Discussion

Have programmers been this awful and clueless forever or did I just miss that section in "The Psychology of Computer Programming"?

https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Programming_Psychology.html

How much of this stems from driving women and minorities out of programming?

I mean, intro improv classes are _right there_. If you need a psychologically safe space to work through personal interaction and rejection, it's under $300 for 8 weeks. And it's fun! It's no substitute for therapy but it can be really effective at boosting your social awareness and comfort and self-confidence.

Dunno, I just can't accept putting in the work for allegedly smart people who are told and don't want to hear. Grow up, take an improv class, whatever - just don't expect everyone else to do your work for you.

In case the original thread gets deleted, I want to preserve this because it's really a mind-bogglingly tall ask. I've left off the author and the thread; this isn't about dragging someone being wrong on the internet, it's about poorly socialized devs and how we're being asked to cater to people who don't accept no for an answer.
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In response to the following:

"Yeah. I'm looking at individual contributors who might well get quite upset over having LLM-generated contributions bounced at the door and who might well sincerely want the ease LLMs provide for their own priorities, but who have little power, and trying to find empathy."
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Let me get this straight: Someone wants to participate in a community but does not want to work within the community's standards and practices, is turned away as a result, and somehow wants empathy? Because they're the Little Guy and are very sincere and are now very upset because someone in the community pointed at the sign and told them no?

Do software developers just not understand consent and how society works or do they just actively reject it? While I have some empathy for people so poorly socialized they don't understand social interaction and can't handle rejection well (looks in mirror), these are chronological adults who have a lot of growing up to do.

I've made submissions to projects, changes that served both a personal and a community need and had them rejected. I thanked one project for clarifying their goals, I understood and agreed with their decision, and happily forked the project with zero animosity. Another project had lost control of their Windows packaging process leaving the Windows release stagnant and lagging the main unix-oriented release. I offered to fix their packaging process with the explicit goal of minimizing changes to existing architecture and workflow, to avoid disrupting their way of doing things any more than necessary. The project was seeking volunteers and assistance but apparently Not Like That. I had actively communicated with the devs and put in a fair bit of work only to find that they had decided to take a different approach without telling me. In that case I just walked away - I clearly wasn't going to be able to help in any way they recognized. It's aggravating as hell to put in the work and try to stay within the community practices and goals and find out later that their stated goals and actual goals were substantially different and not clearly communicated. I wasn't happy but I didn't need empathy; this crap happens all the time, I wish I hadn't wasted the effort but at the end of the day this was simple miscommunication not malice. Their Project, Their Rules.

Neither of these cases involved AI.

The difference between my experiences and the hypothetical is that I actively tried to understand project goals and to work within their rules, standards, and expectations ahead of time and to cause as little disruption as possible. In the hypothetical, community rules mean little to the contributor. There's a sense of entitlement that the rules and standards and expectations shouldn't apply to them because they are Very Sincere and their changes make their life easier. And they deserve some empathy because now they're very upset because they were told no before they started and still told no after they did all that work.

I'm not going to infantilize developers; they are adult enough to build complex technical systems and they should be adult enough to navigate a simple social system. It's not a project's job to socialize developers and it's mind-boggling that I should be asked to empathize with people who through intent or ignorance do not understand consent and do not accept that rules and standards apply to them. Again, this is an area I struggled with - I've been there. You don't always get your way when you follow the rules so what should you expect when you ignore them?