Some of the very worst of the worst liberal takes, apologia for fascist shit, and of course cryptobro grifts and even Tesla worship keep coming from there. It’s fucked.
I don’t want to say all programmers or tech workers are like that, but I don’t like what I’ve seen so far from people with a .programming suffix on their names.
I am a software developer with a physics/engineering background. Can confirm STEM professionals can be quite reactionary. They commonly view themselves as progressive; but it’s an Andrew Yang technocratic sort of progress which does nothing to abolish the real exploitative conditions. They still believe that capitalist technological progress will save humanity, not realizing it will always mean increased profits and exploitation and nothing more.
Basically, the average software developer is Reddit personified. Those people exist, they aren’t bots. They’re roaming at your local Trader Joe’s and Best Buy.
I’m still unlearning some of this ideology that I picked up from that crowd.
Those people exist, they aren’t bots. They’re roaming at your local Trader Joe’s and Best Buy.
Are you my neighbor?
Did you ever find an inability to communicate with some STEM folks about media or entertainment in a meaningful way?
I was talking to someone with a coding/econ background and he was telling me how the ending of this one movie was very deep. I asked him how? And he asked what did I mean, it was just deep.
They are a good friend so I don’t think it’s due to social anxiety, though it could be. I was taken aback by the lack of depth. Then I remembered growing up chatting with friends in high school about different single player games we liked and the depth of the conversation was similar. We’d stay that the story was great, or awesome, cool, etc. and never have much substance to our claims. We’d reference a scene or a part, maybe a sequence of events but that would be it.
It is common for STEM folks to have a reductive world view. I think part of this is due to capitalist alienation. Whereas great thinkers of the past were polymaths dabbling in many different studies, today there is an intense drive to specialize into a particular trade or study, and therefore to identify strongly with it, due to the capitalist division of labor. We don’t think of ourselves principally as humans or thinkers, but as doctors or attorneys or physicists — and increasingly, even these broad vocations are insufficient as an identity, and one must further qualify that they are a pediatric opthalmologist or a family law attorney or a condensed matter physicist.
Just as it is flawed for STEM folks to reduce everyone else to their own simple categories, we too must reject simple categorization, viewing this group as a monolith. To do so is to tacitly accept their own worldview. Don’t appeal to their identity as a developer, or a gamer, or a scientist. Talk to them as humans with their own distinct experiences. They will constantly fall back on the fact that they “are” a Windows loyalist, or a gamer, or a Democrat, and invoke these things as explanations for their opinions and behaviors. Don’t let it stop there, ask more questions and make them explain themselves as a human and not some illusory identity.
I was talking to someone with a coding/econ background and he was telling me how the ending of this one movie was very deep. I asked him how? And he asked what did I mean, it was just deep.
The optimistic interpretation is not that they are essentially shallow, but that they lack the ability to communicate or even understand their own thoughts clearly. It takes practice to think, and even more practice to think in a self-aware manner. These are prerequisites for the kind of deep conversation you might have wanted from them.
My wife is extremely analytical with media and has really forced me to think a lot more about various pieces of media I see.
This has resulted in me seeing modern slop for what it is, and really annoying coworkers when they say how good X is and I was laughing out loud at the badness of X the night before.
The thing that frustrates me most about that crowd is that they are totally blind to their own privilege. Many of them are raised by parents who worked for the military industrial complex and were given computers and education in STEM fields from a very young age. I’m talking tutors, extracurricular activities, better teachers, smaller class sizes, charter schools, the works. The apartment complex I grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost no kids had computers in their house, and if they did, it was just so their parents could like do email or something once a month. Meanwhile every STEM guy I know had a dad who was giving him HTML and C++ textbooks at like the age of 8. And these guys get this massive head start, and they think they were just smarter than everyone else and that the working class are just a bunch of willfully ignorant people playing with their own shit all day. Nobody is growing up in poverty taking care of younger siblings or aging grandparents, no no no, we just all decided to be lazy for no reason.
I saw that image a good while ago and made the mistake of not saving it. This time I did. Thanks!
I was in STEM and the majority of my classmates didn’t only avoid humanities courses, but outright hated the idea of humanities courses. They thought they were useless and beneath them. I think that’s how you get incredibly reactionary engineers.
Part of that is the sort of conflicting goals in education.
