Do you feel like you “think like a computer?”

I don't think that I think "like a computer", but rather I think about the design of systems/processes more. As I would expect, say, a visual artist to think about the visual design and aspects of things more than a non-artist. Or a musician (as evidenced by music-centric friends) to notice acoustics and other properties of spaces and media more than non-musicians. But artists don't "think like a painting" and musicians don't "think like an instrument".

Computers, themselves, don't "think" about efficiency and maximizing, they think literally (and I do know some people who take everything too literally, I would say they "think like computers" in the sense that they lack humor and imagination and creativity). Instead I'd say I think like a computer scientist/systems thinker. I think about what collection of actions and conditions would achieve a goal most effectively. This can be in several regards:

- Most efficient

- Most repeatable

- Most sustainable

These are the same kinds of things that I think about in developing/designing software systems. But I'm not thinking like a computer.

Geez, I hope I don't think like a computer. They can be such incredible idiots. "Oh sorry, I have to drop displaying the whole page because you left an extra flyspeck comma here." "Oh, sorry, I can't look through this line of comma-separated strings with this array function, tell me to turn it into an array then I'll do it." AGGGGGGH!

App: "Tut, tut, you didn't cross that 't'."

Me: "Then how did you know it was a 't' ??"

App: "Never mind. Just go do it while I relax a bit."

Me: "OK try it now."

App: "Whoops! Syntax jubilation error in line 1 character 1."

Me: "Where?"

App: "That's not my job. I do as I'm told. "

Yes and apparently it's one of the signs of high functioning autism. I started painting recently and now I'm breaking down even people's faces to shades, layers and highlights.

Oh well. It's fun.

Sometimes the way a computer works is a useful model for thinking about your thoughts, but you don't actually think that way. If you believe that you actually do, it can be self-fulfilling, limiting, and even deny your humanity.

You are not a computer, not even close. Unfortunately, we are often temped to think we are. It's a cause of the social disfunction techies are known for. Don't be so self-limiting. To think we are like a computer can be useful, but it can be a crutch.

I was just talking to SO (non-tech) about this! I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing, but it came up because SO and other non-tech friends seemed to be so impressed by my ability to detect edge cases in everyday things.

I am not a “rockstar” engineer - mostly I just tend to think in terms of truth tables, or case coverage because that’s a huge part of my day job.

Not during waking hours. Back when I was working long hours as a junior developer, I would have lucid nightmares every night of being a 5-cell simplex. I would reprogram myself while asleep for hours until I woke up. The more I tried to program it the more complex it would get.

As someone that started his career in real time embedded systems, debugging hardware and writing code close to the "metal" I definitely do but not the way you suggest, I simply can't overlook how things are designed and built on the lower level even when those are relatively stupid devices.

Sometimes I would like to tell my programmer teammates to "imagine if you were the computer, what would be faster to do", when it comes to think about optimizing a process or something like that.

Simple and short answer: Yes, a thousand times yes.

No, and I think that's part of my problem.

Yes, absolutely.