My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means. | Hacker News Reader

My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means.

renaebair.com

162 pointswebista55 comments

My partner also had no clue what I do, so she asked to learn. Not to learn how to code, but what it involves. So we took a couple nights and we wrote a small program together just so she could understand what it means when I say 'function' or 'UI'. At each step I explained why we were doing things and what it entailed and what some of our options could be, but stopped short of actual code semantics. At the end we had a working program and she understood how it was put together and in turn, what my daily routine entails. To this day she doesn't get that blank look and is able to ask questions. The fact she took the time to do that meant a lot to me.

Keeper.

I think sharing passion is great. Perhaps it isn't reasonable to expect unless you met through that passion, but simply 'entering your world', just a bit, is oh so important. What you guys did is amazing. You surely have a strong foundation in your relationship.

Unfortunately I just broke off an engagement to a lady who does event planning for a museum. When I met her almost 4 years ago she was working clothing retail on a hiatus from school. I encouraged her to finish her degree and to apply for internships before graduating. She didn't know what she wanted to do and the museum gig fell into her lap thru an acquaintance, but she loves art and consequently loves her job.

I went to most events she hosted over the period of a year she had the job and we were still together. I chatted up dozens of her co-workers, hung out dutifully, walked thru the exhibits with her as she explained them. I enjoyed it even though it wasn't my thing, it was fun to learn and I was proud of her.

During this period I went to two Startup Weekends. I asked her to come visit. Esp. the second one where my pitch was selected and I built a team of 7. I wanted her to see the final demonstration, to simply be there - for nothing else I was presenting in front of a crowd of 100 people and I was nervous. She would not come. She did "not like computers, that's your thing", paraphrasing. That was the major turning point...

It's not about learning to program, or to even take a passing interest or understanding. It's simply, "this is my life's work, please support me." I think if you can't get that out of a relationship that's a major red flag.

Sorry about that.

I'm with someone who isn't quite supporting me either. I'm glad you broke up with her. I mean that in the nicest way. The situation can't be maintained especially if you're being supportive but it isn't reciprocal. I started a company and my girlfriend cannot get on board because of everything that comes with it (long hours, sleepless nights, etc). She's told me to quit and "get a real job" (whatever that means... To her it means working for someone else) several times despite the fact that the business is a huge success, raking in twice as much as my previous job and ten times as much as our first 3 months in business. It's important you have a supportive partner. Lack of interest or support is very telling of where a relationship will eventually end up.

Thank you, I appreciate hearing that. It's been a difficult thing for my friends, and esp. my family to grasp. In many ways we were compatible, but I consider this crucial. Most are passively accepting now "well, as long as you're happy". Only my best friend who is around my age (I'm 35, he's 37), who also has never been married and has been an entrepreneur for the past decade truly understands.

As to your own situation, I get that long hours, lack of attention and whatnot are difficult to deal with... but it sounds like you've proven success in your endeavor. Seems like a bit of a double-bind. One thing I can say is, being single certainly simplifies things! I dated two girls briefly after we broke up but have now made the choice to not do that for awhile, the time I gained is precious and there's nothing wrong with being alone for awhile to capitalize on it. There are many women out there and there is nothing more attractive than a man fulfilling his purpose in life.

People are afraid of being placed in a situation that's totally alien to them. It's not as alien -- it's not as big a deal for you to go through an art gallery and chat up yuppies as it is for her to go through a convention center being gawked at by nerds.

After my girlfriend and I had been going out for six months or so -- this was five or six years ago -- I got her a laptop and a wacom pad. She was a painter -- she'd never touched photoshop, illustrator, corel or anything. I tried to teach her how to use them. She got so frustrated, at one point she held the laptop out a window and threatened to throw it down six stories. But she's amazing with it now -- she's actually one of the highest-paid, most in-demand freelance illustrator/designers I know. I knew she had the skill.

But to this day when I talk about getting her to sit down and see something of the code I write, she gets a look on her face that I know not to mess with. I'd love to walk her through what I do, but I know she understands as much as she needs to, and it's not compatible with the way she thinks. It doesn't do anything for her. That's alright.

My point? It's easier for us to go back into their world than it is for them to understand ours.

I don't think presenting a business idea is any more alien to the average person than an art gallery.

My girlfriend's working through K&R this month. I told her if she gets through chapter five, we'll talk.

There aren't enough people saying it: You lucky bastard.

And if you don’t have even a basic understanding of what your spouse does with 40+ hours of his/her week, then you’re not on a team.

