This sense of magical control can be intoxicating and fun; it lends itself frequently to a sort of starry-eyed idealism. And it can also lead, particularly in younger coders—who’ve yet to be humbled by life and their own screw-ups—to some epic hubris. People who excel at programming, notes the coder and tech-culture critic Maciej Cegłowski, often “become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.” Or as the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum noted in 1976, “one would have to be astonished if Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts were not to apply in an environment in which omnipotence is so easily achievable.”

It is accompanied by its close cousin, a fierce devotion to efficiency. Since they have, at their beck and call, machines that can repeat instructions with robotic perfection, coders take a dim view of doing things repetitively themselves. They have a dislike of inefficiency that is almost aesthetic—they recoil from it as if from a disgusting smell. Any opportunity they have to automate a process, to do something more efficiently, they will. (Sanghvi even extended this to her nuptials. Her mother wanted to arrange Sanghvi’s marriage in India, and Sanghvi agreed, because it struck her as far more efficient than dating—which you could regard, from a purely computer-scientific point of view, as a woefully resource-intensive sorting algorithm. “I was a big fan of arranged marriages,” as she said once in a speech. “It appealed to the engineer in me. They’re practical, and they had a higher probability of succeeding.”)

Code makes efficiency and scale easy, seductive, almost inevitable. That is also why programmers fit so easily into business building and part of why some slide so frequently into libertarian thinking. Their talents are torqued perfectly for capitalism’s central trick, which is, basically, “do something marginally more efficiently than before and then skim off the profit.” Mind you, software also, by its very nature, weird-ifies a lot of the assumptions of capitalism. A piece of software is a thing, a machine that does something, so you can own it; but because it’s also a form of speech, it can be easily shared. And so it is shared, almost incessantly. Coders are remarkably chatty and open about their everyday work, regularly posting their software problems to online forums and spending hours helping other people solve theirs. (A study in the ’80s concluded that coders were “less loyal to their employers than to their profession.”) Even in the bowels of the most rapaciously capitalistic Silicon Valley firm are coders who spend a lot of time—at their desk, at work—helping solve the bugs of other randos. And there’s often a communitarian spirit in the worlds of free and open source software, where coders often contribute work freely, to software that anyone can also use themselves, freely.