[dasil003]

I couldn't disagree with you more, it seems to come from a pervasive cynicism that is day in day out grind of defect-finding in the programming industry.

How you can you casually claim technical support person has a more positive work environment than a programmer because sometimes a customer is happy when their problem is solved? What about all the customers who are irrationally angry even when you do your best to solve their problem? What about the problems you have no power to solve but have to take the heat for? What about the general prevailing attitude of frustration and discontent that characterizes the average person reaching out to support?

I don't understand how anyone could for one second say this is preferable to seeing a compiler error. There's no negative emotion inherent in a bug you discover. The fact that you are looking for flaws and fixing them is "negative" in a technical sense, but I find it bizarre to compare it so unfavorably to real negative human emotion directed at you. Even when other people are critiquing your work or sending you bug reports, there tends to be less emotion and more constructive feedback than you get in a service industry.

And what of citing "creative industries" and then drawing a sharp contrast to developers. Software engineering is extremely creative. The positive feedback from development is primarily the joy of creating working software. I've been doing this 20 years and it's still a thrill. Furthermore, I get plenty of positive feedback for my work. Obviously it's not on the scale of the insane hours I've spent in the trenches obsessing over minute details, but that's fine, I can take a compliment and find it gratifying even if it's shallow and uninformed of the true scope of my work.

I think there is definitely something about programming that leads to a pedantic mindset that could be offputting to others, but I think it's nonsense that it leads you to be inherently negative. Programming for me is empowering, attention to detail is just how I hone that power.