I put myself on a self-imposed break (which I'm breaking now, sorry; it seems to be more of a one-post-per-day policy) from HN because I don't want to be contri

I put myself on a self-imposed break (which I'm breaking now, sorry; it seems to be more of a one-post-per-day policy) from HN because I don't want to be contributing to the problem. But as long as the quality of my posts doesn't degrade (flame wars do that) I think 1 per day is fine. I think we, as a group, tend to be shitty judges of character, but our arrogance blinds us to the need for improvement. We're cynical about "people" in general, but we latch on too quickly to businesspeople who seem above-the-fray or decent, often based on superficial signals. (This is like the creepy guy who fabricates a relationship with a girl because she smiles at him.) A consequence of this is that we can't perceive it when we the people above us play divide-and-conquer games against us. Language wars. This team against that team. IDE-users vs. command-line developers. Efficient but "not dedicated" 8-to-6 family guys vs. inefficient all-nighter types. Pro-Google vs. anti-Google. Facebook users vs. Facebook haters. Young vs. old. We've all been monstrously played and most of us don't even see it. Your enemy isn't the guy who wrote the shitty code. He was quite possibly working under an obscene deadline in a job he couldn't afford to lose. No, the enemy is the boss who mandates you use the shitty code (using the nicest possible language, i.e. "we won't be able to deliver unless <horrible technical compromise that damages your career>") instead of letting you rewrite it; when he makes a common enemy out of the original architect, he's fucking playing you. Most of our road-wear that we get in this career comes from wrong assumptions we make when divide-and-conquer games are played against us. We eventually wise up to the bad character of the players, but we retain those biases for a long time, and start saying things like "every shop I know of that used the JVM (N = 1) was unable to hire good people"... when the real reason that shop couldn't hire talent was that it paid poorly. Just what I've seen. All this incivility and in-fighting comes out of our willingness to tear each other apart based on superficial differences, and that's something that's been inculcated in us from above. Why? Because we're fucking easy to control that way.