Computer Science Personality Disorder? | Hacker News Reader

Computer Science Personality Disorder?

40 pointsacademictemp25 comments

I'm an academic in CS. I'm constantly frustrated with the way people in my community behave (I call it computer science personality disorder).

It feels like so many academics in my community are competing to be that stereotypical "genius non-personable guy who just doesn't realize he's rude." Don't get me wrong, these people are smart. But they're not geniuses -- mostly just above average guys LARPing as Sheldon Cooper. I sometimes wonder whether the CS community would be better off with people half as smart but twice as collaborative and supportive.

Is this everyone else's experience?

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I’ve witnessed a room full of half as smart people trying to get a project done many times. They’ll take 10 months setting meetings and talking in circles, because no one knows enough to actually get started.

Generally, there needs to be at least one lone wolf (or someone who wishes they were a lone wolf) who reads the manual and starts building the thing. At least then everyone else has something to talk about and the discussions can start to have some real direction to helping shape what comes next after the base is laid down.

While it’s great if this person has people skills, it isn’t always the case. Either way, the person is needed. I think somewhere around 1 in 5 people on a team need to have some of that in them. They make the seismic changes, and the others are around to support and maintain.

Problems arise when the person in question can’t back up their big talk with getting things done, and their personality isn’t just a quirk worth dealing with, but an obstacle that drags the whole team down. I’ve experienced this as well and it wasn’t fun.

IT is a profession that attracts that type of personality. From autism to assholes. "Technically correct" is the best kind of correct for technology. Technology is an often "exacting" science in the eyes of those individuals even when it isn't exacting, it's just their strongly held preference or belief.

If you go into the profession, you will not be able to avoid it in a corporate environment. If it isn't something you feel you could handle and burn your way through, consider small teams, non-IT companies, or consulting/running your own business.

But these kind of people exist in every profession as do autistic individuals and assholes. It's part of being an adult and improving your interpersonal skills.

There have been many lone wolves who have created great things in our world. Don't discount them. You would not be "better off".

I would agree - especially developers are prone to develop this "better than you" attitude. The detail-oriented job of a developer and the need for exactness and correctness of the code leads to a high transparency of the quality of someone's work and facilitates comparisons on a peer level. I have the feeling, developers treat their work as some kind of puzzle and look to see who can solve this puzzle quicker and better - a very competitive environment with clear rights and wrongs. If you have an edge, you can abuse this situation.

B players with too much ego are the kinds who put PhD on their card/throw titles around, talk about MENSA, and challenge everyone else to trivia contests. At a big name, exclusive department, more than half of the people were normal and well-adjusted, while the other half skewed on a continuum of quirky to mildly obnoxious or ego now and then but not completely intolerable. TED speakers and people with giant awards, prizes, and h-index. The worst types are the completely intolerable folks who are overconfident and treat others badly because of a superiority complex... the "big fish, tiny pond"-"Comic Book Guy" lifers are found in megacorps.

Another aspect to keep in mind is the ambiguity and conflation between a continuum of intentional (jerk) to unintentional (dork) lack of honest and accurate looking-glass self.

Finally, another anti-pattern of some subject matter experts is being too comfortable within a narrow range of subjects, talents, life experiences, etc. and being generally excessively risk adverse.

The best thing one can do is broaden their horizons by finding where the artists, (sane) homeless people, OG's, and otherwise interesting and genuinely awesome people hang out. Makerspaces, hidden cafe or bar, or so on. I met way more interesting quasi-homeless people in Palo Alto than former Apple employee #4 jerk friend-of-a-friend swinging their Lambo keys around. Ego is boring, status is boring, and absurd wealth is boring too.

> I call it computer science personality disorder

Yes, I think that if you're neurotypical, and you find it difficult to relate to the neurodivergent, you should dismiss them as being assholes.

> who just doesn't realize he's rude

NT's make the social rules, and everyone else should fall in line, I get it. In this case, you should just go old school and stuff them in a locker because they're harshing your chi, bro.

> Is this everyone else's experience?

