"Three programmers come to a one-way street. The academic looks to the right, doesn't see any oncoming cars, and crosses. The corporate programmer looks to the left, then looks to the right, and then crosses. The distributed systems engineer looks to the left, then looks to the right, then looks up to make sure there aren't any planes falling out of the sky…"
"... the hacker looks down to check for landmines and footguns, and then runs to catch up with the rest, grumbling something about computer scientists and off-by-one errors."
The distributed systems engineer definitely uses a mirror to watch both directions at the same time while crossing the street. They've been caught by Time of Check - Time of Use errors before.
Well, I do always look both ways when crossing the one-way street where I live.
But not because of programming experience, but because of late-night Taxi drivers who drive like Doc Brown (https://youtu.be/vHake6w4Su0?t=17) and believe that "reverse" is some kind of cheat code that flips the direction of the road.
In tourist-filled parts of the world where they drive on the left side of the road (e.g. UK, Australia, Japan), you sometimes see signs reminding the tourists to look right before crossing the road.
London in particular has the signs ("Look left", "Look right") written in words on the road surface itself at obvious crossing points, especially near stations etc. So pedestrians look down at them as they go to cross the road.