Traditionally, university was about producing the Rennissance Man. It was mostly a product for the elite, and it made sense to be teaching them Latin and Shakespeare, so they could have stuffy drawing-room conversations with other elites.
In recent years, education is much more about acquiring a credential to unlock a higher paid job. The people attending are never getting into a drawing-room conversation, so the time spent on Latin and Shakespeare merely increases the cost of the programme, the time to completion, and the risk you end up with a lower GPA that looks questionable on a resume. I can see the recalctriance. I had that recalctriance (on a scholarship with a finite term and GPA requirements, I’m not going to expose myself to cost and risk for the sake of being a more interesting person)
I always figured the way to address this was to provide more open-entry, non-graded courses in the humanities. Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series. Right now, the closest we have tends to be either audit-only programmes at existing universities (complicated and expensive, and the content may be intended more for mainstream students, so you might be missing prerequisite knowledge if you try to jump into a random senior-level course) or Learning Annex sort of stuff which is likely to be of low quality and spotty selection.
Normalize taking a week-long evening class instead of binge watching a TV series.
I would honestly love to do this. I would love it if modern life provided more free time so I’d have the energy to do it. And obviously I wish it was more affordable to do this. And that there were structures to do it outside of being “certified” (aka no testing, it’s literally just an avenue to learn about things).
Yeah, I did both a science and a humanities degree and he differences between the students was always really stark. My STEM classmates not only disliked the humanities classes, they were openly hostile towards philosophy and literature as concepts. Nearly all of them had a conception that anything that happened before they were born wasn’t worth knowing. They had no interest in culture, were unaware of stuff like landmark movies or novels. It was hard to relate to them. Some of the STEM classmates were cool, but they were the ones most likely to stay in academia forever. They were actually interested in numbers and science, and didn’t simply see knowledge as some instrument to become middle class.
I never met the opposite, a humanities student outright hostile to science itself, except for one very weird Foucault acolyte. Most of the time they’d just say they’re bad at math, which is fair. I’m pretty bad at math too.
They were big mad when my university was like “you need one unit per year from outside your discipline”.
As a programmer, I’m here to say that my people are not alright.
Backing up this claim sadly.
Programmers are usually either libertarian types, the worst type of radlib imaginable, or cool anarchists/communists and it skews heavily towards the first two.
I’ve noticed programmers leaning leftward the longer they’re in the workforce. Watching the machines of commerce from the inside has a very sobering effect, particularly if you’re not one of the guys getting paid out the nose for the privilege.
But straight out of college? I’ll admit it. I was a Ron Paul guy.
I wish the core principles of the hacker ethos weren’t so utterly hijacked by libertarian ideals. I think being a keyboard-jockie or an E-wizard should make us more likely to fight the system not want to be a part of it. I feel like being a 9-to-5 MEGACORP programmer turns people into the ad men of yore without the cool suits.
It’s so strange to me that at my MEGACORP job so many of our developers and IT professionals think all this stuff is cool and good. I know a lot of people have to drink the kool-aid to get through the day, but i thought we were all supposed to do what you do in the cartoons and throw it on the plant that comically withers immediately. I have meet some cool anarchists/socialist/communists types here and there on the job, but it seems like it’s less and less each year.
Not on some doomer-shit, just sayin’ it’s important now more than ever for techo-dweebs to openly talk about leftie ideals in regards to tech.
I think being a keyboard-jockie or a techno-wizard should make us more likely to fight the system not want to be a part of it.
If Shadowrunner has taught me anything, its that the quest for money makes assholes of us all.
Not on some doomer-shit, just sayin’ it’s more important for techo-dweebs to openly talk about leftie ideals in regards to tech.
When I’m eyeballs deep in a trashy implementation of Microsoft DevOps, I can find it hard to be an idealist because I just want to scream at my coworkers all the time.
Good coding is as much about good organizing as advanced technical skills. And good organizing isn’t a skill the modern Western workforce cultivates.
When I’m eyeballs deep in a trashy implementation of Microsoft DevOps, I can find it hard to be an idealist because I just want to scream at my coworkers all the time.
BRO FOR REAL THO! I FEEL THE EXACT SAME WAY! HOLY SHIT WE WOULD HAVE SO MUCH BETTER TIME DEVELOPING IF WE TOOK LIKE EIGHT SECONDS TO ADDRESS THE HOW’S AND WHY’S OF CONFIGURATION RATHER JUST FOCUSING ON THE “DELIVERABLES”!
