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Are Software Developers Naturally Weird?
jammag writes "Well, c'mon, yes — let's admit it. As a veteran coder discusses as he looks at his career, software development is brimming with the offbeat, the quirky and the downright odd. As he remembers, there was the 'Software Lyrics' guy and the 'Inappropriate Phone Call' programmer, among others. Are unique types drawn to the profession, or are we 'transformed over time by our darkened working environments and exposure to computer screen radiation?'"
There is no "normal" - everyone seems to have something. Developers (and geeks, in general) just wear it out there on their sleeve.
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It's the screen radiation, but The Others don't think that way...
I'm thinking that different professions have different levels of social pressure to conform to a certain way of behaving and appearing, and the coder profession has less of this pressure, perhaps because good programmers have to constantly question assumptions and think outside the box to come up with good designs. But hell if I know or care.
Here's a tip: everybody loves to think they're unique and "weird." The most conventional, boring, person you know is going to describe how wacky their party was if you ask.
In reality, there's no such thing as "weird" because there's no such thing as "normal." If you encounter somebody you think embodies "normal", well, you just don't know them well-enough. (I bet a lot of people thought Tom Cruise was normal before he started jumping on Oprah's couch.)
Comment of the year
Strange, weird and unique peoples work in every sphere of society. You only think coders are special because you happen to hang out with coders and not, say, accountants. If you were hanging out with accountants, you would find accountants a weird and diverse bunch too, but instead you have a stereotypical view of how accountants act, just like the rest of the population have a stereotypical view of coders.
The stories in the article don't seem unique to software at all. That type and degree of weirdness shows up in every type of work, techie or not. People are just strange! We all know our families are strange - we've either adapted and become oblivious, or moved on. With coworkers, however, we are forced to interact daily with a group of random people we don't get to choose individually. That exposes us to a broad cross-section of societal weirdness that we aren't used to, and we notice it. I think everyone has had this experience to some extent. That's one reason The Office is such a popular show; we can all identify the Michael Scotts and Dwight Schrutes in our lives.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
People with Asperger's syndrome - and left-handed people - make the best programmers. Ergo, weird comes with the terratory. I prefer "interesting". I'm "interesting"...and programming has kept me earning top dollar for 35 years.
I find that women with big tits make the best programmers and I have as much evidence as you do that proves me right.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Do weird people naturally become software developers?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
terratory
Sigh. Whenever we have these "we only seem weird to you cretinous neurotypicals because we're geniuses" circle jerks the sloppy spelling and grammar really starts to grate.
And actually it's completely back to front. We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Personally I think a lot of it has to do with power and boundaries - again, just like with small children. Because any IT person who shows a modicum of talent is so sought after, that their employers will go to great lengths to retain them. If that means playing along with their emotional issues, well: so be it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And some organizations do not put up with behavior at all that was mentioned in the article. A more professional manager would have a much different team an wouldn't have had the problem he had.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
What do you mean? African or european developers?
This must be some kind of a joke. The first "example" is:
When Ted would deliver his code for the QA group for testing, there would be much rolling of the eyes. You see, Ted like to sprinkle comments in his code that were not relevant to the software. And not just irrelevant comments, but just plain weird comments. For example, a case statement would be preceded with:
“I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above for mercy, ‘save me if you please.”
Huh? Or, a comment next to a loop would state:
“You spin me right round, baby right round like a record, baby Right round round round”
Yep – song lyrics. The first is from an Eric Clapton song “Crossroads” and if you saw the Wedding Singer, you’d recognize the looping Dead or Alive lyrics.
But, again huh???
Where these comments hurting anyone? Probably not, but they were at a minimum distracting.
That's not weird, this guy is just an idiot who can't be bothered commenting his code.
I'm fine with the occasional clever witty comment (I've done it myself) as long as the code makes sense and that everything is documented (e.g. This method does x, y, z and also takes over the world).
The other two examples are just as bogus:
a) a guy who interrupts co-workers at inappropriate times and starts chatting about life matters and doesn't know when to shut up.
b) a girl who's always on the phone distracting co-workers with inappropriate topics (calling guys about passing STDs to them and eventually doing phone interviews for other jobs).
I'm sorry, but none of this warrant a "software developers are naturally weird" headline. People are weird and every profession has its crazes. I can think of a lot of professions that suffer from the last two examples more so than software development.
This article is either a troll or the bastard child of a slow news Sunday, either way, I took the bait.
