Yeah, I think/hope he was trying to be funny as it was a comment made in passing. He also had almost no connection to my employer, so it wasn't very scary. It'

Yeah, I think/hope he was trying to be funny as it was a comment made in passing. He also had almost no connection to my employer, so it wasn't very scary. It's stuck with me ever since, though, so it seems to have meant something. Over the years thinking about it lent me the same perspective you have. I used to be one of those really annoying anti-X (PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.) zealots. I thought it was funny but that experience made it clear to me that random snark can really hurt. Plenty of people use plenty of "joke" technologies to make real software people use every day, and snarking out on them is unlikely to help. I'll still steer people clear of MongoDB especially, but it's in more constructive ways and with a more clear eye towards actual use case.