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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

It might be the other way around. I think you need to be right type of person to be a (good) software developer.

To be a (good) software developer you need to be at least a little bit honest with yourself (can't learn from mistakes if you can't acknowledge you made a mistake, etc.), you need to be curious, you need to be willing to observe and learn and you need to be able to put effort including in things that may not necessarily have immediate payoff.

All of which, I think, correlate with being a good person. Does not mean you will be a good person, it just means there is higher chance.

And, in retrospective, all good developers I have ever got chance to know a little better were nice, good people (at least to me). Which is not true for general developer population (which is to say I also got to know a lot of shitty people which were never good developers).

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>To be a (good) software developer you need to be at least a little bit honest with yourself (can't learn from mistakes if you can't acknowledge you made a mistake, etc.), you need to be curious, you need to be willing to observe and learn and you need to be able to put effort including in things that may not necessarily have immediate payoff.

>All of which, I think, correlate with being a good person. Does not mean you will be a good person, it just means there is higher chance.

None of this correlates with being a good person at all! Let's imagine that I am pure evil and want to maximize harm. Being honest with myself, learning from my mistakes, being curious, being willing to learn and observe, and putting effort into things that may not have immediate payoff are all going to make me better at poisoning the water supply or what have you.

These traits correlate with being effective, not good.

I think it is more of the opposite -- having those traits on its own doesn't make you a good person, but lacking those definitely makes you a bad person. :)

I think you are making logical mistake.

A trait can lead to a lot of different outcomes being more likely. Including outcomes that directly conflict with each other.

Saying "having these traits makes you more likely to be a good person" does not contradict saying "having these traits makes you more likely to be effective evil dictator".

You assume that if having certain traits makes you more likely to be effective evil mastermind it also means it must make it less likely that you are good person. Which is not true.

Imagine following situation: you want to measure how a trait makes it more likely that any random person out of entire population is a surgeon. And then you want to measure if a trait makes it more likely that any random person out of entire population is a lawyer.

We know that being lawyer conflicts with being surgeon -- both require significant investment of time and effort and you have to choose being one or the other.

But, we can find that having wealthy parents makes it more likely that you are both surgeon and lawyer. And that is because being surgeon and being lawyer both requires a heavy investment of time or money or both -- which is more likely to be possible if you have wealthy parents that can support you.

Which of course does not prove my point, but it does invalidate your argument.

No, I am not making a logical mistake, and your 'invalidation' of my argument is actually just restating it.

> You assume that if having certain traits makes you more likely to be effective evil mastermind it also means it must make it less likely that you are good person.

I do not, and I don't assume that the traits listed make you more likely to be an evil mastermind or a good person, I think they are completely unrelated to morality, and only related to effectiveness (this is what I mean when I say the traits don't correlate with being a good person at all). If you wanted to find the most effective neutral people, you would look for the same traits, because that's what they measure: effectiveness.

Another way of putting your claim: effective people are more likely to be good people. I think that is a very bold claim and have seen no evidence of it in my life, competence and goodness are orthogonal.

Don't know it there's a relationship to being a good person, for whatever moral interpretation of good.

But I do agree that it helps to be a good developer that you have good introspection skills, honesty, curiosity, and confidence to make mistakes and learn from them.

I agree with you.

But I think GP has a point, he just picked wrong qualities... I believe in software engineering especially it is important to have empathy (to code in a way that others understand) and humbleness (to accept your limitations in a team setting).

Maybe those correlate with being a good person? I don't know.

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