Day 254: outsider fallacy

i first noticed it on my first visits back home from college.

“omg you go to princeton? you must be soooo smart”

i would tell them no, i’m not scribbling formulas on my dorm window inventing new fields of mathematics, and my classmates aren’t either. sure, you have some wicked smart apples in the bunch, but for the most part, ivy league students are still just regular old people.

same thing when i worked at facebook and google. outsiders assumed that i was some coding savant zooming down colorful slides all day (the internship was a truly terrible movie) and swimming in free food (okay, that part is actually true)

it’s understandable why this happens. it’d be way too inefficient to consider everything on a case-by-case basis, so we generalize from whatever little information we have about a person.

we’ve all been on the receiving side of this and had people (often incorrectly) assume things about us based on some group membership like race, education, gender, occupation, appearance, etc. it’s happens all the time.

the funny thing is that despite knowing from the inside how inaccurate these assumptions and generalizations can be, we still do it when we encounter other groups because putting things in neat little boxes makes our lazy brains happy.

i noticed myself doing it recently when looking at a new project by the playwright team at microsoft called playwright-cli. i was interested because it has quite a bit of overlap with browserflow when it comes to recording actions and generating selectors, so i was curious how they tackled many of the challenges in this area.

back in high school and college, i thought microsoft was garbage because slashdot told me so, but nowadays you got typescript and vs code and github coming out of there so microsoft is * ~ pretty cool ~ * in my mind. going into the codebase, i was expecting some incredible code that would rock my world.

turns out that the code quality is just… okay? stylistically, i get triggered because there are naked conditional blocks without wrapping braces and random sloppy bits like two spaces where there should be just be one. these sorts of things aren’t that big of a deal, but prettier is a thing, you know? there’s also a bunch of needless repetition where someone clearly copied and pasted code rather than writing a simple loop to condense the logic.

and then i realized i was making the outsider fallacy where i somehow assumed that this codebase would be lit simply because it’s an official project by microsoft. at the end of the day, people are people are people are people and everyone’s pretty normal