My brother once laughed at me when I told him that I thought I would make a good counselor. *grin* I can see from your reaction you’re thinking the same thing. Well, I was sitting at my desk today, trying to get myself in the mood to do some coding when I had an epiphany. You see, I didn’t become a psychologists or a counselor, I became a software developer, and it occured to me that the two aren’t all that different.

You see, in both cases you have a client who has a problem. And they come to you and you meet in an office and the client explains their problem. In both cases you have to listen very carefully, because often the client won’t tell you the real problem, but will instead dance around the issue. You have to take all the information they give you, ask careful questions designed to verify and diagnose what is wrong, and then come up with a solution.

In both cases you have to be gentle, understanding but firm. In both cases, after presenting the solution, you have to stay with the client to help them understand it and then start using it. The only real difference is that a software developer writes his solution down in a strict syntatic language and a psychologist writes his down in a complicated and loose syntatic language. ;)

Good psychologists share the hacker ethos, which is to study and learn and see how things work. Not all hackers write software that is immediately useful to people, many spend years doing research into the heart and soul of the technologies they are interested in. Psychologists will do the same, many spending their whole lives stydying the esoteric behaviors of the human brain. Really, all psychologists are just brain hackers.

I suppose I aught to draw a couple of distinctions. If psychologists are like hackers, then counselors are like software developers. The hacker often deals with hard technology at a deep level, though not always. Software developers, at least in this day and age, usually work at the top of the technology stack, just like psychologists often deal with the hard science of how the brain works, though not always, and counselor deal at the top of the stack applying the knowledge allready known to the problems of today.