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I would say a lot of this is just the nature of online discourse that allows the loudmouths, blowhards and nitpickers to have their way while more balanced peop

I would say a lot of this is just the nature of online discourse that allows the loudmouths, blowhards and nitpickers to have their way while more balanced people disengage because it just isn’t worth it for them. This dynamic can be seen in all online communities that grow large and it’s not specific to technical topics. That said, I think programmers are prone to some of this simply due to the fact that programming requires a baseline obsessive attention to detail that most people don’t want to think about. Combine this with the fact that businesses need tech and the situation has led to a lot of secure jobs for technical people with poor social skills. This has led to a situation where a lot of people can get by in a sort of comic-book-guy bubble of expertise without having to learn anything about civil discourse. Now I think it bears repeating, these people are a tiny minority, definitely less than 5% in my experience working with hundreds of engineers over the decades. It’s just the increased size of the community and incentives online that cause them to bubble up without consequence.

safety1st 4y ago
I agree with everything you said. Imagine what's going to happen when someone trains an AI model to act like a loudmouth, blowhard nitpicker. Since this would be done by a programmer, programming communities would be among the first ones targeted.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  That already happened. Then, StackOverflow banned ChatGPT.
Sharlin 4y ago
I wish most software engineers were even half as attentive to detail as most traditional engineers are when it comes to failure modes. The field is obsessed with the happy path which in my opinion separates it from “actual” engineering didciplines.
- hilbertseries 4y ago
  It’s all about risk profiles. The failure of a bridge or an airplane is catastrophic and people will die. If a SaaS provider is down for awhile, people are frustrated.
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    You're right, it's just an inconvenience for the users, but a real problem for the developpers. Some upfront thinking would help us (developers) save a lot of effort and frustration
    - keithly 4y ago
      It’s not just the developers, but the entire organizations they work within that prioritize shipping new features rather than reliability, because that’s generally what’s most profitable (at least in the short term). It’s hard to change those incentives for an entire organization.
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    The impact, whether economic or QoL or whatever metric you prefer to use, of a million frustrated people and the corresponding loss of productivity may not be insignificant. And, obviously, software is in charge of actual security in the real world, and the track record there is not exactly flattering! Safety as well, of course, but luckily safety-critical software is a much smaller and usually more rigorous subfield, quite unlike the case with security.
  - jetpks 4y ago
    I think this used to be true, but we're not building toys anymore. Whether we like it or not, SaaS products are rapidly becoming transitive dependencies of mission critical, life/death infrastructure. Last time i had to get roadside assistance, they couldn't use a mile marker / highway location reference. They had to have something to type into google maps in order to dispatch help. Could they have gotten to me if google maps was down? Probably but i'm not sure. Either way, it wouldn't have been the practiced default and that matters.
Jasper_ 4y ago
> That said, I think programmers are prone to some of this simply due to the fact that programming requires a baseline obsessive attention to detail that most people don’t want to think about. It requires some careful attention, planning, and some honed skill, but so does building a bridge that spans a river, so does cooking meals for a party of six on time, so does sewing a shirt, so does composing a piece of music, so does drawing a cartoon or a comic strip. Programming isn't the first occupation that requires problem solving skills. A tech boom and high salaries have definitely convinced a lot of programmers who haven't had much other world experience that it is. The way we talk about and treat programmers as an elite class has only helped to grow that image even more. As you said, a lot of highly paid programmers who never cared to learn social skills, or worse, actively despise working with others. However, I don't think this is an accident or a fluke, it's behavior that's been encouraged and reinforced from the bubble. As the tech boom wears off, we might see this change.
- tester457 4y ago
  > As the tech boom wears off What could cause this though?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > What could cause this though? The Fed having a tight-money policy to control inflation leading to widespread layoffs in existing tech firms and less investment in new ones, and what would make it more durable is some breakthrough outside of computing leading investment in a different direction in the next easy-money period.
- ljm 4y ago
  We’re just trading speculation here but I think the boom and the bubble aren’t quite that relevant once you just look at the profession and not the way it’s been funded by VC. The field, the industry, the profession… whatever you call it… it’s not even a century old. Cooking, metal work, civil engineering, architecture, etc. etc. go back millennia and transcend civilisations. Humanity has had a hell of a lot of time to get good at those things, each culture throughout history discovering and refining its own methods until now, where we see them fused together in a globally connected world. Software is not even a century old. We are still in the birth of a new industry, everything is rapidly growing and evolving, and we don’t have any historical context to rely upon except perhaps mathematics. We might have hit our limit on CPU architecture and how we write software, as far as we know we’re the first to reach this point. But the next generations, the next civilisations, can take our primitive work and discover something we couldn’t. It’s only going to become more important as time goes on. We all just got in early, in the middle of the chaos. We’re gonna go through this kind of maturity problem quite a lot.

