Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

I love programming, but the idea of hanging out with and chatting with other programmers as a regular part of my social life leaves me cold. I'm happy to be a part of online conversations about code and hardware and design, but away from the computer ... not really. I'd rather be talking about food, or hiking or travelling or culture or relationships. There have been very few people I've ever met in person that I really enjoyed "being a programmer with", and none of them live within 1000 miles of me. And that's all just fine.

View on HN

Why are they mutually exclusive? Can't you hang out with and chat with other programmers ... about food, hiking, travelling, culture, or relationships? In the same way that lawyers don't have to talk about law, and doctors don't have to talk about medicine when they hang out. When I think about my friendships, it's rare that we ever spend any significant amount of time talking about our work.

One reason for their mutual exclusivity is that I am self-employed, have worked at home for the last 30+ years and live in a tiny village in New Mexico. "Other programmers" is not a thing that just happens in my life, and I'm generally reluctant (one might say "loathed") to go track them down when the benefits of doing so seem pretty thin.

I think "can't you hang out with ... " meant "would it really be a problem if you did hang out with ... " referring to the objections in your previous comment. Not why don't you know any in practice!

There are some people that gravitate towards making friends at work and spending their non work lives with them and there are those that prefer the opposite.

I am friendly with my coworkers and might occasionally spend time with them outside of work, but, for the most part, all my closest friendships are not from work and not in the same profession (outside of the few I picked up in school).

I think this is part of why programming as a job never appealed to me (and I never became one). I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round).

To contrast, I have some philosopher friends and they discuss about food (they, unlike me, love cooking shows), travelling, but also philosophy. There is never any feeling of "this is work, we don't talk about this". It's very refereshing. And I imagine writers talk a bit about writing too.

> I'd like to do something that is worth doing in the sense that it's worth discussing in your "free" time too. And most programmers feel like the show Severance (yeah I know it's the other way round).

This does not fit my experience. It's rather that many passionate programmers are rather eager to talk about what they do at work (at least if they are allowed to), but the common situation is that what they do at work is barely interesting to people who are not at least somewhat interested in programming topics.

Same. I see programming as a way to accomplish some sort of task. When artists hang out, do they spend their time talking about brush strokes or editing techniques? From my experience not really, they talk about the higher up stuff. Themes or storytelling or influences are what they usually talk about. I want to operate on the higher plane.

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” - Picasso

https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/crm3kz/the_pa...

Right. I'd much rather talk about the pros and cons that the arrival of cheap DAWs have had on musicking in all its forms than the details of how we schedule audio processing in one of those DAWs.

I don’t know about artists but writers do seem to talk about low level details a lot. Not just themes or whatever

I've got a friend who I got along with a lot because we talked about programming and other cool hobby stuff. Now as I get older, I'm more interested in talking about non computer stuff but he seems to not respond to that as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com