Cognitive dissonance is expecting one thing that you hold as a deep belief and seeing something else that flies in the face of your belief and the uncomfortable feeling you get when it happens. Cognitive dissonance is a coping mechanism of the brain that you might imagine is meant to help us not believe in Santa, the Tooth Faerie, and the End of the World. At some point you see evidence and your fantasies go 'pop' and you are back to reality.
Sadly, belief is stronger than cognitive dissonance. It is why cults still exist. It is why deprogrammers are still in demand. It is why there is so much pseudoscience in the world.
As an example, many end of the world cults are so messed up when the world does not actually end, they go a little nutty. They just can't believe that they were wrong. Many just create a new fantasy and set a new date for the end of the world. Sure, a few wake up and leave the cult, but most hang on.
Programmers have the same problem. Take exceptions. Please, take them! They are great... except when caught and ignored. 99% of most crappy code is caused by developers not properly catching and 'handling' errors. They see something like exception handling and assume it is somehow rare or that because the catch does not force you to write code, there is no need to write the code.
The cognitive dissonance happens when the application becomes unstable and/or crashes. They may even log the exceptions, but for some reason, they can't understand why the code fails. They justify their decisions with fantasies like the exceptions being rare or impossible or better yet, un-handleable. They feel uncomfortable, but they just can't seem to come to terms with the idea that they failed to add error handling.
Like an end of the world cult, they just set another date when their application will work and wait for it to happen. Sadly the day never comes. They still believe in a fantasy, despite the evidence in front of their face.
No comments:
Post a Comment