I watch this video of this guy try to install FreeBSD and every minute he is talking about people giving him shit for other videos on sun servers and keeps lamenting how he is going to get shit for the way he is doing the install. The constant sniping criticism that exists in these communities aside, what bothers me is watching it bother him so much that he can't shut up about it. It's a cliche but they live free in his head.
When I do watch these videos it's usually either NCommander or boomer greybeards because they aren't into cringe meme shit and are really bad at the content creator grift mindset.
It's also really disheartening when I see people freak out about code of conducts and drop out of projects because they can't live without snide remarks or abusive behavior. They are technical projects, why can't you keep it technical?
Linus Torvalds syndrome. Some people love being the little tyrant of their project, and don't understand that it's possible to be discerning without being an asshole.
In my experience, software engineers are more likely to have been bullied as children, and have higher rates of autism than the general population. Since software is their niche, they get defensive of their territory — no one is as good or as right about software as them — and tend to assert this by being snide, pedantic assholes in the comments of anything about tech that deviates from how they'd do things.
There's a million ways to achieve any particular software task, only a handful that are reasonable (but usually more than one). This means that if you're a nerd who's feeling bad about yourself, you can get in the comments and smugly declare the poster Wrong and yourself Right for a little dopamine hit.
It's generally not considered rude to point out better or different ways of doing things in tech, but if you had to consciously learn social skills and most of the skills you learned during your formative years were from bullies, it's easy to be a huge asshole, especially when that behavior is the norm and isn't generally punished. I've def had to work extra hard to not come off as a know-it-all dickhead when I'm telling people they're wrong at my job.
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Oh yeah, 100%. Especially with Gen X and older millennials who grew up before cultural hostility towards nerds really died down
That was a thing?
Revenge of the Nerds was a Boomer classic.
when did that happen?
I'd guess around 2010, plus or minus a few years depending on where you lived
No, it's the billions of dollars dumped into PR
This culture also incubates a tendency for said tech bro programmers to believe they're somehow multidisciplinary Renaissance men who need to push their idiot-syncratic ideas into everything. It's epecially ironic when considering that most of their celebrated software developments from Dot Com to the present are depression machines and privacy nightmares.
It's because they think that's how humans relate to each other. It's how they've always been treated when they were at the bottom - so naturally, now that they're at the top, that's how you treat people who are at the bottom. Because how would they know any differently?
Kids, this is why you don't take pleasure in inflicting trauma on other human beings, no matter who they are.