This is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Programming is an activity that makes you face your own fallibility all the time. You write some code, compile it or run it, and then 80% of the time, it doesn’t work exactly the way you imagined. There’s an error message, or it just behaves incorrectly. Then you need to iterate on it and fix the issues until you get the desired result, and even then it’s subtly wrong, and causes an outage at 3am on Sunday.
I thought this experience would teach programmers to be the humblest people in the world.
I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?
I don’t think it has anything to do with being a programmer or not, it’s just about being a human and that’s basically how human are in general.
So yeah, I think if a person is ‘meant’ to be mean and arrogant they will be mean and arrogant no matter the job.
Overall you can make many mistakes in almost any field before mastering it. The only things I can think of that are kind of specific to programming (not exclusive though) are that you don’t have to be nice to people(which is kind of a requirement for sales, for example) and access to feeling of accomplishment that you have created something possibly great.
Plus being slightly more disagreeable is generally a good feat for a programmer (depends on the company and position) which also may contribute to the cause.
Yeah, overall I don’t think I really felt any correlation between being a programmer and being an asshole.
Edit: On the second thought I think there’s a possible correlation between being a programmer and how much of an asshole they could be…