If you can't mod them join them.
If you think software developers are weird, you're not getting out enough.
Commission salespeople and futures traders are much weirder. Some CEOs are weird. Low-end rock musicians are weird. (Above the "club band" level, some sanity tends to emerge, or at least the self-destructive ones are filtered out.) Strippers are weird. Successful high-end call girls, though, tend to be chillingly sane when not in their work personas.
That's just nasty. That should really be part of an article titled: "Are Coworkers Sometimes Unpleasant?"
Well, it's inappropriate to make the call while at work (or at least, while you can be overheard) but otherwise it's very responsible to tell previous partners they might be at risk. All they have to do is get a test.
This article reminds me of a couple of incidents earlier in my career:
I usually find the HR department to be pain in the ass, but there are times when they are indispensable. When I first started working, I was managing a team of fresh college graduates. They all went out together after work one Friday for "movie night." The next week, one of the women who worked for me came to my office very upset. Turns out that after movie night, she'd gone to a bar with her fellow team members, then taken him back to her place and had sex. She was worried about pregnancy and disease because the sex had been unprotected. She was also upset that he was "being cold to [her]" the first day back in the office. At that point, I just said, "this is a topic for our HR department" and walked her and her "movie night buddy" to the office of the HR rep for our area. The resolution was to have one of them volunteer to be transferred to another area, but there was subsequent drama anyway. Social ineptitude coupled with inexperience and raging hormones is an unusually bad combination.
I also worked with a programmer who cursed worse than a sailor and "adjusted himself" more frequently than an entire team of baseball players. We used to take bets on how many times he would grab his crotch during a conversation, and if the meeting was all guys, we'd all adjust ourselves for laughs and to see if he'd pick up on it--he was completely oblivious. For whatever reason it went on for years without anyone ever doing anything about it. On the cursing part, he did eventually get called in to HR and scolded for his language, to which I am told his exact response was "Holy shit, I'm so fucking sorry." He still kept his job, though.
In that respect, neither handedness nor syndromes seems to have any relevance.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
I think this is the largest truth of it. Why are we good at things technological? Because we're so interested in it that we've spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. Time and effort that had to come at the expense of neglecting other activities.
Also, we tend to be a bit elitist in attitude and relish all things that set us apart. So we probably think we're weirder than we really are.
Also also, people are just weird. I've never known a normal person in my entire life.
I think most people who are detailed oriented are considered eccentric. Good businesspeople, programmers, chefs, military strategists, and anyone who has to have things a certain way are considered weird.
Programmers just happen to be more detail oriented than most everyone else. One character in a program with hundreds of thousands is the difference between having something that compiles and something that doesn't. It takes a certain type of personality to accept this as part of the job description.
There are certain people who have it worse - civil engineers and doctors, for example. Once they have computed a load or prescribed a treatment, there is no way to edit and rebuild.
I find that often hiring managers tolerate jerks in our profession because a lot of hotshot programmers develop a large ego early in their careers, aided by management teams that enable this disfunction. The net result is a work place with high turn over of 'normal people'. There are a lot of hiring managers who read Slashdot. My message to then is 'Don't hire jerks'. Great programmers have lots of options about who to work for. If you have a team where you tolerate jerks then good people will leave and good prospective employees will turn down your job offers after meeting your jerks during the interview process.
Geeks love to tell themselves self-congratulatory tales about how they're weird, or prone to Aspergers, or otherwise exempt from the normal conventions of human interaction, because they're so smart and talented. Hey baby, I'm a rockstar! I don't need to know all that crap about proper hygiene or graceful social interaction--my brain is too full of powerful code that's the next killer app!
Programming will mature as a discipline when programmers see themselves as not that different from any other skilled, educated professional.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
"Weird" is an irregular adjective that varies with the pronoun. An example illustrates best:
I am interesting
You are eccentric
He is weird
I find the best programmers are the ones with the maturity to complete a task when they said they would. Who can perform an exhaustive session of testing without complaining (even though it's boring, but necessary work). Who will produce the required documentation to a high standard and will play nice with the other members of the team they are in.
In that respect, neither handedness nor syndromes seems to have any relevance.
So how's Superman working out for you? I assume you didn't hire Batman because he has "issues".
Yes. Computing is warping our minds.
