Vox populi: “Programmers are the most boring people in the world”

by philg

A couple of notes from my most recent commercial airline flights.


On a flight from BOS to SFO, I sat next to a woman who said that she was going out specifically to attend a big party in San Francisco.  “That sounds fabulous,” I said.  “Not really,” she replied.  “Most of the people who will be there are computer programmers and they are the most boring people in the world.”  [She herself worked in software marketing and lived outside of Boston with husband and kids.]


On a flight from BOS to Long Beach (LGB), I sat next to a woman who had recently graduated from University of California Berkeley with a degree in English.  What kind of a job did she get where she could use her finely honed intellect?  Selling home mortgages to folks with bad credit, same as that recent MIT graduate we checked up on a month back.

16 thoughts on “Vox populi: “Programmers are the most boring people in the world””

  2. Does anyone get out of College and do what they thought they would? My gut says the percentages are lower than you think.

  4. A married woman with children who’s a software marketeer. Sounds pretty interesting to me. Did you ask her what kind of people she finds interesting? I’d really like to know.

  5. Trevis, you’d be surprised! Of course when their home-brew Excel/VBA sheet from hell or ASP/VBScript web “application” go so wrong risk management won’t let them trade anymore, guess who they come crawling back to?

    Of course, then they still have the nerve to demand you fix their stuff instead of scrapping the piece of shit and starting from scratch on something that is actually designed properly…

    Such is life working as a programmer for an investment bank.

  6. I avoid mentioning what I do at all costs. MD might be more interesting than programmer to some people, but programmers probably don’t get asked for software advice, or hear about how the person in the seat next to them’s mother’s cancer was misdiagnosed…Perhaps from now on I’ll just say I’m a programmer and conversation will cease.

  7. A sales person accusing some other group of being “boring” is hardly a scathing criticism. If we are going to generalize, then in general marketing types tend to be shallow, superficial and lack depth – everyone with a brain is going to be boring to them.

  8. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It all depends on what you find to be interesting in a person.

    There are lots of reasons for why many people seem to find programmers boring. One reason why this attitude may be widespread is due to the high proportion of introverted programmers. A person who lacks understanding of introversion and/or the patience to deal with introverts will often come to the conclusion that “there’s nothing there,” or that what’s “there” is not interesting.

  9. 32 papa, computer programmers tend to get asked to fix everyone’s computer, they are supposed to know how every program works and have to listen to complaints from party guests about whatever piece of software that happened to fail.

    Don’t bother trying to explain the difference between writing software and doing systems administration. If you have “studied computers”, you know it all. Don’t bother trying to hide behind “I use Linux” or “I use a Mac”. If you have “studied computers”, you know it all.

    The only way out, perhaps, is to completely scr*w someone’s personal data when called yet again to fix something.

    🙂

  10. what kind of programmers? java dickheads might be boring (they actually use words like “solution” to refer to software outside of work) but people who use somewhat unpopular languages are probably a lot more interesting. i don’t think haskell/ML/lisp/python/ruby people are boring.

  11. I find that most people don’t like to talk about their jobs or be told about other folks’ jobs. In response to an answer of ‘I work in marketing at Merck’, I’ll actualy ask, ‘so what exactly do you spend your day doing?’. Usually I just get a blank stare and then some stammering about paper work or some such. Occasionally I get a really interesting response that indicates what the other person does for 40 hours per week.

    I think much of the perception that computer programmers are boring comes from the fact that many computer programmers are happy to talk at length about what they do in their jobs. Instead of answering ‘oh, just boring computer stuff’, many computer geeks will lanuch into at least a couple minute explanation of programming interactive widgets for a toy company or whatever. It’s not so much the computer stuff that’s boring as the audacity to talk in any detail about one’s work.

    Then again, maybe it’s just me.

  12. Hal: you may be on to something there. People who don’t talk at length about their day jobs, but still want to converse, must talk about their outside-of-work activities. I work in software by day, but am also a musician and photographer, and occasionally teach college students. My impression is that these activities are much more interesting to the typical listener than hearing about y-combinators or amusing trends in my web server logs.

  15. The problem is that as a programmer, people often seem interested in what you do, but they’re only trying to find out if you can fix their computer problems for free, and not hearing about your own. Doctors and lawyers have similar problems. Nobody at all wants to talk about engineering.

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