Absolutely. I'm not in academia, but I've found that we need to address this scourge early on. Identify these pieces of shit early in grade school. Give them wedgies, laugh at them, beat the shit out of them on the playground, steal their property, call them names, isolate them in the cafeteria, make them the butt of every public joke, and make sure they know where their station is.

And don't get me started on those paraplegics. Neurodivergent people are bad enough, with the wiring in their brains making it difficult to understand our arbitrary social rules. Paraplegics, with the wiring in their spinal cords that make it difficult to walk need to get out of their fucking wheelchairs, what a bunch of assholes, always getting in the way.

Oh my god, and the homosexuals, too! Why won't they just love the correct gender?

I am 100% with you, academictemp. Maybe we can just load all these people who are not exactly like ourselves, or think and behave exactly as we do, onto cattle cars and be done with it.

Yes. I’m an academic computer scientist at a top-25 US university. I find that people in the field tend to be excessively critical and very often lack empathy. There is some culture of intellectual one-upmanship where it is more socially desirable to identify flaws and unhandled corner cases in an idea than to recognize some overall value that could be improved on. Perfection is very much the enemy of good enough or better than what we have now.

Ideas that survive are the ones that anticipate and pre-empt criticism rather than the ones that are creative or innovative. There is little consideration of ethics and value or harm to society.

Honestly, I think it is damaging to the field. It is very demoralizing for newcomers to be subject to repeated criticism and not encouragement. There isn’t much culture of mutual support. I’ve been told by NSF personnel at review panels that CS grants proposals get much lower review scores than those of other sciences because the CS reviewers are so critical and that’s problematic for the field as a whole because it was hard to justify finding proposals with low scores when the funds could go to higher scoring proposals in other fields (though this was many years ago).

So in short, yes, it is also my experience. I’ve worked around it by trying to work with people from other disciplines which have better cultures.

Sure. You need to know how to handle those types; you'll never be rid of them. Broadly, though, I think any large ecosystem needs a broad mix of personality types, including the ones stereotypically painted as 'negative', to remain vibrant. If everyone in a community were high in agreeableness, say, this will feel nice to the people in it, but could have downsides if no-one feels able to engage in conflict, disagreement or argue for controversial ideas.

We don't need to celebrate or encourage any asshole-like behavior of the stereotypical "genius asshole" but, regardless, enough such people have achieved things that, potentially, an agreeable genius could have not. (The same is true vice versa, of course, we need as many highly agreeable people too!)

> If everyone in a community were high in agreeableness, say, this will feel nice to the people in it, but could have downsides if no-one feels able to engage in conflict, disagreement or argue for controversial ideas.

Can confirm, because libraries/Library Science is like this. What is best for the patrons or society comes second to how everybody in the room feels about a plan and everybody's 'lived experiences'. By far my least favorite part of the field, as a woman who's pretty low in 'agreeableness'.

For an extreme example, I remember a group project in my MLIS where we talked for three hours unable to choose a topic because everybody had to be in agreement. It was the stupidest waste of my time I'd ever encountered and they were not receptive to my declaration that it didn't actually matter and we'd not remember this in three years anyway. External validation and 'community' were a big deal to them, so my saying that anything wasn't actually that important was a huge social faux pas. I eventually just left and told the rest of the group to let me know when they figured out what we were doing.

Ideally in a healthy community there would be members who could encourage a bit of nudging and reformation of harmful behavior. Maybe nobody has bothered trying to get through to them.

Perhaps some people genuinely thrive in hostile environments. Perhaps they just wish to establish themselves as superior within your group's dominance / status hierarchy. If much of their ego is tied up in their intellect then they probably need an outlet in which it may be flattered regularly. Perhaps it would be possible to construct situations in which more prosocial behavior is rewarded.

Sounds like they didn't pass a high enough filter. It's easy to have a high impression of yourself when you didn't actually compete. I remember having conversations with roommates and people in my classes about how hard so and so works, how you would always find them in their office, how we would get emails from this or that professor in the middle of the night, etc. My guess is that most people don't see how competitive academics can be. Without that visibility, people form inflated (egotistical) attitudes.

