8 ms·

I have a hypothesis, but it's VERY silly. Programming, like many tasks created in the 20th century, is not nearly as physically demanding as traditional jobs. P

I have a hypothesis, but it's VERY silly. Programming, like many tasks created in the 20th century, is not nearly as physically demanding as traditional jobs. People who work behind a desk 24/7 feel emasculated and try to compensate by showing off their expertise through aggression. It's a game of dominance and frustration. Of course, this is totally unproven.

JustSomeNobody 12y ago
Close. When we program it's from our heads. If anyone questions why we do something, it's as though they are questioning our intelligence, so the natural (for some people) reaction is to be defensive.
- AdeptusAquinas 12y ago
  To elaborate with an example: when you pick a programming language or framework you presumably have other options which you don't take for whatever reason. The reasons for picking something over others don't need to be strong: its what I use at work, its what a friend uses are probably a lot more common than 'this programming paradigm is better'. When someone else comes along and says you made the wrong choice, or even if they stop at just championing their own, different choice and therefore 'implying' you are wrong, its easy for individuals who might not have their self-awareness guards up to respond as if they were being personally attacked. Even if your original choice isn't something you, all being equal, don't really care that much about.
chc 12y ago
Eh, simple tribalism seems like a simpler answer to me. It's the reason Navy folks talk smack about Marines, Target shoppers look down on Walmart, Yankees fans bash the Red Sox, etc. — I don't see why it can't explain a React fan hating on Ember or whatever.
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  I think this is the right answer, it's pretty high level, and maybe more nuanced than "it's my tribe" because there's always infighting amongst the tribe, but it cuts to the chase, this whole attitude is endimic to the human condition. Sometimes maturity cuts through it, but IME, sometimes it takes maturity and intelligence (though not a huge amount of it), and on the rare cases, there's something more, like a primal competitive nature.
nyolfen 12y ago
nerds have long used opinion/taste curation as an alternative mode of masculinity
- ckib16 12y ago
  Interesting. Very though-provoking comment. Have not heard that one before but it makes sense. I agree there is probably something to that.
ArekDymalski 12y ago
I don't think it's silly.
therealdrag0 12y ago
I don't think it's related to the physical nature of it. I think it's just that it's a field that is infinitely faceted (so room for different perspectives and opinions) and one which many of us have a serious personal interest in. I.e., it's not JUST a job for many of us. I am one of those kids who has been a 'power' user since middle school. Now I'm a programmer. If I didn't do it for a living, I'd still do it. So what that boils down to is I have opinions that are semi-personal. A lumber-jack or a secretary probably has much less personal investment in their field. Personal interests yield opinions, and where there are opinions there are people who are aggressive about them, whether it be music, religion, sports, cars, or technology.
cheatsheet 12y ago
I think programming can be very mentally taxing. I prefer empathy over dominance.
ThrustVectoring 12y ago
Putting people into different groups is enough to get people from one group to hate the other.
- zornthewise 12y ago
  This isn't really true as far as I am aware. If you are getting this from the Robber's Cave Experiment(HPMOR), it was misrepresented there. They were only hostile after it was induced and they went back to being nice in the last stage too.
  - cciivv 12y ago
    brown v. blue eyes classroom experiment http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/vi...
- danparsonson 12y ago
  Indeed - I've heard it referred to as 'ingroup/outgroup behaviour' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups)
webnrrd2k 12y ago
This in one of my "i believe it, but can't prove it" ideas about the negativity in programming: Programmers tend to be very insecure about their intelligence. I think it has to do with how (at least in the us) skills in STEM fields aren't valued too highly until you get into college and beyond. If the damage is done early then it can be hard to back it out later in life, so a lot of programmers carry around some residual scars.
enraged_camel 12y ago
Here is my theory, which could serve as an addendum to yours: people who spend a lot of time interacting with machines, instead of people, tend to have an under-developed sense of empathy and similar social skills. Often times they don't realize or put a high value on how their negativity will affect those whose work they criticize. So you end up with a ton of hostility in the industry, not just towards new products and ideas but also between established "tribes."
- collyw 12y ago
  IS it not usually the other way around? People towards the autistic end of the spectrum prefer to interact with machines rather than people.
jared314 12y ago
