The Programmer-Mathematician Stereotype Debunked
Description
A two-panel meme featuring comedian Jimmy O. Yang from one of his stand-up specials. The top panel has a question in large white text: 'IF YOU'RE A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER ARE YOU GOOD AT MATH?'. Below this, an image of Yang on stage is subtitled with his mock-outraged response: 'You just insulted my entire race of people.' The second panel is a closer shot of Yang speaking into the microphone, delivering the punchline: 'But no..'. The humor works on multiple levels. It directly confronts the common public misconception that all programming requires advanced mathematical ability. Yang cleverly frames 'programmers' as his 'race of people,' setting up a classic stereotype joke, only to subvert it by admitting the stereotype isn't true for him. This resonates deeply with the large majority of software engineers, especially in fields like web and application development, where logic and problem-solving skills are far more critical than calculus or linear algebra
Comments
46Comment deleted
The most complex math I've done this week was calculating the off-by-one error in a loop and figuring out if I have enough story points left in the sprint to justify a 3-hour Yak shave
Twenty years of optimizing distributed systems and I can model p99 latency with a heavy-tail distribution, but ask me to factor a quadratic and I’ll respond with exponential backoff
I've been writing distributed systems for 15 years and the only math I use is calculating how many 9s of availability I'm lying about in the SLA
The eternal question that haunts every developer at family gatherings: 'You're a programmer? You must be amazing at math!' Meanwhile, we're over here Googling 'how to center a div' for the thousandth time and using Stack Overflow to remember if array indices start at 0 or 1. Sure, we built a distributed microservices architecture that handles millions of requests per second, but ask us to do long division without a calculator and suddenly we're reaching for Math.floor() and praying the floating-point gods are merciful today
Programmer math: Big‑O hand‑waving, time‑zone modulo, and proving 0.1+0.2≠0.3; everything else is a dependency
After 20 years, my math stack is p99s, error budgets, and counting nines in the SLA; if you need eigenvectors, page the ML team, not the CRUD squad
Good at math? We aced Big O, but ask us to predict sprint velocity without heuristics - pure fiction
thank god im not the only one Comment deleted
Sorry dude, I'm good at maths Comment deleted
Admin, delete your meme - Cairco is good at maths Comment deleted
You can't graduate without finishing Calculus, Differentials, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Math College drop outs gtfo Comment deleted
Don't be so narrow-minded to assume thar only those who graduated from a specific university can enjoy programming. Give me a break. Comment deleted
Specific university? This is the standard across California you twat Comment deleted
There's literally not a single word in the meme about any university. The more you talk, the more you embarrass yourself. The nonsense you are saying is like to say that you need to graduate from a conservatorium to write music Comment deleted
The more you talk the more you suck dick. Fuck off dumbass. Go try and pass a PE exam without any math classes. Kys Comment deleted
hey, while it's not in the rules, I do not apprechiate this kind of behaviour. Be nice. Comment deleted
"Be nice" is in the rules (although it is marked as not mandatory) Comment deleted
aye, true. I wrote that part myself as well 🤦♂️ Comment deleted
And yet again you embarrassed yourself. There's not a single word about PE exams in the meme. You want to be acknowledged by bragging about some certificates of yours. Go somewhere else. You are pathetic - no wonder why you're looking for attention. It's hard to be you because it's hard to wear clown makeup every day. Comment deleted
Doesn't matter if it wasn't in the meme. It's implied that computer people aren't good at math and that'd be far from the truth for anyone who's actually good at their job or hobby Comment deleted
Miss Comment deleted
Imagine learning about Big O without knowing how to solve quadratic equation Comment deleted
literally me Comment deleted
I think knowing math is not necessery all the time. For example Web development or mobile development Comment deleted
web development is mostly design, not programming. At least it's supposed to be, soydevs will use js for anything. Comment deleted
Well that’s not much different from python that people put literally everywhere no matter how much it’s suited for the task Comment deleted
ubuntu be like Comment deleted
Agreed Comment deleted
Backend development? Python Scripts? Python Desktop software? Python Big data? Python Artificial intelligence? Python Machine learning? Python In-app scripting system? Very likely python Comment deleted
the last one is usually perl or lua though, it's really hard to do in-app scripting with python if the main program isn't python, and even if it is, it's very hard to do it securely. Comment deleted
lua is good for scripting i heard Comment deleted
but yeah, like half of all preinstalled desktop apps in ubuntu 18.04 had python 2 as a hard dependency Comment deleted
Isn’t it just overall Linux Comment deleted
no, ubuntu 20.04 has less of it (but now a shitton of snap), KDE was always a bit better and the rest of the distros are mostly reasonable. Comment deleted
fun fact: until ubuntu 19.04, they had some javascript code that was responsible for dynamic mouse movement. They then made a blog post about how much faster it got after replacing it. They didn't say what they replaced it with though. Comment deleted
backend development - python is unscalable scripts - python is fine desktop software - python is sloooooow and practically impossible to type check big data - fuck off AI - IDC ML - Literally the same thing scripting in apps - not python kthxbye Comment deleted
for AI and ML, python is actually usable because all the hard work is being done in C/C++land, and you just need to feed data into tensorflow or something Comment deleted
yeah exactly Comment deleted
Python is unscalable in web but Instagram was written on python and works somehow. Comment deleted
Anything can be scaled if you're rich enough Comment deleted
Lol, last week, when I asked our manager about load testing, he answered that we do more aws instances instead. But still, as python dev I would say that it is scalable enough for vast majority of websites. Even fintech, excluding some features that count every ms and written on C/++. Comment deleted
Ok Comment deleted
I wouldn't say anything. But for most web stuff the workflow is to transform request into bunch of database queries, execute them and transform the results into whatever you want to send back. This is trivially parallelizable and the critical point for scalability is actually the database in question. So as long as you don't pull Zope/Plone which wrote their own Python-based object-oriented database you should be fine. Comment deleted
And also what's wrong with big data on python? All popular libs have direct mapping to C Api. So you just make ml stuff with almost same speed as on C but with much more comfort Comment deleted
Are you fucked up? Comment deleted
lol i studied statistics Comment deleted