Good coding is as much about good organizing as advanced technical skills. And good organizing isn’t a skill the modern Western workforce cultivates.
Agreed, and this is a really big thing we need to address both from a tech and labor perspective (well I guess they are one in the same when you think about it). Organization is really what MEGACORPS really truly hate, every bit of software is meant to be “plug & play”, every thing is modular, everything is a node unconnected to any other node. Nothing is really meant to be a whole. Nothing is meant to planned everything is ad-hoc. Everything is a part, especially individuals members of teams. No one really works together, no one is really on teams, it’s just collections of discrete entities. These companies want all the benefits of organization with ever allowing actual organization to come about because we all know it wouldn’t be organized like this.
last time I was on a dev team, there was maybe 1 or 2 people who would actually comment/document their code, tag what bug ticket they were addressing, or do any kind of human communication outside of an agile meeting. the rest would just autopilot through everything with a hyper-competitive mindset and and not extend any kind of courtesy or cooperation to any peers. it was… depressing.
Most programmers are completely dedicated towards hating everyone else. Other programmers, laymen, whatever. If they HAVE to interact with another person it’s even worse.
And it’s not a case of them legitimately just disliking human interaction- That would make sense, be somewhat understandable, and even be outright valid in the case of neurodivergent people dealing with neurotypical bullshit. No, they hate interacting with other people simply because they think they’re smarter and better than everyone else.
programmer is a job. i think your take is kind of reductive. if there are reactionary tendencies with programmers, it is because they are products of the capitalist base and superstructure of our society, but to suggest that they are all this way because they are simply inherently flawed and that it has nothing to do with neurodivegence or the system we live in is kind of reactionary in my opinion. I think other posters have laid out better why there are reactionary tendencies with programmers, for example, the proximity of tech to the MIC, or the tendency of programmers to grow up in a bourgeois milieu. But even that is a historical explanation since programmers are increasingly downwardly mobile, nonwhite, and third world, since the imperial core has been outsourcing programming, and since there is a tendency of job markets to become oversaturated and under paid.
It doesn’t get much better IRL, these are people making 6 figures in their 20s getting hailed as intelligent professionals on the level of doctors and engineers without any of the years of rigorous practice. The average person in tech is living in a completely different reality to the average worker.
It doesn’t get much better IRL
I live a bus trip away from Silicon Valley; it’s bad. Very bad.
Bookstore conversations with them (often unsolicited toward me) go up to and just about reach excerpts of Mein Kampf.
I’ve heard things from techbros that were last uttered out loud by a 1920s eugenicist, genuinely no option but to hit them with the
It’s like you’ve just walked into the RL equivalent of a SlateStarCodex thread. Can’t chat with those types without going home and scrubbing harder than Lady Macbeth.
It’s like you’ve just walked into the RL equivalent of a SlateStarCodex thread.
The most fucked up part is when they drop little smug hints or just namedrop the LessWrong cult and seem more surprised than anything that I recognize what they think is mystical, secret, and elite insider knowledge. Even calling it a cult doesn’t seem to startle them as much as just calling out that their secret club isn’t secret to me.
Software developers don’t realize they are blue collar workers and will be crushed underboot as soon as their jobs can be automated by AI or whatever.
And at that point, some will realize it was mostly luck that got them there, and become reasonably normal. Ohers will double down on their belief in meritocracy, which all of society has been reinforcing, especially in big tech and startup culture. That belief in meritocracy is the cornerstone of all reactionary politics.
Tech workers being labor aristocracy mostly making them much more reactionary. And they’re enthusiastic about some magic tech fixing the world only if we accept our Sillicon Valley overlords and such.
Probably they also are terminally online due to their jobs, thus making them more exposed to all kinds of propaganda on the Western internet.
Probably they also are terminally online due to their jobs
It’s also where they’re terminally online. Normal people are terminally online on Instagram and Tiktok while tech bros are terminally online on just Reddit because they all think Tiktok is sissy pee spyware
I think Reddit also offers a figleaf on content.
If your boss steps in and sees Reddit or Hacker News on your screen, you can justify it as “well, I’m working through this discussion on how to fix Weird Technical Issue on /r/programminglanguage” while the mainstream view of TikTok is that it has little content of value for Important Business Things.
