In human social behavior, it is unlikely for a single person to only take or only cause pressure. People who are pressured look for possibilities to cause pressure themselves.

Human operators get a lot of pressure thrown back at them when interacting with machines. This is especially true when writing code. The developer realizes that mistakes are all his own fault, because the machine does not err: it just acts by the rules of physics. Thus, the developer experiences a feeling of powerlessness which creates pressure upon him.

The effect of this stressful situation is easily noticed in many important open source projects: programmers tend to cause much pressure on human interactions to relieve themselves from the stress they receive. This attitude scares off new programmers. When searching for faults arising from interaction of multiple projects, the programmers will stubbornly blame other projects involved, refusing to look for the problem in their code.

This effect slows down development of large software systems in a community effort. It would be interesting to read about possible solutions for this problem. On step in the direction of solving it is dealing more consciously with it.

This pattern has some similarity with the GodKing pattern.

This page exists on both MeatBallWiki and WikiWikiWeb because both the social pattern aspect and the software development pattern aspect are important to this, but the direction it takes may be very different on the two wikis.

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<-> Wiki:CodeKing