I have an alternative, and potentially equally silly, hypothesis. Many programmers are young and have just enough money, time, and knowledge to get into trouble. This is compounded by the growth rate of the programming field. New, young, programmers jump into the industry every year. So, a young programmer can potentially encounter entire teams of equally young programmers, creating a school like atmosphere of aggression and dominance. (Which is sometimes taken advantage of by employers.)
- fweespeech 12y ago
  As silly as your theory is, I have anecdotal support for it based on some of the places I worked at. The younger the crowd, the stronger the "new, assert technology X" superiority vibe is. Where I work now, no one cares and I get questioned on using something that is less than 3 years old. xD
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    > The younger the crowd, the stronger the "new, assert technology X" superiority vibe is. This could also be due to simple inexperience. The first time you come across something that seems amazing, it's easy to make the leap from "amazing" to "perfect" and become a zealot about it. Then you live with the amazing thing for a while and discover that it actually has flaws that weren't obvious at first glance. Then you go through this cycle a few times and realize that everything has flaws, and that the art is learning how to identify the things whose flaws impact what you want to do the least, rather than being able to find the One Perfect Thing that solves every problem cleanly. And you come to value the tools that tell you their flaws and limitations up front over those that try to hide them behind blustery assertions of perfection. But by the time you realize all that stuff, you're not young anymore :-D
    - fweespeech 12y ago
      Of course. But I thought ITT we were being silly ;)
- mattnewton 12y ago
ElComradio 12y ago
It's nowhere that complicated. Everyone likes to feel special/superior. There are many ways to do this. Easy ways are money and power. If you are smart, you can win arguments. If you aren't any of these things, you can be superior in other ways. You can feel morally superior to those 'millionaires and billionaires'. You can save the planet or the animals, which those others for all their money/power/specialness don't care as much about (or so you tell yourself). You can become a shameless hedonist. Those corporate fuddy duddies would love this lifestyle, you see, but they are cowards even though they are rich, right? In every case it's about being unique or on top of those things or making a mark that will last. Special. Valuable.
- judk 12y ago
  It's weird that you put "winning arguments" in the category apart from the other Subcultures. Your biased self-image is showing :-)
btilly 12y ago
I have a hypothesis which is much less silly. Programming expertise is very fragile. A variety of changes in your environment, such as different coding standards, dependencies, programming languages, etc, will cause a severe impact to your performance. The result is a strong negative reaction to things that should be objectively neutral. That is, a change in your environment can make you feel incompetent, and it is easier to get angry at the change in the environment than it is to be honest with yourself about what is happening. I forget which book I ran across this theory in, but it explains a variety of conflicts that repeatedly come up about formatting, libraries, programming languages, operating systems, and so on. Furthermore it is easy to experience the feeling yourself when you go from an environment where you're competent to a new one. (At the moment I'm going through this having to learn Eclipse and Java, after many years of being primarily a Perl dev.)
- judk 12y ago
  Are you now saying Java isn't awful? That's news, coming from btilly.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    He doesn't appear to be offering any opinions on Java, or any other framework, language, etc., at all.
    - btilly 12y ago
      That is true. But I have offered opinions in the past. For example see http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/66808/java-or-python-for-internet-application http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/66808/java-or... for an opinionated comparison I offered on Python vs Java. I still stand behind everything that I said there. If you go farther back, you'll find more negative opinions of Java like the one at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=41244 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=41244 that I stated 15 years ago. I believe that the substance of my complaints were true then. They are true of some organizations today. But they are not true of all of Java, hence my willingness to use Java today.
  - 12y ago
Houshalter 12y ago
I think Internet comments encourage this behavior but it has always existed and isn't unique to programmers. Just today I read a long reddit thread with military people arguing about aircraft.
- alchemism 12y ago
  Ever listen to a group of men argue about the qualitative meaning of baseball statistics? I don't think it has anything to do with technology at all
plikan13 12y ago
At some point you got to wonder whether the practice of programming itself can make people unhappy. Maybe it's just not natural to put your mind into that straightjacket of formal thinking for 8+ hours a day.
- collyw 12y ago
  How I would love to be able to program for 8+ hours uninterrupted at my work. I really enjoyed my job back when I did that.

