
My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means. - webista
http://www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/
======
51Cards
My partner also had no clue what I do, so she asked to learn. Not to learn how
to code, but what it involves. So we took a couple nights and we wrote a small
program together just so she could understand what it means when I say
'function' or 'UI'. At each step I explained why we were doing things and what
it entailed and what some of our options could be, but stopped short of actual
code semantics. At the end we had a working program and she understood how it
was put together and in turn, what my daily routine entails. To this day she
doesn't get that blank look and is able to ask questions. The fact she took
the time to do that meant a lot to me.

~~~
brandall10
I think sharing passion is great. Perhaps it isn't reasonable to expect unless
you met through that passion, but simply 'entering your world', just a bit, is
oh so important. What you guys did is amazing. You surely have a strong
foundation in your relationship.

Unfortunately I just broke off an engagement to a lady who does event planning
for a museum. When I met her almost 4 years ago she was working clothing
retail on a hiatus from school. I encouraged her to finish her degree and to
apply for internships before graduating. She didn't know what she wanted to do
and the museum gig fell into her lap thru an acquaintance, but she loves art
and consequently loves her job.

I went to most events she hosted over the period of a year she had the job and
we were still together. I chatted up dozens of her co-workers, hung out
dutifully, walked thru the exhibits with her as she explained them. I enjoyed
it even though it wasn't my thing, it was fun to learn and I was proud of her.

During this period I went to two Startup Weekends. I asked her to come visit.
Esp. the second one where my pitch was selected and I built a team of 7. I
wanted her to see the final demonstration, to simply be there - for nothing
else I was presenting in front of a crowd of 100 people and I was nervous. She
would not come. She did "not like computers, that's your thing", paraphrasing.
That was the major turning point...

It's not about learning to program, or to even take a passing interest or
understanding. It's simply, "this is my life's work, please support me." I
think if you can't get that out of a relationship that's a major red flag.

~~~
noduerme
People are afraid of being placed in a situation that's totally alien to them.
It's not as alien -- it's not as big a deal for you to go through an art
gallery and chat up yuppies as it is for her to go through a convention center
being gawked at by nerds.

After my girlfriend and I had been going out for six months or so -- this was
five or six years ago -- I got her a laptop and a wacom pad. She was a painter
-- she'd never touched photoshop, illustrator, corel or anything. I tried to
teach her how to use them. She got so frustrated, at one point she held the
laptop out a window and threatened to throw it down six stories. But she's
amazing with it now -- she's actually one of the highest-paid, most in-demand
freelance illustrator/designers I know. I knew she had the skill.

But to this day when I talk about getting her to sit down and see something of
the code I write, she gets a look on her face that I know not to mess with.
I'd love to walk her through what I do, but I know she understands as much as
she needs to, and it's not compatible with the way she thinks. It doesn't do
anything for her. That's alright.

My point? It's easier for us to go back into their world than it is for them
to understand ours.

~~~
esrauch
I don't think presenting a business idea is any more alien to the average
person than an art gallery.

------
petercooper
_And if you don’t have even a basic understanding of what your spouse does
with 40+ hours of his/her week, then you’re not on a team._

That's quite the generalization. My wife has almost no knowledge of most areas
of my work, but it's never been a negative or caused any friction in my non-
work life. That said, I don't really have much interest in sharing it either,
as there's more than enough to discuss and do as a family outside of my work
hours.

~~~
__ingrid__
I agree. Expanding your horizons is great, and if you get to do it with a
loved one, that's even better, but it's not a necessary part of every
relationship. I've dated guys who knew nothing about programming, and I
wouldn't be ashamed to take them to company parties to mingle with my fellow
programmers, and I don't look down on spouses I meet who don't program either,
they're often interesting in a different way.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

~~~
narcissus
I, too, agree... for me, at least, I don't care that my wife really
understands what I do (although she gets it to a point). For me the important
thing is that she isn't bored by me talking about it :)

That is to say, while she doesn't really understand it, she will let me
talk/vent about it as much as I need to. Just as I don't really understand
what she does, but I'm more than happy for her to talk about it.

------
mr_luc
This is something that I think about a lot, actually.

If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your
friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those
things?

Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and
so on. But please consider the other viewpoint.

Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other
people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a
business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or
surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship
with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a
normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion?

My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others.

Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance
of sharing gists with?

I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we
let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry
people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family
endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.

Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with
the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you,
or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or
coding with your SO, then you're lucky!

~~~
jroseattle
Ah grasshopper, much to learn you have. :-)

Seriously, don't sweat this. While your logic is completely valid, one thing
I've learned in personal relationships is that logic is, in-and-of-itself,
rather useless in determining relationship success.

Unless you're a robot, people come with things like emotions and feelings and
all kinds of other baggage that are impervious to logic. Not just your
partner, but yourself. And you usually don't realize it until later.

