This is something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Programming is an activity that makes you face your own fallibility all the time. You write some code, compile it or run it, and then 80% of the time, it doesn’t work exactly the way you imagined. There’s an error message, or it just behaves incorrectly. Then you need to iterate on it and fix the issues until you get the desired result, and even then it’s subtly wrong, and causes an outage at 3am on Sunday.
I thought this experience would teach programmers to be the humblest people in the world.
I can’t believe how wrong I was. Programmers can be the most arrogant dickheads you will ever meet. Why is that?
This is a social psychology question and the answer doesn’t have as much to do with the particulars of what a programmer does as the social environment “programming” lives in.
The easiest concept regarding this phenomenon is self selection bias. Certain groups of people are drawn to, and others are excluded from certain professions. These groups are usually defined by demographics and personality traits. This results in a self-preserving system with its own gatekeeping, leading to a self-preserving subculture.
Obviously this isn’t unique to programming. Every human group regardless of how that group is defined have in-group and out-group biases which perpetuates us and them identities in our minds. Everyone has these to varying degrees.
If we want to talk about why programming seems to select for the trait of arrogance, we have to speculate.
I think it could be related to the esoteric nature of professions like electronics engineering and programming. Things these professions work with do not have moving parts. Their internal workings can’t be guessed by their physical appearance, nor from their immediate function. This might be creating a feeling of magic, as in any advanced enough technology blah blah… You know what I mean.
Perhaps programmers start to believe in the magic themselves, or to take it seriously when they are called “tech wizards” etc.