovering and refining its own methods until now, where we see them fused together in a globally connected world. Software is not even a century old. We are still in the birth of a new industry, everything is rapidly growing and evolving, and we don’t have any historical context to rely upon except perhaps mathematics. We might have hit our limit on CPU architecture and how we write software, as far as we know we’re the first to reach this point. But the next generations, the next civilisations, can take our primitive work and discover something we couldn’t. It’s only going to become more important as time goes on. We all just got in early, in the middle of the chaos. We’re gonna go through this kind of maturity problem quite a lot.

abirch 4y ago

Programming doesn't have the tangible aspect of the examples you provided. If I make a bridge over the river with huge holes in it, you see them. With programming you don't see them until you run into them.