Monday, November 11, 2013

Programmers Are More Social Than You

The prevailing stereotype of the hunchbacked, hygiene challenged programmer enclosed in a dark basement is inaccurate at best.  The truth is that many programmers are much more social and collaborative with other human beings than originally thought.  Imagine this scenario: you’ve moved into a new neighborhood and you’ve built a brand new house from the ground up.  Several of your neighbors stop by and decide that your house can be something much bigger and better, so they add on a basketball court, a tennis court, and a full-length swimming pool at no cost for labor.  These are some social and friendly neighbors!  As it turns out, thousands of programmers collaborate in software development in online open-source projects like Firefox, Linux, and Wordpress.  If the rest of the professional world was as social (and generous) as open-source programmers, we’d have free mechanics in our garages fixing our cars, free heart surgeons in our hospitals performing life-saving operations, and free plumbers fixing those pesky leaks underneath the sink!  Now, don’t you wish that everyone was as social as a typical programmer?

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