Jenny’s Reviews > Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World > Status Update

"Programmers are the ones who create the flaws in their own code, of course. But it's the users who reveal the flaws; the users who, poking around and clicking on things, uncover all the inadequacies of the coders' work. This can often wind up planting a deep, vibrating misanthropy in some programmers' souls."

"But if you had to pick the central plank of coder psychology, the one common thread in nearly everyone who gravitates to this weird craft? It's a boundless, nigh masochistic ability to endure brutal, grinding frustration ... Finding bugs."

Four waves of coders:
1. Huge teams, computers owned by institutions
2. Hackers of '60s and '70s: renegades who wrested computing away from institutions, started pushing women out of the field
3. '80s: home computers, teens with no adult supervision
4. mid-'90s to today: grew up with web and mobile phones, confronted by unexpected side effects their creations cause in society

"It's often a surprise to people today, but at MIT's Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, when [Mary Allen] Wilkes worked there, most of the 'career programmers' were female. Indeed, it was often assumed back then that women were naturals at programming." Men were more into hardware at the time.

"This instinctive desire to optimize -- and scale -- is what has led to many collisions between software firms and civic life."

"[Computers] will take every single last one of your smallest errors and grind them in your face, until you fix them. That works its way into your mind and personality, too. When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration."