The Effects of Computer Programming on the Brain (2012)

I wouldn't qualify this as an addiction either[0], but it's still good to know what motivates programmer behavior and the dopamine cycle is definitely a factor. The real question is how do we use this information in a productive way (better code quality) rather than a destructive way (needless code complexity).

[0]: My personal definition of addiction is, if you were to stop doing X activity for a week cold turkey, would you experience withdrawal symptoms?

> For some people, the healthiest reward is the coding. For others, it's working on solving a 300-year old math problem, or struggling for hours and days to find the perfect word for a line in a poem, or a sentence in a novel. There are no "healthier" rewards than those intellectual gymnastics.

More to the point, there aren't any other rewards than dopamine. Dopamine is literally what a reward is in the brain. Unless you're just never going to do anything rewarding, this is inescapable.

> someone who may be suffering from what I can only really describe as coding addiction, the solution may be to find healthier rewards.

If your definition of addiction is dopaminergenic action, then you're simply proposing another addiction here, because you're just proposing a different dopaminergenic action besides coding here.

That was exactly what I wanted to say, if in more words: too many simple dichotomies.

I don't like seeing the language of addiction and recovery expanded to new areas like this. It's a way of putting moral frame on behavior that can be healthy and enriching.

I first felt this way when I saw "addiction" applied as a label to kids who prefered playing video games to going outside. My response was "did they call it addiction before video games when kids played with blocks and action figures indoors?" They didn't. It's easy for people to reach for the term "addiction" when they want to pathologize behavior they don't like.

Fact is, the dopamine cycle is a natural part of life. The problem isn't whether something is addictive or not, it's whether the side effects of that pleasure cycle are harmful. I've had periods in my life where I've spent weeks and months at a time "heads down" in programming. It was always as controllable as it was pleasurable.

In the startup world, "Passion" is a shibboleth, or a way of speaking that signals yourself as part of the in crowd. Or, in full startup vernacular, people who are "passionate" about programming are a good "culture fit."

I'm not saying people aren't passionate about programming, but in the context of the startup world, the literal meanings of the words don't matter. The subtext is what's being listened for.

I'm not passionate about programming at all. It's just the best way to make money from home.

But I keep my skill growing anyway because I'd like to produce better software products. Development is a mess already, it will be better to prevent further complications.

When they say bad programmers they simply mean not as good as them, which is a mean but true and fair thing to say.

This sounds like it could be quite bad for learning. I've found my learning of an abstract subject, such as mathematics, greatly increases when I can take a step back at each successive milestone of progress.

In contrast, when everything simply blurs together, there are no clearly delineated chunks of memory to latch linguistic markers onto, and I fail to build abstractions out of those thoughts.

Of course, this concern may be moot in the case of computer programming, since the abstractions involved are often concretely represented by the computer itself! In a way, when we program, we are outsourcing a part of our brain, relying on a smaller subset of mental capacity, and relying on the computer to amplify it back again, by handling the abstractions for us.

OTOH, this may simply be proof that going to the whiteboard before coding up a solution is a healthy alternative to hacking away at the keyboard all day without thought.