Why did you choose the ‘Dark Side’ and become a programmer?

I am teaching an introduction to .NET programming class this week and I always like to ask what got the students interested in becoming a programmer in the first place. The answers I get run the gamut from one extreme, “I just love the way that I look with a pocket protector”, to, “I want to be like Bill and have lots of money” (I don’t have the heart to give them the cold hard facts about that last one).

The reason that I ask this question is that I am trying to classify the drive behind a person to make them a good programmer so I can pass this information on to my students who are still unsure what they want to be when they grow up. I have always said that I can teach just about anybody to be a good network administrator, but I am not sure that you can teach someone to be a good programmer without some predisposition on their part. The problem is; I am not sure what the characteristics of a good programmer are.

Now I usually joke around to my students that any good programmer needs to have three traits; they need to be lazy, they need to be impatient and the need to have an ego that says, “I can program better than you” (this is the fighter pilot mentality). These characteristics are true up to a point, most programmers I know like to cut and paste, they hate to have to type code more than twice and they are very willing to use someone else’s code, after they have improved on it of course (see trait #3), they want to get the project done NOW…in other words lazy (efficient), impatient (goal oriented) and hubris (confident in their abilities).

As I said these behaviors point to a good programmer, but are kind of hard to define until the person has been a programmer for a while. What I have seen that really makes me think that a person can be a programmer or not, is to have them recount why they want to learn to program. Some of the reasons that I think point to someone that will make it as a programmer are things like, “I love to solve problems”, or, “I want to know how that works”. If someone says that they want to be a programmer because there are lots of jobs for programmers or the famous “I don’t know”, then I start to worry that they will not really like being a programmer for the rest of their career. I really don’t think programmers are actually created, but instead they are born to code.

So please, for my continued study into the species codus programmus, let me know what lead you to the dark side. Maybe if I get enough response I can improve on my thesis, make a gazillion dollars and be just like Bill.

Why are you a programmer?
( polls)