Are programmers a bunch of heartless robots who are lacking of empathy? [closed]

Posted by Graviton on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Graviton
Published on 2012-04-12T07:56:33Z Indexed on 2012/04/12 11:42 UTC
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OK, the provocative title got your attention.

My experience as a programmer and dealing with my fellow programmers is that, a programmer is also usually someone who is so consumed by his programming work, so absorbed in his algorithmic construction that he has little passion/ time left for anything else, which includes empathy for other people, love and care for the people whom he love or should love ( such as their spouses, parents, kids, colleagues etc). The better a person is in terms of his programming powers, the more defective he is in terms of love/care because both honing programming skills and loving the surrounding takes time and one has only so much time to be allocated among so many different things.

Also, programming ( especially INTERESTING programming job, like, writing an AI to predict the future search trend) is a highly consuming job; it doesn't just consume you from 9 to 5, it will also consume you after 5 and practically every second of your waking hours because a good programmer can't just magically switch off his thinking hat after the office lights go off ( If you can then I don't really think you are a passionate programmer, and the prerequisite of a good programmer is passion).

So, a good programmer is necessarily someone who can't love as much as others do because the very nature of the programming job prevents him from loving others as much as he wants to.

Do you concur with my observation/ reasoning?

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