Your expectations about spending time with someone who shares your passion
isn't unrealistic at all. But in the end, a relationship is about people, not
your passion. You may find a partner because of your passion, but he/she will
stick around because of who you are -- not what you do.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Finding people who share your passions is relatively easy. We advertise them
on our sleeves. There are, literally, catalogs and clubs and conferences and
books and lecture circuits and cruises devoted to any given pastime, from
Ethiopian funk music of the 1970s to small-scale software companies focused on
order tracking.

Finding a romantic partner or a spouse is a wholly different problem which
generally plays out on a completely different level.

------
srl
And the gcache'd version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHiyqmkJ:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-
husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-
means/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1)

~~~
DrJokepu
Thanks a lot, I simple can't figure out how to get to Google Cache on touch
screen devices as it looks like that their instant preview thingie is
triggered by the mouse hover event.

~~~
irahul
Appending `cache:` to the url works. Example:

    
    
        cache:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/

~~~
srl
That's 'prepending' (just so you know).

~~~
irahul
Yes. I noticed it after I had missed my edit window.

------
dangrossman
Discussion from last year: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595950>

------
araneae
I think generally this might not be about relationships per se, but simply
what kind of person you are.

It would seem weird to me to be in a relationship with a person and not get
involved in their field; but that's just because I'm that kind of person. I
view everyone as a potential teacher. When I dated a physicist, I got into
physics; a computer scientist, computer science; a Go player, I learned to
play Go; an epidemiologist, I learned epidemiology.

But not everyone is like that, in fact probably most people are not... so it
probably has less to do with your relationship and more about personality
type.

------
sasha__b
Available in Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-
husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-
means/&hl=en&biw=1882&bih=1243&strip=1)

------
ravloony
My Christmas present from my wife was a presentation of screenshots of her
programming tutorial. She's been learning python in secret, to show me that
she wants exactly what the article advises: to understand what it is that I do
for a living. I feel privileged to have married her.

~~~
outworlder
That's awesome.

~~~
ravloony
That's what I thought!

------
jroseattle
At a certain level I agree with the OP, but only where "basic understanding"
is something that can be decided between two people.

Characterizing whether or not my wife has an appreciation for the tools I use
in my job as a measure of the strength of our relationship is, for us,
completely invalid. My wife can barely explain what I do for a living. But she
knows that I love what I do, and she's supportive within the context of what
she understands.

This post really just speaks to how this particular person measures her
relationship with her partner. Anyone else drawing out this singular aspect of
a relationship as a gauge for matrimonial harmony is on a fool's errand.

~~~
johnnyn
100% agreed. My wife is a labor and delivery nurse. I ask her many questions
about her job but I have no interest in learning to how give an IV or check
for effacement.

If someone you're dating is not interested in learning your programming
language, don't hold it against them. Most likely, there are other reasons why
they are dating you in the first place.

------
flyosity
Reading this makes me appreciate that my wife is also a software engineer and
instantly understands things I talk about. We've been together for a long time
(met near the end of college at RIT) but it's one of those life perks that I
take for granted sometimes because I forget that it's definitely _not_ the
norm.

------
Jun8
There's a subcontext here that is separate from the appalling notion of being
not interested in what your husband/wife works on. Consider the statement: "My
husband's specialty is comparative literature and I don't know what that
means" or "My wife is an art historian and I don't know what that means". If I
heard one of these statements I would think (to myself) "what an ignoramus!".
Well, if it's not OK for those, why is it OK for engineering or science? This
brings us to the classic _the two cultures_ debate, articulated simplistically
by C. P. Snow but echoed by many, many other scientists. I think the gap has
widened in the past decades.

------
nzjames
I just asked my wife and she said she just tells people I'm a spy. When I
pressed her for why she said what I do is too technical therefore I'm keeping
it hidden from her and that must mean I'm a spy.

------
bitops
Great article and it goes both ways of course. Curiosity about another person
is the only way to keep things fresh, regardless of how platonic the
relationship is.

For geeks: remember that sometimes there are _much_ more interesting things in
the analog world than whatever you're immersed in digitally. ;)

------
metaobject
My wife isn't a programmer, but understands some of the stuff I do at a high
level. I think that it makes conversations much more efficient. I can come
home bummed out a little, she asks "what's wrong?", and I tell her that my
code keeps crashing, or that I can't get some library to build, etc - and she
gets it - end of conversation about that. It also helps out when I have to put
in extra hours to get some stuff done ... she knows that this work can
sometimes require a great amount of effort.

------
aen
Really nice post. I'm a designer/developer and I'm lucky my wife understands
the work I do.

~~~
StefanKarpinski
In college, my girlfriend (at that point of two years) knew I was into
incomprehensible theoretical math, but apparently I had never mentioned
anything about computers or programming, which I was also pretty into.

One day we were both working in my room and a bunch of LexisNexis links she'd
saved earlier just wouldn't work. She was on the verge of tears and panic —
she'd spent days collecting these links, and now none of them worked. I said
"lemme see" and sat down with her computer. I poked around with her saved
links and tried some stuff on LexisNexis. Then I wrote a perl one-liner to
munge her URLs. Voila: the munged URLs all just worked (the links had IP-based
auth token that I just s///'d).

At no other point in my life have I been looked at with quite that degree of
amazement and hero-worship.

