Here's what I learned from reading fiction: it's best not to go too deep into the authors' biographies, because it may spoil the joy of reading their writing. Some are alcoholics, philanderers, liars, or arse lickers. They are mostly skint, always hoping to be the next Hemingway and forever ruining literary cafes' budgets by ordering one coffee per day and spending hours hogging the table and arguing about style. Some embellish their biographies, but if that's what sells books, so be it. They typically form closely-knit cliques and have strange rituals and their own vernacular. Some are racist--there is a contemporary English fiction writer who cannot stop himself from making sure that whenever he needs an idiot, a crook, or a thief in his stories then the reader is explicitly told that it's an Eastern European, even if that fact has nothing to do with the story. A darling of the literary column in the English press. Of course, he is.
Software developers rarely venture into that world, because the pay is crap and the challenges are all to do with who you know. Writing is also one of the most closed and xenophobic guilds. Count on the fingers of one hand contemporary non-English writers writing and publishing in English without the help of a translator who are invited into the English literary coteries. One hand will be quite enough.
As a software developer I also learned that our profession attracts the kind of moron who would never be allowed to practice chemistry or civil engineering in professional capacity. You can wake up one day to tell yourself that the ad about learning to code in Python was actually a sign from above and you are ready to make megabucks the moment you finish your online course. You don't know what you don't know and instead of learning more about the art and science of designing, writing, and testing software you focus on a few people who do not conform to your worldview. You are surprised that software developers have a wide variety of views, body shapes, or sexual preferences. Being a writer, you feel compelled to write about it. That's how you lay bare your entitlements, your feeling of superiority for having mastered the rules of grammar and navigation of the impenetrable, permanently undrepaid world of literary hierarchies. The world of people who live in horror of someone mastering the rules of the language better and replacing the on the shortlist for the Booker prize. Unlike software developers who want more people to master their favourite language, because the more popular it gets, the more opportunities they will have.
(If the above doesn't make sense, do not worry. I too don't know why the writer-coder brings people's personal views into the discussion of software development from the point of view of an English major.)
Software developers rarely venture into that world, because the pay is crap and the challenges are all to do with who you know. Writing is also one of the most closed and xenophobic guilds. Count on the fingers of one hand contemporary non-English writers writing and publishing in English without the help of a translator who are invited into the English literary coteries. One hand will be quite enough.
As a software developer I also learned that our profession attracts the kind of moron who would never be allowed to practice chemistry or civil engineering in professional capacity. You can wake up one day to tell yourself that the ad about learning to code in Python was actually a sign from above and you are ready to make megabucks the moment you finish your online course. You don't know what you don't know and instead of learning more about the art and science of designing, writing, and testing software you focus on a few people who do not conform to your worldview. You are surprised that software developers have a wide variety of views, body shapes, or sexual preferences. Being a writer, you feel compelled to write about it. That's how you lay bare your entitlements, your feeling of superiority for having mastered the rules of grammar and navigation of the impenetrable, permanently undrepaid world of literary hierarchies. The world of people who live in horror of someone mastering the rules of the language better and replacing the on the shortlist for the Booker prize. Unlike software developers who want more people to master their favourite language, because the more popular it gets, the more opportunities they will have.
(If the above doesn't make sense, do not worry. I too don't know why the writer-coder brings people's personal views into the discussion of software development from the point of view of an English major.)