Why Are Coders Angry? ( Computer Science )

There’s a website dedicated to language benchmarks, to measuring how fast certain languages run compared with others, and it includes this preface to stave off riots: “These are not the only compilers and interpreters. These are not the only programs that could be written. These are not the only tasks that could be solved. These are just 10 tiny examples.”

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It sometimes appears that everyone in coding has a beef. You can feel it coming off the Web pages. There are a lot of defensive postscripts added in response to outrage. “People have reacted strongly to this post,” they’ll read. “I did not mean to imply that Java sucks.”
Languages have agendas. People glom onto them. Blunt talk is seen as a good quality in a developer, a sign of an “engineering mindset”—spit out every opinion as quickly as possible, the sooner to reach a technical consensus. Expect to be told you’re wrong; expect to tell other people they’re wrong. (Masculine anger, bluntly expressed, is part of the industry.)

Coding is a culture of blurters. This can yield fast decisions, but it penalizes people who need to quietly compose their thoughts, rewarding fast-twitch thinkers who harrumph efficiently. Programmer job interviews, which often include abstract and meaningless questions that must be answered immediately on a whiteboard, typify this culture. Regular meetings can become sniping matches about things that don’t matter. The shorthand term for that is “bikeshedding.” (Who cares what color the bike shed is painted? Well …)
Code culture is very, very broad, but the geographic and cultural core is the Silicon Valley engine of progress. The Valley mythologizes young geniuses with vast sums. To its credit, this culture works; to its shame, it doesn’t work for everyone.

At any moment some new thing could catch fire and disrupt the tribal ebb and flow. Instagram was written in Python and sold for $700 millionΔ, so Python had a moment of glory. The next mind-blowing app could show up, written in some new language—and start everyone taking that more seriously. Within 18 months your skills could be, if not quite valueless, suspect.
I was in a meeting once where someone said, “How long will it take to fix that?” One person, who’d been at the company for years, said, “Three months.” A new person, who’d just come from a world of rapidly provisioned cloud microservices, said, “Three minutes.” They were both correct. That’s how change enters into this world. Slowly at first, then on the front page of Hacker News.

Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable. They get defensive when they hear someone suggest that Python is better than Ruby, because [insert 500-comment message thread here]. Is the next great wave swelling somewhere, and will it wash away Java when it comes? Will Go conquer Python? Do I need to learn JavaScript to remain profitable? Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared. We are, most of us, stumbling around with only a few candles to guide the way. We can’t always see the whole system, so we need to puzzle it out, bit by bit, in the dark.

4.1 The Legend of the 10x Programmer

Programming has twin cults of genius and youth. One of the ways Google acquired its reputation was by hiring fresh-faced whizzes. Ph.D.s from Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon were table stakes. The true programmer began to code in utero and has an IQ of at least 10,000.
There’s even the legend of the 10x programmer, an individual who is just that much more productive than the proletariat. There is evidence that some programmers are much more productive than their equally experienced peers; but other studies have found this to be engineering folklore. Ten is an order of magnitude in a discipline that uses orders of magnitude to estimate things. Ten is an attractive and thus suspicious number.
That said, the industry undeniably attracts brilliant thinkers. I’ve met a few. You can tell they’re brilliant because their solutions make you laugh and go, “Oh, I would never have thought of that.” The sparks in their brains jump some pretty wide gaps. They know more than the manuals. Some people put the time in; some people can’t help but be obsessed; and some people are just so damn smart that it’s a revelation to be around them.
Dream of 10x programmers if you will. But I wouldn’t hold out hope that one will come to work for you. You can’t hire them for the same reasons you can’t coach the Chicago Bulls and you aren’t often called upon to date supermodels of your preferred gender. They’re not interviewing at your crappy company for your crappy job. They’re not going to come and rescue your website; they’re not going to make you an app that puts mustaches on photos; they’re not going to listen to you when you offer them the chance to build the next Facebook, because, if they exist, they are busy building the real Facebook. Sometimes they’re thinking about higher mathematics, or how to help a self-driving car manage the ethical choice between running over a squirrel and driving off a cliff. Or they’re riding their bikes, or getting really into pottery. It’s hard to have a better life than a great programmer, as long as they’re unencumbered by physical or mental illness.
Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation. It’s come to have an association with Asperger’s syndrome; many programmers will say they “are somewhere on the spectrum,” though these self-diagnoses can be a little self-serving—being obsessive is seen as a good thing by many coders. And some jobs programs have successfully placed people on the autism spectrum in programming careers. But the idea that people with Asperger’s make good programmers is as suspect as the idea that women aren’t naturally inclined to coding; both assumptions, to use a term beloved of the Internet, are problematic, and deeply reductive. Tread lightly: All kinds of people can be programmers. And autistic people can have all kinds of careers.
If 10x programmers exist, they require 10x managers at 10x companies. There’s no shame in not being 10x yourself.
For a truly gifted programmer, writing code is a side effect of thought. Their skill isn’t in syntax; it’s how they perceive time and computation. They can see the consequences of their actions more quickly than the next programmer; they spend less time in the dark. Their code still has bugs, it still needs to be optimized—they’re not without flaws. But for every candle we own, they have three or four flashlights and a map.