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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need a "programmer's perspective"? Exercise has nothing to do with programming or engineering specifically. Exercise (ideally, some form of exercise that strengthens muscles that atrophy while sitting) should be a thing for everyone who sits behind for 40+ hours a week.

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You're overthinking it. It's a "programmer's perspective" because the author is a programmer. There isn't anything more to it, and as far as I can tell there's no insinuation that it is particularly special.

A cleaner walking 5 hours a day, and a programmer sitting 8 hours a day: that's 2 different perspectives to exercising.

Actually all forms of sports are always a personal perspective. Why ? Because we are all unique biologically and psychologically.

Your own perspective to sports changes over age and other factors (sickness, weight, private life ...etc). That's why you won't run 15 km tomorrow the way you did today.

Actually that’s a common misconception too - you will not get fit from having a physical job like cleaning you will just be tired. So I really appreciate that I can exercise both the brain at work and muscles at the gym. I see some people in the gym who do physical work or night shifts and it’s much harder for them to manage fatigue immunity and make gains (you need proper rest time to rejuvenate).

99% of workers who sit at a desk for 8 (or more) hours a day are not programmers.

most people who sit at the desk don't have hours at a time sitting all tensed up and in a bad position because stuff is not going well and they get hyperfocused on running the code again and again, not that that happens often - but sometimes.

Its worse, they have to sit there using the half arsed buggy software that some programmer shat out in order to get promoted to L5 in the 2021 summer of CV driven development and hasn't been updated or fixed since.

I've used half-assed buggy software before, I've worked for the government and cases had to be logged, also I've worked as a data entry worker - and of course I live in Denmark, one of the most digitized countries in the world, where the government gets away with making you use the solutions they had developed with awful UX that - really, one time I got fined 5000 dollars and had a company closed down because I thought what a program was telling me was an obvious bug - but it wasn't - when I complained to the workers and the ministry that required this solution be used they said "Oh yeah, everyone has that problem"

In short I have used just as buggy crappy software as anyone, and I'm a programmer who has been hyperfocused for a day in all sorts of uncomfortable positions, for bonus points I have also worked intense physical labor in jobs where people died, just in case someone was going to play the manual labor card.

I have as yet encountered nothing worse than programming when it is going very badly. When it's going easy it's a piece of cake of course.

if they work on some sort of error handling then they might take longer hours ig.

You might disagree, but the most important skill of a programmer is problem-solving skills/mindset and a rational approach. A programmer's perspective of many things will be different than the average person perspective that doesn't use those skills to make decisions.

He even wrote about that if you had the time to read the article before commenting:

  As a software engineer I though, If I should "pick boring    tech", maybe I should also "pick boring sports". So I decided to pick something boring. Something old, 1000s of years old. My rationale being that for older sports there would be more easily available knowledge, failure modes would be better known, and I would be able to better understand if I was doing it wrong.

Programmers are no more capable of magical thinking than the average person.

No but what you call magical thinking we call logic.

This may surprise you but the ability to think logically is not solely reserved to folks who are programmers.

While this is true, your replies prove that some people ignore logic for some odd reasons.

Well, it might be useful because programmers are likely to spend even more time in front of a screen than the average person, and thus examples from other programmers might encourage them to exercise more. Other who sit for work find computers a necessary evil and prefer to do other things instead of working with them.

well we people just do all kind of stuff and that stuff never ends.. we feel like just few minutes but the reality is the time keep ticking and our eyes just stick to screens... and at that moment we dont even think about the health and body .

you’re more likely to click through if it applies to you “I usually don’t care about strength training but I am a programmer so this interests me! Let’s click through”

Because there's a science to strength training that us nerdy devs can appreciate. It's not as scientific as woodworking, but its there.

Because programmer's are special.

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