7 ms·
There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the ex
by patio11 11y ago
There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values.
Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 which we haven't patched yet.) You'll tend to find yourself valuing what they value. You will tend to find yourself achieving outcomes strikingly similar to their outcomes.
Given this, picking a peer group whose values are not your values and whose outcomes are terrible is a poor choice.
There is some cognizable peer group of "the most misanthropic 10% of commenters on Internet threads about programming languages." The majority are not professional programmers. Most are not very happy people. You can generally tell a lot about what a person values by what they spend their time doing; someone who professes to value the great intellectual challenge that is Real Programming but actually ships comments which make other people feel bad probably, to a first approximation, values making other people feel bad.
If you do not also want to grow into a values system where making other people feel bad is the highlight of your day, consider choosing a better peer group, where e.g. feeding one's family through honest labor is valued and having very loud opinions about NodeJS not so much.
- ectoplasm 11y agoI wanted to say something like your comment is just 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, but then I'd be 2nd order making you feel bad about 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, so then I just thought about how I felt and it was bad. What a mess. Good points about the importance of choosing a good peer group, I totally agree. It's really hard when you have more than one group.
- mercurial 11y agoYour first sentence would be more appropriate if parent's post was directed at this subgroup.
- sridca 11y agoIt would depend on what you were actually feeling behind your appraising comment, would it not? On the one hand, one tacitly feels contemptuous towards the other group and tries to come across as dispassionate in their appraising comment. On the other hand, one feels considerate (or neutral) and simply calls a spade a spade in their appraising comment. When you take the entire context of people's interactions over time into consideration, the former is likely to be hurting (overall) and the later is likely to be helping (overall) even though certain specific instances may come across as the opposite. tl;dr - feelings and vibes (over time) matter more than words (in individual instances).
- nostrademons 11y agoInterestingly, I've learned to love having more than one peer group. I felt like a floater all through high school and college, like I didn't belong anywhere, but around age 30 I started viewing that as a source of strength rather than of weakness, and "I belong everywhere" rather than "I don't belong anywhere". My wife and many of my close friends (that don't belong to any particular peer group) are the same way. There's a certain irony where, although it sometimes feels lonely being a floater, such people often seem to have higher status when viewed from the outside. They're confident enough to not be defined by their peer group, after all. Few people are, and many people wish they were.
- ectoplasm 11y agoThanks for the positivity, it's hard to remember that how you see yourself is not how others see you. Whenever other people tell me that others look up to me I'm like wtf are you talking about. I have about five major peer groups, it's kind of like the jack of all trades, master of none conundrum.
- pekk 11y agoYou think you're cute, but you're missing the point.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vorador 11y agoFrankly, I have a hard time believing that the misanthropic commenters on r/programming are major opensource contributors. The most prolific programmers simply don't have time to waste on comment threads.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- noir_lord 11y agoI pulled back from the community around some of the stuff I use for much the same reason, it's the same people telling other people they are "doing it wrong" and yet almost without fail those people aren't doing anything interesting. The ones I still respect don't say a real lot but either have amazing blogs full of interesting stuff or repo's full of interesting and useful projects. As my grandfather used to say "don't tell me I'm wrong, show me".
- liviu- 11y ago"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" - Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel
- jqm 11y agoIt's roughly put, but I sometimes wonder how people who appear to be doing really dumb things _did_ make it to adulthood....
- FLUX-YOU 11y agoProbably because the things they do aren't up to scrutiny. You don't know it's bad until someone/something comes along and tells you, or you just happen to discover a better way on your own (that someone else has probably already discovered). The computer doesn't shock you if you write terrible code, after all.
- lawnchair_larry 11y agoOpinions come from passion. You don't care for opinions because you are not passionate about programming. You just want to get a job done. To you, these opinions are noise. The obvious counterexample: Linus Torvalds.
- patio11 11y agoLinus is very talented. He is also a raging singularity of abuse who gets tolerated for it because he is extremely talented. I worry a little bit about logic which suggests that anyone who is insufficiently Linuxian in dealing with other people is thereby assumed simply to care less about programming.
- icebraining 11y agoa raging singularity of abuse Oh, come on. We hear about an over the top email every couple of years and we discuss them endlessly. Linus gets talked about because all of his communications happen in an open record. Not that it excuses his abuse, but a "singularity"? Please. Offices I know have instances of that kind (and worse) abuse every month, if not every week.
- coldtea 11y ago>Linus is very talented. He is also a raging singularity of abuse Only if you have never worked in any team outside nice cosy polite and P.C. US programmers. And I wouldn't even consider him "abusing". He is ranty, fun, and vocal about what he thinks.
- hebdo 11y agoExactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux. You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.
- pekk 11y ago
- Roritharr 11y agoMay I quote your first two paragraphs? I have a few people starting out as programmers who really need that kind of language to get that point to them.
- patio11 11y agoIn general, please feel free to quote a reasonable amount of anything I write.
- Matumio 11y agoThose are great, however I think "arbitrary code execution" in MonkeyBrainOS is not a flaw but working as intended. Better think twice before patching it, it may be part of this feature called empathy.
- tomjen3 11y agoWhere would one go to find a better peer group? Irc?
- chippy 11y agoMost of mine are face to face real people - some of those started out from blogs and IRC, in a kind of incubation stage. Some have been graduated from Twitter to a kind of incubation where I await meeting them in person before I afford them "write access to my brain". I find meeting people in person, one is able to really gauge people's personalities, passions, sense of humour, side interests and the like. And the side effect of meeting your heroes is that they appear to be just as human and fallible as yourself!
- davemel37 11y agoIf i ever met OP this is what I would tell him. There are two ways a low self esteem can materialize. One way is to put down the world to make you feel bigger than them. The other is to feel bad about yourself and proactively try to improve in anyway you can. Both might be unhealthy...but if you are like me and have a low self esteem...you are a million times better off being the second guy than the first...so you have that going for you. The reality is that you likely noticed these negative comments and took it to heart because of deeper issues. It sounds like you had a very difficult life so far. Try to focus on the good you do. Realize that programming is a tool to create things. Creating things is the greatest thing you can do in this world. Creating is a form of giving of yourself to the world. The knowledge in your head is yours but the websites you built are a real contribution. A positive contribution. Never stop creating and giving of yourself and try to remember wheneer you see a negative comment that you are giving good to the world and that commenter is giving bad to the world. If you focus on admiring those that create and give and forget the selfish ones that take and take.. You will slowly find your self worth from the people out there who build people up not break people down. This wont get fixed over night...but you are not alone and you are on the right track.
- michaelwww 11y agoI believe you could expand your thoughts further into a longer form and be well recieved. I look forward to reading more.