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

Close. When we program it's from our heads. If anyone questions why we do something, it's as though they are questioning our intelligence, so the natural (for some people) reaction is to be defensive.

AdeptusAquinas 12y ago
To elaborate with an example: when you pick a programming language or framework you presumably have other options which you don't take for whatever reason. The reasons for picking something over others don't need to be strong: its what I use at work, its what a friend uses are probably a lot more common than 'this programming paradigm is better'. When someone else comes along and says you made the wrong choice, or even if they stop at just championing their own, different choice and therefore 'implying' you are wrong, its easy for individuals who might not have their self-awareness guards up to respond as if they were being personally attacked. Even if your original choice isn't something you, all being equal, don't really care that much about.

chc 12y ago

Eh, simple tribalism seems like a simpler answer to me. It's the reason Navy folks talk smack about Marines, Target shoppers look down on Walmart, Yankees fans bash the Red Sox, etc. — I don't see why it can't explain a React fan hating on Ember or whatever.

will_work4tears 12y ago
I think this is the right answer, it's pretty high level, and maybe more nuanced than "it's my tribe" because there's always infighting amongst the tribe, but it cuts to the chase, this whole attitude is endimic to the human condition. Sometimes maturity cuts through it, but IME, sometimes it takes maturity and intelligence (though not a huge amount of it), and on the rare cases, there's something more, like a primal competitive nature.

nyolfen 12y ago

nerds have long used opinion/taste curation as an alternative mode of masculinity

ckib16 12y ago
Interesting. Very though-provoking comment. Have not heard that one before but it makes sense. I agree there is probably something to that.

ArekDymalski 12y ago

I don't think it's silly.

therealdrag0 12y ago

I don't think it's related to the physical nature of it. I think it's just that it's a field that is infinitely faceted (so room for different perspectives and opinions) and one which many of us have a serious personal interest in. I.e., it's not JUST a job for many of us. I am one of those kids who has been a 'power' user since middle school. Now I'm a programmer. If I didn't do it for a living, I'd still do it. So what that boils down to is I have opinions that are semi-personal. A lumber-jack or a secretary probably has much less personal investment in their field. Personal interests yield opinions, and where there are opinions there are people who are aggressive about them, whether it be music, religion, sports, cars, or technology.

cheatsheet 12y ago

I think programming can be very mentally taxing. I prefer empathy over dominance.

ThrustVectoring 12y ago

Putting people into different groups is enough to get people from one group to hate the other.

zornthewise 12y ago
This isn't really true as far as I am aware. If you are getting this from the Robber's Cave Experiment(HPMOR), it was misrepresented there. They were only hostile after it was induced and they went back to being nice in the last stage too.
- cciivv 12y ago
  brown v. blue eyes classroom experiment http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/vi...
danparsonson 12y ago
Indeed - I've heard it referred to as 'ingroup/outgroup behaviour' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups)

webnrrd2k 12y ago

This in one of my "i believe it, but can't prove it" ideas about the negativity in programming: Programmers tend to be very insecure about their intelligence. I think it has to do with how (at least in the us) skills in STEM fields aren't valued too highly until you get into college and beyond. If the damage is done early then it can be hard to back it out later in life, so a lot of programmers carry around some residual scars.

enraged_camel 12y ago

Here is my theory, which could serve as an addendum to yours: people who spend a lot of time interacting with machines, instead of people, tend to have an under-developed sense of empathy and similar social skills. Often times they don't realize or put a high value on how their negativity will affect those whose work they criticize. So you end up with a ton of hostility in the industry, not just towards new products and ideas but also between established "tribes."

collyw 12y ago
IS it not usually the other way around? People towards the autistic end of the spectrum prefer to interact with machines rather than people.

