In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, (It’s a software design book, seriously), Alan Cooper argues that programmers are so different from users that they probably shouldn’t design for them. That’s my job (I’m a program manager) but I think I might be just as bad.

One of my teammates told me that we needed to do something one way, which caused a problem down the pipe that I have to solve right now. But why would you take his word for it, when you can spend hours analyzing the source code. I didn’t have an IDE or a compiler, but I had full text search and a fantastic editor that can handle C# syntax highlighting. So I unrolled the code by stepping through the code from the entry to the bug, replacing every call to a non-obvious function with the meat of the function and throwing out overhead code (things like error-handling, casting, serializing, etc) and adding comments because unlike real programmers, commenting code doesn’t make me break out in hives.

And after taking 2 megs of source code down to a mere few hundred lines (with comments) and I had my answers, he was right, we probably needed to do it that way and more importantly I think I know how to work around it.

In summary: Nerds probably are a little different than most people.