safety1st 4y ago

I agree with everything you said. Imagine what's going to happen when someone trains an AI model to act like a loudmouth, blowhard nitpicker. Since this would be done by a programmer, programming communities would be among the first ones targeted.

fxtentacle 4y ago
That already happened. Then, StackOverflow banned ChatGPT.

Sharlin 4y ago

I wish most software engineers were even half as attentive to detail as most traditional engineers are when it comes to failure modes. The field is obsessed with the happy path which in my opinion separates it from “actual” engineering didciplines.

hilbertseries 4y ago
It’s all about risk profiles. The failure of a bridge or an airplane is catastrophic and people will die. If a SaaS provider is down for awhile, people are frustrated.
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  You're right, it's just an inconvenience for the users, but a real problem for the developpers. Some upfront thinking would help us (developers) save a lot of effort and frustration
  - keithly 4y ago
    It’s not just the developers, but the entire organizations they work within that prioritize shipping new features rather than reliability, because that’s generally what’s most profitable (at least in the short term). It’s hard to change those incentives for an entire organization.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  The impact, whether economic or QoL or whatever metric you prefer to use, of a million frustrated people and the corresponding loss of productivity may not be insignificant. And, obviously, software is in charge of actual security in the real world, and the track record there is not exactly flattering! Safety as well, of course, but luckily safety-critical software is a much smaller and usually more rigorous subfield, quite unlike the case with security.
- jetpks 4y ago
  I think this used to be true, but we're not building toys anymore. Whether we like it or not, SaaS products are rapidly becoming transitive dependencies of mission critical, life/death infrastructure. Last time i had to get roadside assistance, they couldn't use a mile marker / highway location reference. They had to have something to type into google maps in order to dispatch help. Could they have gotten to me if google maps was down? Probably but i'm not sure. Either way, it wouldn't have been the practiced default and that matters.

Jasper_ 4y ago

> That said, I think programmers are prone to some of this simply due to the fact that programming requires a baseline obsessive attention to detail that most people don’t want to think about. It requires some careful attention, planning, and some honed skill, but so does building a bridge that spans a river, so does cooking meals for a party of six on time, so does sewing a shirt, so does composing a piece of music, so does drawing a cartoon or a comic strip. Programming isn't the first occupation that requires problem solving skills. A tech boom and high salaries have definitely convinced a lot of programmers who haven't had much other world experience that it is. The way we talk about and treat programmers as an elite class has only helped to grow that image even more. As you said, a lot of highly paid programmers who never cared to learn social skills, or worse, actively despise working with others. However, I don't think this is an accident or a fluke, it's behavior that's been encouraged and reinforced from the bubble. As the tech boom wears off, we might see this change.

tester457 4y ago
> As the tech boom wears off What could cause this though?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > What could cause this though? The Fed having a tight-money policy to control inflation leading to widespread layoffs in existing tech firms and less investment in new ones, and what would make it more durable is some breakthrough outside of computing leading investment in a different direction in the next easy-money period.
ljm 4y ago
We’re just trading speculation here but I think the boom and the bubble aren’t quite that relevant once you just look at the profession and not the way it’s been funded by VC. The field, the industry, the profession… whatever you call it… it’s not even a century old. Cooking, metal work, civil engineering, architecture, etc. etc. go back millennia and transcend civilisations. Humanity has had a hell of a lot of time to get good at those things, each culture throughout history discovering and refining its own methods until now, where we see them fused together in a globally connected world. Software is not even a century old. We are still in the birth of a new industry, everything is rapidly growing and evolving, and we don’t have any historical context to rely upon except perhaps mathematics. We might have hit our limit on CPU architecture and how we write software, as far as we know we’re the first to reach this point. But the next generations, the next civilisations, can take our primitive work and discover something we couldn’t. It’s only going to become more important as time goes on. We all just got in early, in the middle of the chaos. We’re gonna go through this kind of maturity problem quite a lot.