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Comment by tudelo | Hacker News Reader

"The personality traits for being a good programmer"

Could you expand on this? I would be interested in what part you find 'rare' -- I find there are tons of different niches/archetypes that a SWE can have.

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My very anecdotal experience: After teaching/mentoring quite a few SWEs from varying skill levels, the two traits that I find are the most important and at the same time rare are:

- Attention to detail

- High frustration barrier

Over the course of a career those become less and less important as one learns to use the appropriate tools (e.g. linters) and processes, but you still need them to get to that point. Especially for beginners, those two in practice most often break the "everyone can learn to program" trope, that I'd like to be true.

Indeed, I think it's two different frustration barriers. There's a high barrier to being frustrated enough to stop working on a difficult problem to improve a situation. There's a fairly low barrier to being frustrated enough with an existing solution to want to make that improvement.

I agree that that's also a very nice trait for a SWE to have, but I actually had the far more boring attention to detail in mind: Spotting syntactic errors in code and similar things like misspelling of variables, etc.. Hunting those down in the beginning also goes hand in hand with a high frustration barrier.

> everyone can learn to program

Indeed. Everyone can learn to write code. Not everyone can learn to program.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...

For lack of a better descriptor: behavioral traits one might identify as autism.

The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C to better implement their company's Lets Encrypt integration.

The person who actually stepped through Kelsey Hightower's Kubernetes the Hard way just because they thought Kubernetes was really cool.

The person who writes code for personal projects during "social hours" where others may be out with friends, out with their significant others, etc.

EDIT: I'll leave it for the integrity/honesty of the comment, but here are some descriptors I wish I'd used in the first place instead of 'autism':

* On the spectrum

* Extreme Introvert

* Socially disconnected

* Ties self-value to work-output in extreme ways

* Seeks joy from work versus social interaction & status

I don't think people should be so hard on you for your terminology choice. The term "autism" is overly broad. One might be talking about:

(1) Classical autism

(2) Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

(3) Broader autism phenotype (BAP)

If people were to understand you as talking about (3), well I don't think you said anything inaccurate. You obviously weren't talking about most individuals included under (1). As far as (2) goes, well at one end (2) includes (1), and at the other end (2) has a very vague boundary with (3).

> that one might identify as

Everyone seems to be missing this. It doesn't have to be in the DSM criteria, the parent poster is talking about the popular view.

I don't necessarily agree – I don't seek joy from work but I do things that others (my wife included) would consider as "work". The moment you tackle that label on them – or whenever I lose control of what I'm supposed to be doing – I'll no longer have the same joy.

> The person who for some reason is up on a Saturday night reading the NGINX source code in C

Sigh

Now this I have issue with. I think the best programmers I know will do something like this out of their own self interest. Maybe they are setting up some elaborate and over-engineered system for their own amusement.

If this is for work, though? You bet your ass I'll be reading that NGINX source code, if I have to, during work hours, however loosely defined those are. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes your mind will be so focused on something that it _just won't let go_. In which case, fine, Monday can't wait and I'll try this thing. As long as there is no expectations from the part of the company.

Saturday night I'll be mucking around with 3d printing, game engines, programming my own blog software for the 30th time in a new Scheme dialect, anything. Just not work.

I agree with you, but I think there’s an even more important point: spending your Saturday integrating nginx with certbot is quite frankly, an easy task - technically speaking. This is not even learning - this is your routine work task.

> For lack of a better descriptor: behavioral traits one might identify as autism.

I wouldn't identify any of your examples as signs for someone being on the autistic spectrum.

none of these have anything to do with autism...

Heh, you do need a better descriptor. That is the media's idea of the autistic savant. A very small minority of people on the lesser end of the autism spectrum may have some of those traits. The reality for the other 99% is vastly different.

What about individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP)? What the GP said probably does describe quite a few BAP individuals.

(And the boundary between BAP and ASD is rather ill-defined and subjective anyway.)

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