Programmers should stop celebrating incompetence

Programmers should stop celebrating incompetence(world.hey.com)

20 points by mdcurran 4 years ago | 3 comments

dusted 4 years ago |

I enjoy this kind of idiotic humor, especially after spending hours hunting down something that can be fixed by changing a single byte.. But the reason I think they're funny is not because they're true, but because they're not, because even though it FEELS like you're an idiot some times, especially when you've found the solution, you know that it took a great deal of skill

But I've seen it cause real damage as well, in those who are truly incompetent, they don't recognize that these memes are supposed to be ironic or sarcastic, and take them at face value for "nobody else knows what they're doing either!", this leads them to never recognize just how far they are from being useful, then they start blaming everything else instead.

gjvc 4 years ago |

This is a great piece. Idiotic memes have a corrosive effect, largely unseen until it is too late.

onion2k 4 years ago | |

Idiotic memes have a corrosive effect, largely unseen until it is too late.

I don't think that's true. I certainly see no evidence for the hypothesis. Memes have no impact on most developers except to make us laugh, recognize "yeah, I feel that", and then go back to writing some pretty amazing things.

To be honest, DHH's suggestion that funny pictures could be the reason for a proliferation of imposter syndrome rather than, say, hiring practises that turn down very capable developers because they can't present a proof that P=NP on a whiteboard in 30 minutes to a board of 10 people is downright offensive to developers.

We're an intelligent and capable community. Memes probably aren't root cause of many of our problems. We can understand when a funny picture is just a funny picture.