Laziness, impatience, and hubris

August 19, 2010

Those are the free “virtues” of the programmer according to a well known book on the Perl programming language… Let’s see what happens when I consider those virtues out of the computer context.

I know for a fact that I am lazy, pushing things to the last minute, and that is quite embarrassing sometimes. Procrastination is the word, it’s become very popular among so-called geeks, and personal coaches.

I’m not sure if I am very much impatient, although I get easily bored at things, ideas, or people after a while. Most of the time in a very polite and quiet way ; meaning that if I can walk away I will, but I’m not in a hurry if I can daydream. Daydreaming is good, please do so, it’s when you get your best/worse ideas. Like: hey, it’s been a long time, let’s blog!

Finally hubris… Now that’s hard to admit. I’m sure I can be proud of stuff I made, but if you ask me to pick an example, then I can’t… yet? The fact is (I hope) I’m just as much a human being as you are, then given a functional brain and some time anyone could come up with the same sh*t I did ; so why should I be proud of that? The only pride I take is in managing not to bother anyone (not easy).

That being said, hubris is also about self-confidence: a quality that I was born without. Damn.

Next time, we’ll see three other qualities: “attention to details”, “thirst for blood”, and a “twisted mind”, the three virtues of the psychopath. Thank you for your time.