Social implications of software
- 5 minsIntroduction
This post is very personal and opinionated. You may have a different opinion, and that’s fine.
I recently read that what defines a good Software Engineer (S.E.) is the ability to switch between levels of abstraction in a relative quick and easy manner. I do not fully agree with that statement, as I think there are other qualities to describe a good S.E, but it definitely shows how important abstraction capacity, and complex thinking is within our work field.
The constant usage of this abstract thinking often generates disconnection from reality, and may cause people around us to see us as anti-social people that do not even know how to communicate properly. Here is my take about why this phenomenon occurs, which are the effects to our social skills, and how I feel about it.
The nature of our work
Software has one of the most flexible learning curves of any field. Learning how to do basic operations can take as little time as minutes, given that it does not require us to understand what is going on under the hood to work with it. Therefore, one can go as deep as desired, internalizing the implications of coding this or that other way; learning this or that design pattern, preparing for this or that scale size…
Not many of them require complex thinking per se, but they involve understanding the implications of software development, being able to see problems in advance, designing good architectures, understand the risks of external dependencies and so on.
How abstraction affect us
I believe, because I have personally suffer it, that spending several days working on something that requires lots of concentration and complex thinking, can lead to short-term poor speak and phrasing abilities. I also believe that this speak deterioration portraits a “poorly-social” version of us, which does not represent how we are and how we communicate with each other. This effect becomes very clear when we find ourselves in situations when we speak with people whose job involves, dealing with people, in a day to day basis (lawyers, professors, scientists, journalists…).
Let’s think of an example.
It is Friday night, and after a whole week of very hard debugging sessions spending all work time in silence going through some pieces of documentation, you are about to attend this Friday party with your best friend. Once you arrive, you talk to the organizers, the attendees… and you start to feel like everyone is way more well-spoken than you. You know you are a good speaker, that you are funny, but somehow, in that situation, you are clearly not feeling good.
It feels like most of them are a couple of gears higher than you, communication speaking.
I think this is a real feeling, shared among lots of us, but hard to explain.
My explanation for this phenomenon is the following: when an activity requires some specific mental skill set to be boosted, we need some time (actual days), to shift our mindset to perform well in that activity. Coming back to “neutral mindset” requires some additional days. Therefore, following with the previous example, if we are working at 6:00pm on Friday and attending a party that same day at 9:00pm, there has not been enough time for us to shift into our more socially-friendly mindset again.
Bottom line is: programming pushes us to tune our mindset to excel in certain areas. That mental shift takes time to recover, so if you find yourself working Monday to Friday on something that pushes that shift, is hard to show your real communication abilities, and work to improve them.
Personality biased
Up to this point, the non-obvious social implications that I think software development enforces on people, should be clear. These implications are mostly negative, as they involve a trade off between working performance and social skills, and most of the people would not like to join this trade off.
That’s why good S.E. are so well paid, and that’s why not every money addict is willing to jump into a S.E. carer, as well as they do to a Business one.
That trade-off is keeping the balance.
Do not get me wrong, I think everyone can jump into a S.E. career and do great. I truly believe so. However, most people are not willing to sacrifice short-term social skills for their work progression, so it quickly becomes a burden. To be honest, no one wants, but there is a specific type of people who have fewer problems with doing so.
Introverts.
See, I understand introvert behaviour by the times a given person wants to socialize, not about the quality of the social interactions. Obviously everyone, independently of their inner personality, want to enjoy some quality social time with their relatives, friends, and significant other. It is the amount of times you are willing to do so per week, more than the quality of those interactions, what defines your introvert personality.
At this point, I feel comfortable concluding:
1. It is easier for introverts to bear this social skills degradation trade-off, given that they were not willing to socialize that much in the first place.
2. Software is dominated by introverts. Not because S.E. promotes less socialization, but because only those who are comfortable socializing once a week, do not see that trade-off as an actual burden.
Some references
- Linus Torvalds TED talk. (00:00 - 02:00 on how S.E. conditions usually are).
- TechLead programmer habits (10:30 - 14:30 on programming loneliness).
Sinclert Pérez
Software Engineer @ Canonical