Do you need to be passionate about programming to be a good developer?

I recently encountered an intriguing article on 10x developers that considers two developer types, the passionate enthusiast and the professional.

I’ve lived in both of these worlds, as reflected in my Compassionate Coding work. I started coding in my teen years and loved it, so I tried to fit in with the hardcore enthusiast programmers and found external success, but it left me miserable and burnt out. I came to believe that you can be an effective developer and live a balanced life that includes care for people, not just code, and I started this company to spread that view.

I often see the remote work “debate” framed in one of two extreme ways. The first: remote work is great, and it’s only micromanaging, incompetent, and/or nefarious bosses who want to deprive workers of their freedom by forcing them back into the office. The second: remote work is terrible, and it’s only lazy workers who want to keep “quiet quitting” in their pajamas.

A common misconception about compassion is that it means being “nice” or suppressing our true feelings. Not at all! Compassion means understanding suffering in ourselves and others and desiring to prevent or alleviate it. That often involves speaking up fiercely for others and ourselves.

Last week, I hosted a live session to address the Compassionate Coding community about practicing compassion for ourselves and others in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights

When you use RTFM, you’re saying, “Not only am I not going to help you, but I also want to make sure that you feel ashamed about your inability to help yourself.”

If we want to create more effective teams and a more inclusive tech industry, we need to retire RTFM and the associated sentiment from our culture.

“She just doesn’t seem technical enough.”

“We need someone a little more technical.”

“The guy who mentored me at my last company always made me feel bad when I made a mistake. I don’t want to do that to someone else.”

Coding is stressful. Self-compassion is a great technique for managing difficult emotions that provides health benefits, improved relationships, and a better mindset for problem-solving.

When executed properly, the agile retrospective is the perfect combination of gratitude and a growth mindset, which are two key contributors to happiness and fulfillment. 

The prevailing work culture in Silicon Valley is not healthy or sustainable. Here are 5 ideas for improving the situation for everyone.

When it comes to communication, especially involving engineers, tech has a toxic tone problem. I know because I’ve not only been surrounded by it for the past decade, but during less enlightened moments, I’ve contributed to it. But there's hope!

Compassion has the power to heal the tech industry. Software may be built on machines, but it's built by, with, and for human beings. It's time to start focusing on the human factors of software development, including the importance of cultivating compassion.