That's quite the generalization. My wife has almost no knowledge of most areas of my work, but it's never been a negative or caused any friction in my non-work life. That said, I don't really have much interest in sharing it either, as there's more than enough to discuss and do as a family outside of my work hours.

I agree. Expanding your horizons is great, and if you get to do it with a loved one, that's even better, but it's not a necessary part of every relationship. I've dated guys who knew nothing about programming, and I wouldn't be ashamed to take them to company parties to mingle with my fellow programmers, and I don't look down on spouses I meet who don't program either, they're often interesting in a different way.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

I, too, agree... for me, at least, I don't care that my wife really understands what I do (although she gets it to a point). For me the important thing is that she isn't bored by me talking about it :)

That is to say, while she doesn't really understand it, she will let me talk/vent about it as much as I need to. Just as I don't really understand what she does, but I'm more than happy for her to talk about it.

I do not have a family but I have yet to be a in a good relationship with a girl that didn't understand (or cared enough to try) what I do. I also have to be highly interested in what she's passionate about.

I'm not that 40-hours type of guy (right, no family). Programming & stuff is my job but also one of my hobbies – that probably makes it far more important for me than non-passionate geeks.

Make sure not to confuse "non-passionate" geeks with those who have multiple interests.

Keep an open mind to other things besides "programming & stuff".

I do find it a little bit odd, though. I guess some careers aren't that interesting or you don't spend that much time thinking about them at home so there isn't any reason to share it with your SO.

But my husband is an academic, so his academic side is "always on," so to speak. I feel like some coders are like that too. If you're the kind that's always thinking about your work I think it would we weird if you don't share that with your wife. Last night before bed I read him a paper he needed to read. Granted, I think I only read the abstract before falling asleep, but I like that we share things with each other.

That about... what if he was a spy? You kind of have to leave well enough alone at that point.

I think it depends on how long you've been together. If you're a professional, you should be able to explain the fundamentals quite easily to anyone, including your spouse. If you have a healthy relationship I think over a long enough time span you'll eventually pick it up just from active listening and asking questions to fill in the gaps when your significant other needs to vent their frustrations or share their excitements.

My wife's a professional geologist and we've been together about 8 years. I took a single introductory geology course in university but nowadays I've got a pretty solid understanding of the subject (I can hold my own conversationally with PhD geologists at her work events and such) and likewise, while my wife has never written a program or script once in her life, she understands quite a bit about the topic just by being married to me for so long now (she's often my rubber duck at home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging).

That said, we have a 1 year old child now. Careers aren't usually a topic that crops up around the house lately.

This is something that I think about a lot, actually.

If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those things?

Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and so on. But please consider the other viewpoint.

Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion?

My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others.

Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance of sharing gists with?

I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.

Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you, or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or coding with your SO, then you're lucky!

Teachers should only marry teachers? Nurses should only marry nurses? It doesn't work in the "other" direction, why should it work in this? (Remember, gender disparities entirely as strong as computer science exist in the other direction; people just don't angst about them as much.)

I'd present an alternate point of view, as someone who has been married to not-a-programmer for 11 years now... passion != monomania. You probably ought to have something other than programming you can talk about and incorporate into a relationship. I won't quite say monomania is "bad", but it isn't without costs, and certainly ancient wisdom has expounded the benefits of being a well-rounded person for a very, very long time. It's not wrong.

Teachers should only marry people who understand what a "teacher" is.

I think the 'no women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.

While I agree with your basic sentiment that "the no women in tech" thing does limit social opportunities in that regard, that isn't what you say in your closing sentence. Your closing sentence is a great deal more sweeping and I think it's inaccurate.

In circles I have hung out in at various times, referring to the husband as "in house tech support" was bragging rights. In my experience, an awful lot of men who can't get a date are so sure no woman would want _________ that they make it absolutely impossible to tell them "Uh, actually, I'm real into men like that". They put women in a position where admitting you actually think they are attractive and all/most of the things they are listing about themselves as negatives are viewed as positives gets spun into "god what a loser. who would do her?" It becomes a case of "I wouldn't join any club that would have me" type thing. Furthermore, I typically shy away from trying to give people a clue who clearly need one when posting on public forums because it puts me in danger of having it misinterpreted as an invitation and being mobbed by unwanted attention. I mention that only to suggest that statements like that tend to become self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing prophecy.

(For the record: I am currently celibate for medical reasons and not looking for a relationship. Please don't (anyone) tempt me to go into stomach-churning details about why you (plural) don't want to hit that. Thanks.)

