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Comment by apl | Hacker News Reader

He's absolutely correct on this issue. People in the programming professions surprisingly often go overboard with the whole coder myth -- it's a fairly interesting form of self-aggrandizement.

1) 80% of all programmers are Java people hacking away in auto-completing IDEs, constrained by rigid corporate guidelines. I doubt that their thinking has a fundamentally unique dimension when compared to other lower-tier knowledge workers.

2) Plenty of professions (engineers, lawyers, academics in various fields, law enforcement agents, and so on) require analytic skills, symbolic thought etc.

Sure, programmers at the top of their game have abilities that separate them from regular people. But that's a trivial truth that applies to 99% of all fields of human endeavor.

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Of course, anyone who uses an auto-completing IDE must be an intellectually stunted amateur.

apl is asserting a correlation, not a cause or even a symptom.

For example (and at the risk of revealing my poor music tastes :P), the phrase "volvo driving soccer mom" doesn't imply that all volvo drivers are soccer moms, nor that driving a volvo will make you a soccer mom.

Childish. Also, proving my point that not all programmers are logicians.

I actually read that post as sarcasm, not as seriousness, but I could be wrong.

He's joking, and hence the upvotes...

HN does better without such jokes. Obvious jokes are noise.

The fact that it needs to be pointed out somewhat belies that it is an obvious joke.

Well, that's because it might just be sarcastic criticism. As a joke, it is obvious. That does not mean that it is obvious that this was a joke. Which is exactly why we should do without them. It removes exactly the pointless discussion it has led to.

I think that in some ways programming is a lot easier than some areas in that it is often very easy to get feedback on whether our work has performed or not (especially in this day of TDD).

Contrast this with a lawyer writing a contract - you can't write unit tests, there is no source code debugger and most contracts never get "executed" in the fullest sense of being interpreted in court so you don't really know what they mean in practical terms. This would drive me crazy.

That's also what makes programming harder. As a lawyer you can write a contract that is literally factually incorrect with respect to the law, and may never get tested and actually works as intended (gets two parties to abide by the rules of the contract).

In programming, the first test is the computer. If my program doesn't compile or pass unit tests, I can't even get it to the client or customer.

(I know this was not your point, but...) Actually, many areas of law are very rigid (in the logical sense) and, imho, quite appealing to the analytical thinker discussed in this post. The practice of law may not be like that (although I don't know for sure (yet)), but the same can be said from the 'practice' of the corporate MS Access programmer or the cookie cutter CMS web programmer.

This is why I like the word "hacker" outside of it's more "modern" meaning. A programmer can be nearly anyone with some basic skills, but a hacker is a fundamentally different animal from the rest of the general population. The hacker doesn't even necessarily have to be better than the bulk of his non-hacker, regular programmer, peers (though I imagine you'll often find that to be the case) because it's not about skill, it's about mindset.

It's certainly not limited to programming either of course. I would likely consider a career electrician who moonlights as a coiler (of telsa coils) to be a hacker. If I had to put the meaning of it into words, I would say a hacker is anyone who has a passion for the art of something, as opposed to someone who merely participates.

> This is why I like the word "hacker" outside of it's more "modern" meaning. A programmer can be nearly anyone with some basic skills, but a hacker is a fundamentally different animal from the rest of the general population. The hacker doesn't even necessarily have to be better than the bulk of his non-hacker, regular programmer, peers (though I imagine you'll often find that to be the case) because it's not about skill, it's about mindset.

Not sure if you realize it, but this ties in perfectly with apl's original point about self-aggrandizement. What better way of congratulating yourself for being a different, superior kind of person than using a term which (by your definition) puts you into an exclusive club without even requiring you to be smarter?

The difference is the explicit mention that neither group is superior. Splitting people up by how "smart" they are (how can you even begin to measure that?) is entirely uninteresting. Think of it more like a division between "Type A" and "Type B" personalities.

It's not about smarts or superiority, it's just a way of classifying motivation.

When did you say that neither group is superior? You said that "hackers" don't have to be more skilled, but every other part of your post implies that you think they're superior as human beings.

I say that hackers don't have to be more skilled (superior - in my personal definition of the term).

I also state that I believe they more often than not are more skilled (which I recognize and appropriately tag as my own opinion, not a fundamental part of the concept)

Even more than that, there's the whole hustle element to good hacking. That hustler + hacker combination is how you get amazing things done. (Shall we call them... the haxlers?)

I agree, especially on the part about law. "Legalese" is like natural language programming. It's very well structured, but very hard to parse for people not in the know (like myself). I think writing solid contracts is very much like writing solid programs, if only in the type of thinking that goes into it.

I think the delusion may stem more from the fact that there have been far more software engineers than say, lawyers, law enforcement agents that have had a huge impact on society. This doesn't mean they are at the absolute top of the heap - I think there is an open recognition that there are a number of other sciences that are having the same type of impact right now.

Whether or not this has anything to do with a truly "different" way of thinking, that's up for argument.

> I think the delusion may stem more from the fact that there have been far more software engineers than say, lawyers, law enforcement agents that have had a huge impact on society.

Is that so?

Abraham Lincoln ring a bell? Didn't do too bad for a lawyer.

Law enforcement has a HUGE impact on society try to imagine the world without it for about an hour or so.

Really, the delusion that we have a huge impact on society is to the detriment of seeing how much other professions, both individually and collectively have on our society and that we are only able to function in our respective niche because others do their work.

Even garbage disposal is essential and has huge impact on society and it's one of the most menial jobs.

I had to reread your first sentence quite a few times. You're saying that software engineers in total have had more of an effect on society than lawyers or law enforcement officers? If this is really what you're saying, I think that you are taking the work of these two groups of people completely for granted. Software engineers have affected society, but universally more than lawyers and police? I highly doubt this. You recognize that the vast majority of politicians in the US (for example) and other makers of policy tend to be lawyers, right? That almost every major court proceeding that determined interpretation of legislation and the Constitution have primarily been lawyers? Law enforcement agents also have a huge impact on society...by preventing it from imploding.

I'm not saying that software engineers aren't reshaping the world, but let's not use this as a springboard to downplay the (very important) contributions of other members of society.

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