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Software is made by humans for humans.

Most software is made by teams. All software involves interacting with other people. When you use a tool, a programming language, you’re interacting with the people who made it; when people use your software, they’re interacting with you. When software works or doesn’t work, that’s the decisions of others, the work of others that you’re experiencing. It’s people all the way down.

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Most software is made by teams, and software development is an •intensely• social activity. Software projects stand and fall on the relationships between the humans who create it: whether they understand each other, whether they collaborate well, how they make each other feel.

Computers don’t fill in the gaps and misunderstandings for us with common sense; when we don’t understand each other, we •codify• that misunderstanding in our code, fix it in place and turn it loose.

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The best software tester I’ve ever known once said to me, “Whenever I start at a new place, I find out which teams hate each other. Where their systems interface with each other is the first place I look for bugs — because they’re not talking to each other.”

Software projects stand and fall on the relationships between the humans who create them. (A corollary to Conway’s Law.)

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Now please don’t misunderstand me (and here imagine me looking earnestly to the students): when I say it’s “intensely social,” I don’t mean that you have to be an extroverted social butterfly.

You can be the world’s biggest introvert and make great software.

You can be socially clumsy (I am!) and make great software.

You can be autistic and make great software.

You can be chatty and charming, or silly, or dry and serious, or linear, or chaotic, or or or…and make great software.

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What you can’t be is misanthropic. When you write software, you are in relationship with other people. And if you don’t care about people, if you just •hate• people, if you can’t care about healthy relationships, if you cannot be bothered to communicate or to listen or to just give a ground-level shit about other people, DO NOT get into software. You’ll crash and burn — and you’ll cause terrible harm as you go down. Find some other discipline to go torment.

The rest of you…come on in.

/end

You know, if I say “be decent to other people and try to understand them” and your response is basically “bureaucracy stifles innovation,” I really don’t know what to tell you.

[Edit: switched to screenshot of post]

@inthehands I just want you to know that I did notice the edit. I did go find out what changed. It was a little tedious. But also I'm completely fine with it. It's okay to fix nagging things.

@polotek
Thanks, and much respect to a fellow Noticer.