I consider myself pretty competitive. I'm in a top 5 CS PhD program, have published several first author conference papers in top-tier conferences in my field, and I consider computer science to be a big part of my identity.

That being said, I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on "academic competitiveness" and can distinguish that from what I'm describing above (which I'm calling "computer science personality disorder"). It truly is a behavior that appears unique to our field and I feel that it drives a lot of smart, collaborative, and supportive people to leave.

Oh yea, that's another part of it. Seeing your school at the top of some rankings fuels some egos as well. I've met plenty of intelligent people who remain modest for the reason I indicated in my previous post. Wish them success in their career and just move on. No doubt they'll have professional and interpersonal problems down the line.

Not academia, but my impression is that’s it’s a fragile self image thing - all their eggs are in one basket - “the smartest guy in the room.” Of course being the actual smartest person in the room isn’t possible, and at some level they know that, but they exhibit these behaviors as a way to try to assert it in the world, similar to narcissism. They need to be smart.

Why is it some common in CS? I can only guess but it’s a field where an entire individual can have outsized impact without the need for collaboration so it attracts this kind of personality. I think that will change, though, as the field matures. You look at Math, which should be similar, but it seems that collaborators are more successful than the lone wolves as many of the known problems have had many mathematicians try and fail to solve.

It’s not CS, it’s the world. You go into any industry and you’ll find jerks that assert their power by correcting and out-explaining someone else. It’s even become a popular gendered concept: mansplaining.

It feels like there are more in tech, but I think that’s just a side effect of tech being a space where a lot of genius things have happened in the last 100 years. You’d get as many guys trying to outdo one another at a fishing expo, their expertise is just in a different area.

LARPing as Sheldon Cooper is a fantastic turn of phrase.

https://www.mit.edu/~jcb/tact.html

> Is this everyone else's experience?

Yeah, and not only in the academic environment. Corporate environments have their flavour of this bs as well: people that get an ounce of career development and now all of a sudden their opinion casually always align with the upper management's directives.

I don't think it's academic-specific, even though the academic environment is particularly bad as people get tenure in there and are basically impossible to remove, and a lot of people have to go through them during their university years.

Maybe we as a society can work on re-aligning the incentives? Like celebrating people who collaborate more than we celebrate assholish people? Doesn't seem like it's working, though (just look at the whole social media scene, twitter/x in particular).

I don't have a solution, just wanted to acknowledge the problem.

Opinions are like arseholes. Everyone has got one.

And they all stink.

I completed PhD in the top 5 CS programs in the world.

One of my first meetings to present my topic to my thesis committee had a leader in my field (a world-wide expert in the field and one of the founding fathers that particular area) say: "This idea is bullshit and I can't even bother to tell you why" That was the only thing he said.

Of course, I defended PhD on the same subject 4 years later and other leading scientist and his competitor said the idea was brilliant :D

sounds like projection to me

projecting unacceptable parts of self onto others

I wouldn't know; I didn't major in CS. Didn't need to to get into web dev lmao

This is very interesting could you please describe your experience in more detail? What was the turning point that made you want to share this idea here?

Mostly just repeated observations of my peers. It's kind of hard to articulate an exact experience other than general rudeness and sneering but I'll give it a shot.

Recently, a colleague of mine was presenting their work. Another colleague with CSPD (comp. sci. personality disorder) interrupted the presentation to say "this all seems very obvious." The remark was self-aggrandizing and completely dismissive of my colleague's hard work.

Witnessing this made me realize just how toxic our community can be to one another.

The comment you are replying to gives me big llm vibes

> The remark was self-aggrandizing and completely dismissive of my colleague's hard work.

Ok, but was it wrong?

Put your friend's precious fee-fees aside, and ask yourself the important question: was it wrong?

If it wasn't, then it sounds like the problem was with your friend, wasting everyone's time with a pedestrian analysis that benefited nothing except for their own ego, so they can be heard, so they can climb that all-important neurotypical status ladder, so they can put another insignificant bullet point on their C.V.

Was it wrong?

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