jared314 12y ago

I have an alternative, and potentially equally silly, hypothesis. Many programmers are young and have just enough money, time, and knowledge to get into trouble. This is compounded by the growth rate of the programming field. New, young, programmers jump into the industry every year. So, a young programmer can potentially encounter entire teams of equally young programmers, creating a school like atmosphere of aggression and dominance. (Which is sometimes taken advantage of by employers.)

fweespeech 12y ago
As silly as your theory is, I have anecdotal support for it based on some of the places I worked at. The younger the crowd, the stronger the "new, assert technology X" superiority vibe is. Where I work now, no one cares and I get questioned on using something that is less than 3 years old. xD
- smacktoward 12y ago
  > The younger the crowd, the stronger the "new, assert technology X" superiority vibe is. This could also be due to simple inexperience. The first time you come across something that seems amazing, it's easy to make the leap from "amazing" to "perfect" and become a zealot about it. Then you live with the amazing thing for a while and discover that it actually has flaws that weren't obvious at first glance. Then you go through this cycle a few times and realize that everything has flaws, and that the art is learning how to identify the things whose flaws impact what you want to do the least, rather than being able to find the One Perfect Thing that solves every problem cleanly. And you come to value the tools that tell you their flaws and limitations up front over those that try to hide them behind blustery assertions of perfection. But by the time you realize all that stuff, you're not young anymore :-D
  - fweespeech 12y ago
    Of course. But I thought ITT we were being silly ;)
mattnewton 12y ago

ElComradio 12y ago

It's nowhere that complicated. Everyone likes to feel special/superior. There are many ways to do this. Easy ways are money and power. If you are smart, you can win arguments. If you aren't any of these things, you can be superior in other ways. You can feel morally superior to those 'millionaires and billionaires'. You can save the planet or the animals, which those others for all their money/power/specialness don't care as much about (or so you tell yourself). You can become a shameless hedonist. Those corporate fuddy duddies would love this lifestyle, you see, but they are cowards even though they are rich, right? In every case it's about being unique or on top of those things or making a mark that will last. Special. Valuable.

judk 12y ago
It's weird that you put "winning arguments" in the category apart from the other Subcultures. Your biased self-image is showing :-)

btilly 12y ago

I have a hypothesis which is much less silly. Programming expertise is very fragile. A variety of changes in your environment, such as different coding standards, dependencies, programming languages, etc, will cause a severe impact to your performance. The result is a strong negative reaction to things that should be objectively neutral. That is, a change in your environment can make you feel incompetent, and it is easier to get angry at the change in the environment than it is to be honest with yourself about what is happening. I forget which book I ran across this theory in, but it explains a variety of conflicts that repeatedly come up about formatting, libraries, programming languages, operating systems, and so on. Furthermore it is easy to experience the feeling yourself when you go from an environment where you're competent to a new one. (At the moment I'm going through this having to learn Eclipse and Java, after many years of being primarily a Perl dev.)

judk 12y ago
Are you now saying Java isn't awful? That's news, coming from btilly.
- deciplex 12y ago
  He doesn't appear to be offering any opinions on Java, or any other framework, language, etc., at all.
  - btilly 12y ago
    That is true. But I have offered opinions in the past. For example see http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/66808/java-or-python-for-internet-application http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/66808/java-or... for an opinionated comparison I offered on Python vs Java. I still stand behind everything that I said there. If you go farther back, you'll find more negative opinions of Java like the one at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=41244 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=41244 that I stated 15 years ago. I believe that the substance of my complaints were true then. They are true of some organizations today. But they are not true of all of Java, hence my willingness to use Java today.
- 12y ago

Houshalter 12y ago

I think Internet comments encourage this behavior but it has always existed and isn't unique to programmers. Just today I read a long reddit thread with military people arguing about aircraft.

alchemism 12y ago
Ever listen to a group of men argue about the qualitative meaning of baseball statistics? I don't think it has anything to do with technology at all

plikan13 12y ago

At some point you got to wonder whether the practice of programming itself can make people unhappy. Maybe it's just not natural to put your mind into that straightjacket of formal thinking for 8+ hours a day.

collyw 12y ago
How I would love to be able to program for 8+ hours uninterrupted at my work. I really enjoyed my job back when I did that.