Please call it the "fewer women in tech" thing. I know you intend "no women in tech" as hyperbole, but it makes some women feel erased (not to mention erasing important history), and I know that's not your goal!

Ah, of course.

Thanks for catching that.

Ah grasshopper, much to learn you have. :-)

Seriously, don't sweat this. While your logic is completely valid, one thing I've learned in personal relationships is that logic is, in-and-of-itself, rather useless in determining relationship success.

Unless you're a robot, people come with things like emotions and feelings and all kinds of other baggage that are impervious to logic. Not just your partner, but yourself. And you usually don't realize it until later.

Your expectations about spending time with someone who shares your passion isn't unrealistic at all. But in the end, a relationship is about people, not your passion. You may find a partner because of your passion, but he/she will stick around because of who you are -- not what you do.

> I've learned in personal relationships is that logic is, in-and-of-itself, rather useless in determining relationship success.

Absolutely. We are all far from rational actors in this endeavor. You can make all the sense you want, but it's just wasted energy.

Finding people who share your passions is relatively easy. We advertise them on our sleeves. There are, literally, catalogs and clubs and conferences and books and lecture circuits and cruises devoted to any given pastime, from Ethiopian funk music of the 1970s to small-scale software companies focused on order tracking.

Finding a romantic partner or a spouse is a wholly different problem which generally plays out on a completely different level.

I do not think that anyone can dispute that not sharing your SO's passions on some level is not a good thing. Over simplifying the comment with outliers does not negate the validity of the comment. If you are with someone that is the most awesome person in the world and the fact that they do not share your central passion can be over looked you are not the norm you are the unusual and as th OP said consider your self very lucky. Although, if people were completely objective most would admit that it would be better if their SO did share their passions, regardless of how good there relationship is now.

I somewhat "solved" this problem by marrying a designer. She might not be the one I geek out about code with, but she sure as hell understands and forgives long hours in front of the computer and appreciates when the final product performs well, looks beautiful and is easy to use.

At the end of the day I didn't marry her because of that though. If sharing a single passion would be the key to a successful marriage, I think we'd see whole lot less divorces and many more same-sex marriages.

Congratulations!

Hmmm. Marrying a designer almost makes more sense ... ;)

I hasten to clarify that I think about this as an optimization problem. I don't think it's impossible to be perfectly happy without it.

All of the people I have my closest relationships with are non-technical; manifestly, it works.

I had to think for 30 seconds before I understood what SO was actually supposed to mean in your last sentence, as Stack Overflow didn't seem to fit in...

My wife doesn't get my work, but that's actually good in some respects. I would personally grow bored if we could only communicate on a technical level. Some things are better when they don't make sense and you can't exactly put your finger on why.

In the end I find it keeps me grounded in reality. Sometimes her perspective is the cold shower my technical enthusiasm needs to focus.

As a female programmer I get the same blank stares from a lot of men also. I explain what my programs do and how they make certain processes more efficient, talk about our customer stories. But then, I don't work for SAP or some vague consultancy firm. I have a friend who is a manager in an oil company: I have no idea what he does day to day but I do know that he gets to take a helicopter to work sometimes. We talk about the cool stuff.

So, here is the list of the things that I'm most passionate about (all with equal weight):

* Application Security

* Black and White fine art photography with an emphasis on people

* western furniture from 1910-1965

* The women's fashion industry between 1990-2000

* 20th Century Russian literature

* Syncopation in drumming

My girlfriend has absolutely zero interest in any of those. Sometimes she'll patronize me when I start going off on a tangent about one of them, but more often than not, she'll stop me and say "elevator" which is her code to let me know to just give her the highlight of what I'm talking about.

If I were compiling a list of qualities for an ideal relationship partner, I might include any or all of those as things I'd like them to share an interest in. It would seem to be beneficial to be with someone with similar interests.

I've known people who share similar interests. I don't quite think there's another person who shares all of my passions, but with the exception of application security (for what it's worth, I've yet to have a relationship with someone else who likes busting applications), I've been with people who are also passionate about those things. There's been no appreciable difference in how those relationships have turned out.

The one thing which I do think is of the utmost importance, is for your relationship partner to understand "passion", regardless of what your passion is in.

My girlfriend is a writer. She understands that when I'm sitting at my computer for long periods of time swearing about session id's and verbose error messages I'm in a similar state to how she gets when she's sitting in front of her computer writing.

