Posts in psychology

Programming on Both Sides of Your Brain

A lot of disagreements in software engineering seem to have a deeper background than mere technical considerations. Should you move fast and break things, or should you reinvent the wheel? Does it matter how the code looks like when it does what you want? And what is the purpose of it all in the first place? I propose that many of those arguments arise from different people using different of two possible fixed worldviews in a variety of contexts, which they assign automatically and mostly unconsciously, in a similar way to how our brain resolves bistable perceptions. Furthermore, I propose that the ability to consciously switch between the two worldviews, and the experience needed to decide which one to use in the given context, are crucial for the work of a software engineer.

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