How not to think like a programmer

This is insanely important and may be the best HN link all week. Any engineer who routinely feels frustrated when working with other people should pay attention to this.

I've done engineering and sales, which are very different skillsets. More importantly, I have been mentored by other people who are world class at these respective skills, and have been very lucky to have the opportunity to learn from them.

Even though not everyone should learn to code, it is valuable to be able to put on the other person's hat.

Non-engineers need to respect that engineers deal with situations that don't happen in everyday life. An engineer is frequently presented with situations that boil down to "it does work" or "it does not work". There is no gray area, and typically the computer is not very polite in the way that it tells you that you're wrong -- errors rarely say "Hey, I hope you aren't upset about this, but something's not working right. Want to talk it through and find a solution?" Instead, we deal with messages that have the emotional sensitivity of "screw you!", or if we are lucky, "screw you! #32"

Being in this mindset all the time will condition you to thinking in a certain way, and that's what is required to program. People, on the other hand, don't work like this, and if you can see the difference and act on it, you will benefit from it.