W R O N G
As a programmer, you work all day long with the world’s biggest pedantic a-hole, the computer. It tends to rub off on you, and … not in a good way.
If you accept that a great detective understands criminals at some deeper level, the best programmers literally identify with the computer. It’s part of what makes you good. But it also comes at some cost to your soul, and you have to take great pains to not carry that mindset forward into interactions with other human beings. People bitch about the comments on hacker news, and they ain’t wrong… but they don’t really understand the occupational hazards, either.
(This is also why I don’t think programming is some great amazeballs job that everyone should have. It actually kind of sucks.)
It was a different story in 2001 when there was zero expectation that every device be perma-connected 24/7, but it’s a hell of a lot more complicated now. Since about ~2010 or so every man woman and child carries a computer in their damn pocket, every computer is connected, and thus every computer is a window into other human beings by design.
So programmers who grew up in the pre-2010 era are going to have skewed perspectives on this. Only programmers who were born in… 2000 or so, and would now be coming of age at 18, have really experienced and have any hope of internalizing this brave new world of always connected, in-everyones-pocket computing.
