[11thEarlOfMar]

What is it about programmers that makes them (in general) not expressive, effusive, gregarious, ...

I have a deadpan face most of the time, people complain about not being able to read me. When I was younger, I rationalized that I don't want emotions to cloud the logic of a conversation. But I ultimately realized that I was deadpan all the time, whether in work/reasoning discussions or personal interractions. Regardless, my lack of reaction frequently confuses others and gets me into trouble.

[n8cpdx]

I don’t fully understand, but I have the same issue.

I’ll have a full day of coding work and I’ll have the full range of emotions - joy when t worked, fury when the underlying UI framework is lower quality than my expectations for my work output and I spend days or hours making awful workarounds. Cough cough UWP. Cough cough Xamarin.Forms.

And then I try to go out for drinks after and it’s like I’m an actual robot. Text generation seems to work OK, but emotional processing just isn’t there. I can’t access the part of my brain that does all of the socially-expected facial expressions, speech tone, and cadence.

When I was much younger, I was criticized for a constant monotone delivery and I’ve since worked on fixing that with great success. But if I spend more than an hour or two coding - or if I get anywhere near a state of productivity- I end up with a less convincing reproduction of human emotion than Alexa.

It makes dating after work, or getting coffee with someone mid-day, a serious challenge. I’m not opposed to hearing solutions in the reply.

[NateEag]

None of this is well-researched or strongly evidenced, but a few things that have helped me with similar problems:

* Reading Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg. I have very low native empathy, and the techniques in that book have helped me learn to understand and interact better with more emotionally-responsive people. It also helped me learn to recognize my own emotions better.

* Therapy. Finding a good therapist is hard and they are definitely not all good, but it can help a lot when you do.

* 2.5 grams of daily fish oil seems to have actually increased my emotional response significantly. Totally anecdotal, and not why I started taking it, but after about a month of that dosage I started to notice a difference. There's some evidence I may be on the autism spectrum (high-functioning, once known as Asperger's), so this could relate to that.

* Consciously taking breaks throughout the workday to pause, stretch, and think about what emotions I'm feeling and why.

I hope some of that helps you.

[Smaug123]

> Consciously taking breaks throughout the workday to pause, stretch, and think about what emotions I'm feeling and why.

+1 on this. If I'm not careful, my default mode is to get in the zone for hours, and then eventually realise my body is tired and hungry and cold (or whatever) and I have to do some big intervention like collapsing into a vegetative state for a while. Expanding your awareness, learning to maintain a general sense of how your body is doing while you're absorbed in the actual fun stuff, is a chore; but it's one which pays off when you can notice you're hungry after an hour and fix it quickly (rather than after four hours, at which point the problem is much worse and you might lose an extra hour just recovering from having no energy). And the easiest way to get to a constant gentle awareness of your physical state is to practice by consciously interrupting yourself every so often to do the checks, until the habit gradually fades into your background processing.

[NateEag]

I think programming appeals to people who don't natively do a lot of emotional display or read emotions well.

Emotional responses and awareness have very little relevance for the acts of writing and testing instructions for computers. Machines don't know or care how you feel.

Thus, people to whom those things seem less relevant often drift towards software development, IMO.

[lfowles]

Personally I was overly expressive as a kid and it irked me that people could so plainly read me, so over time I learned to tone down my outward emotions. Might have gone a little too far on that. Whoops.

[quickthrower2]

Take no notice of the people who complain.

Why do they need to read you? Unless it’s a close friend, family or relationship in which case they need to understand how you communicate.

I had a manager who said I need to get better at presenting etc. and for the first time I though meh… whatever. I’ll only do that once I find intrinsic motivation I won’t do that because it’s expected for a job (I’m not in sales and I rarely present other than internal demos)

[meken]

Yes, I can relate. I realize now that fun conversation is highly illogical, emotion based. I view my desire for control and logic actually gets in the way of emotions, which makes conversations less enjoyable.

[v-erne]

Me too. I feel that the key insight is that rational mind is almost always too slow to keep flow of the conversation interesting. It inevitably destroys timing and rhythm. You can observe this clearly in stand-up performances - rationality of the bit is only minor part, the delivery is almost everything.