Computers are just so damn logical, working with them is completely removed from normal everyday life. It's well known that people anthropomorphize computers in order to deal with them in our own frame of reference, but conversely we also mentally shift our thinking into a logical form which we aren't evolved to deal with, so that we can work effectively with computers. The more closely you work with computers, the more this will affect you.
I don't think this is a new thing though. Mathematicians and people working in hard sciences have certainly faced the same sort of thing. For example, many early scientists (eg. Galileo) have faced persecution because they have found a mode of thinking that "normal" people have found objectionable.
It'll only get worse as technology progresses.
I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your evidence.
I don't have much respect for developers.
I am a simple laborer who couldn't afford higher education, but I have my geeky things, specially related to videogame design.
One day, I reunited enough will to combine my work with making a game of my own. It's still in early alpha but it's doing alright.
Thing is...knowing I have no full education background, I dealed with C and OpenGL and their quirky things (pathetic string support, stupid color handling requiring to learn GLSL to do something worthy, respectively), all by myself. This is not specially impressive, but I didn't do by choice. I had to learn the same way with art/pixel art/animation and sound/music as well as general technique to achieve effects. It wasn't difficult to learn to do the media, but the code is not as straightforward. So I tried looking for help around in order to do some specific things that were hard.
Every single programming question I deployed on the net was received with an elitist disregard, sending me to read tons of papers and stuff I don't really have an use for, specially because even if I try I can't understand it. They assume you have high education in MIT and you had to start from mainframes like they did or something. This is specially true on the IRC channel #opengl, where everyone seems to be too elite to deal with n00bs and giving incredibly obfuscated replies generally being more of a "don't bother me you fucking ignorant n00b".
Unfortunately I don't know anyone else who codes around me (this country is not specially literate on IT), since most of my people are laborers like me who'd rather watch TV and get drunk instead of venturing into a coding project. And I can't blame them because unless you reinvent the wheel infinitely you are doomed to be inferior to the top dogs there. They limit knowledge sharing with their arrogant and "I am better than you" attitude, and it's sickening.
There would be far more indie games and open stuff if they weren't so stubbornly elitist and shared that knowledge because it's going to die when they do otherwise.
Software developers are normal. It's the rest of the world that's weird.
if the meeting was all guys, we'd all adjust ourselves for laughs and to see if he'd pick up on it--he was completely oblivious. For whatever reason it went on for years without anyone ever doing anything about it. On the cursing part, he did eventually get called in to HR and scolded for his language, to which I am told his exact response was "Holy shit, I'm so fucking sorry." He still kept his job, though.
Here's the lesson I learned from your post: some people are willing to change, they just need someone to tell them how they should change. They might even be grateful that you've helped them change for the better.
Now, ask yourself: whenever you find people you'd like to change, do you want to risk them never changing by not asking? How does that weigh against the risk of them being offended by you asking?
Thinking over the folks I've worked with, I would have to agree that geeks in general share some common traits. We hate inaccuracy (sometimes pathologically). Most of us have at least one toy (maybe more) on or in our desks. Geeks that do tech support all hate "stupid users" but depend on them for a living (there's a dichotomy). Programmers usually expect true logic to apply to people and are disappointed in people when they won't be logical. Most of us come in late and work late. Once we go home, we get on our computer at home. We tend to like science fiction and fantasy books/movies (including comic books). We will easily convince a non-player character to join our dungeon quest but get a "deer in the headlights" look when confronted with asking someone out on a date.
Not every geek will conform to the stereotype, but stereotypes come about because they are observations about life. We're not all like the above description, but see if there aren't several of those traits that apply to you.
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
In order to be a good programmer, one has to have a very good memory for trivia. Why do you think Ken Jennings, a programmer, was the best Jeopardy contestant of all time? Computer systems and APIs are so complicated that if one cannot remember a good chunk of the APIs and how trivia about how parts of the systems work, it can be difficult to get anything done.
Having a good memory for trivia makes it easy to see all kinds of connections among things in non-programming life, namely in culture, or in day-to-day life in general. This usually leads to a special kind of creativity in which one brings together one's own set of personal behaviors from tying things together instead of just following a template that society provides for us. For instance, instead of trying to imitate the confident corporate person they see on TV, a programmer will choose their outfit based on utility and comfort, pulling together shoes, pants, gadgets, etc, based on utility and comfort.
I find that women with big tits make the best programmers and I have as much evidence as you do that proves me right.
That's just not true. Haven't you looked around? It's the men with the biggest tits that make the best programmers.
Helicopter Problem
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment.
Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to steer to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position in Seatle.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because, similar to their help-lines, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer."
Programming involves trying to reproduce the literal mindedness of an autistic person. Maths involves deliberate abstraction from the real world. Surgery involves doing things that may kill someone in order to cure them. It's unsurprising that these occupations too can result in strange mindsets in their practitioners.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
First, I am sick to death from seeing people try to claim some watered down form of a mental condition that excuses excessive behaviors they mostly wish they had and makes them seem special without having to put much efforts towards it or even understanding much about it. Understand this about autism/Aspergers and pretty much any state considered disordered as compared to the general population: meeting a diagnostic criteria includes having some persistent behavioral anomalies. Having some of the same persistent behavioral anomalies does not qualify one for the diagnosis. Very few of any who actually earn the diagnosis are capable of anything productive. And if one were to go with the behavioral criteria, the vast majority would earn themselves a far less appealing diagnosis or three, and which point they'd rebel against the process and disclaim any association with any disorder.
Now, we have in fact looked at 'weird' in psychology, but mostly as to what people think it is, rather than an objective state. I've looked at what kinds of people get that label and how. Programmers, or geeks/nerds in the technical literature, earn that label -- literally. They tend to start out more similar than most, and develop a specific quirk or three in order to exert individuality. They themselves keep each other within boundries of weirdness by approving or disapproving of others quirks, as often as not in how they're expressed rather than pure content. The effect is one of most people taking on the task of marking themselves an individual by developing an unusual, hopefully unique set of markings for their clothing. They appear to ignore the fact that the piece of clothing is a jacket collar. They appear to be unable to recognize that the collar is always on a Nehru jacket.
The defining word is "affectation". The evidence is in the desperation with which the concept is held and in how vehemently it is denied. A close analogy can be drawn with those who have strong anti-authoritarian rebelliousness early in life. It is not that they are anti-authoritarian, but rather than they are overly sensitive to it and dislike the fact that early in their life they are near the bottom of the ladder. They frequently end up at the other extreme. Likewise, the chronically similar act to differentiate themselves as soon as their situation allows, but only within a limited way, the rest remaining a recognizable part of the fairly closed group for which similarity of some sort remains more a badge than the differences. These too tend to evolve to the opposite end of the spectrum, common end states being either comparing swag t-shirts from conferences, or comparing their ties, the only major item of difference they would ever consider sporting having bought into management.
You may now feel free to mod me down as troll or flamebait just because I've answered the question with my own considered opinion which will no doubt prove unpopular. Refer back to "vehemence".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Agreed; "Are you not going?" conveys that the asker thinks you're not, and wants to confirm that. He wants to communicate this assumption, rather than just asking "Are you going?", which implies he doesn't know one way or another (he could communicate that he thinks you are going by asking "Are you still going?").
But the way he asks it puts the listener in a bind. Should the listener take it literally, or negate its meaning? Negating its meaning just leads to more unclear cases, ones that I might notice but answer in a way that differs from what the asker is assuming. Often I only realize later that a question I asked was ambiguous, or an answer I gave was ambiguous, and then start to wonder whether the other person is doing what I thought he would.
I want to avoid this from the start, so I disambiguate a question with my answer. The asker can still convey his assumption in this case by asking "Are you staying?". If he can't eliminate the negation, he can still ask something like "Is it correct that you're not going?"
So I don't think it's a simple thing like you describe. If you're going to fault people like me, it must be for thinking of the larger picture and the overall effect of ambiguous questions, the king of thinking that programmers do when deciding on coding styles with regard to defect rates.
Study more languages!
The interesting part is when you realize that for example English and Japanese have opposite rules for answering negated questions. Japanese focuses on the person asking (assuming you are not coming) and English answers the topic at hand (if you're going to the party or not)
Scandinavian languages have three words for "yes" and "no", the last one only when replying to negated sentences. (Which makes it translate to "Yes" in English and "Iie" ("No") in Japanese). I have no idea why there is no 4th word to handle the opposite answer.
And this is why everyone should learn more languages. To realize that words are not a 1:1 mapping of the world, but that the way the human mind relates to things and defines your place in the world is strongly linked to which languages you operate with.
(I had a few drinks. I'll go to bed before I come up with long arguments about language being the OS for the brain. Sorry about the typos ;)
I lost my sig.