She loves how excited I get when I storm out of my office into the kitchen and tell her "They're totally fucked, I can take money from other people's accounts." If I start to regale her with the method I've used to perform such an activity; she gives me the look, and I stop. But she gets why I'm excited.

So I'm not going to go so far as to say that it'd be a bad thing to be in a relationship with someone who shares the same passions as you, but I will say I think the key is finding someone with passion about anything. Someone who will give you support when you're spinning your wheels, or can't quite figure out how to do what you want to do. Those people are keepers.

And the gcache'd version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...

Still loads intolerably slow for me, here's the text-only cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...

Thanks a lot, I simple can't figure out how to get to Google Cache on touch screen devices as it looks like that their instant preview thingie is triggered by the mouse hover event.

Appending `cache:` to the url works. Example:

    cache:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/

That's 'prepending' (just so you know).

Yes. I noticed it after I had missed my edit window.

Discussion from last year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595950

I think generally this might not be about relationships per se, but simply what kind of person you are.

It would seem weird to me to be in a relationship with a person and not get involved in their field; but that's just because I'm that kind of person. I view everyone as a potential teacher. When I dated a physicist, I got into physics; a computer scientist, computer science; a Go player, I learned to play Go; an epidemiologist, I learned epidemiology.

But not everyone is like that, in fact probably most people are not... so it probably has less to do with your relationship and more about personality type.

Available in Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

My Christmas present from my wife was a presentation of screenshots of her programming tutorial. She's been learning python in secret, to show me that she wants exactly what the article advises: to understand what it is that I do for a living. I feel privileged to have married her.

That's awesome.

That's what I thought!

At a certain level I agree with the OP, but only where "basic understanding" is something that can be decided between two people.

Characterizing whether or not my wife has an appreciation for the tools I use in my job as a measure of the strength of our relationship is, for us, completely invalid. My wife can barely explain what I do for a living. But she knows that I love what I do, and she's supportive within the context of what she understands.

This post really just speaks to how this particular person measures her relationship with her partner. Anyone else drawing out this singular aspect of a relationship as a gauge for matrimonial harmony is on a fool's errand.

100% agreed. My wife is a labor and delivery nurse. I ask her many questions about her job but I have no interest in learning to how give an IV or check for effacement.

If someone you're dating is not interested in learning your programming language, don't hold it against them. Most likely, there are other reasons why they are dating you in the first place.

Reading this makes me appreciate that my wife is also a software engineer and instantly understands things I talk about. We've been together for a long time (met near the end of college at RIT) but it's one of those life perks that I take for granted sometimes because I forget that it's definitely not the norm.

There's a subcontext here that is separate from the appalling notion of being not interested in what your husband/wife works on. Consider the statement: "My husband's specialty is comparative literature and I don't know what that means" or "My wife is an art historian and I don't know what that means". If I heard one of these statements I would think (to myself) "what an ignoramus!". Well, if it's not OK for those, why is it OK for engineering or science? This brings us to the classic the two cultures debate, articulated simplistically by C. P. Snow but echoed by many, many other scientists. I think the gap has widened in the past decades.

I just asked my wife and she said she just tells people I'm a spy. When I pressed her for why she said what I do is too technical therefore I'm keeping it hidden from her and that must mean I'm a spy.

Great article and it goes both ways of course. Curiosity about another person is the only way to keep things fresh, regardless of how platonic the relationship is.

For geeks: remember that sometimes there are much more interesting things in the analog world than whatever you're immersed in digitally. ;)

My wife isn't a programmer, but understands some of the stuff I do at a high level. I think that it makes conversations much more efficient. I can come home bummed out a little, she asks "what's wrong?", and I tell her that my code keeps crashing, or that I can't get some library to build, etc - and she gets it - end of conversation about that. It also helps out when I have to put in extra hours to get some stuff done ... she knows that this work can sometimes require a great amount of effort.

Really nice post. I'm a designer/developer and I'm lucky my wife understands the work I do.

In college, my girlfriend (at that point of two years) knew I was into incomprehensible theoretical math, but apparently I had never mentioned anything about computers or programming, which I was also pretty into.

One day we were both working in my room and a bunch of LexisNexis links she'd saved earlier just wouldn't work. She was on the verge of tears and panic — she'd spent days collecting these links, and now none of them worked. I said "lemme see" and sat down with her computer. I poked around with her saved links and tried some stuff on LexisNexis. Then I wrote a perl one-liner to munge her URLs. Voila: the munged URLs all just worked (the links had IP-based auth token that I just s///'d).

At no other point in my life have I been looked at with quite that degree of amazement and hero-worship.

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