I am a [redacted personal info]. 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.
Can also confirm. Lack of emotional intelligence or humanities education is a helluva combo as well.
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).
One of the most left wing professors I had was some older guy who was just constantly taking classes and such, even though he was in his late 60's (at least)
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".
Shit's annoying, i don't need my inability to write papers exposed on my transcripts
That's like an intellectual version of being told to touch grass, it makes so much sense now
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.
Making something that can provide value to the company in perpetuity, and then having the company forget you did that and demand more, over and over again, while they're still profiting off the first thing, really is some of the purest alienated labor.
I've noticed programmers leaning leftward the longer they're in the workforce
Explains a lot for me personally, and the surprisingly positive interactions with colleagues when politics are brought up
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.
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.
There are Freemason tells that are more secret and the Freemasons have been leaking like a sieve since the 1700s.
"Uhh we're like the ultra secret dark arts dojo of super special thinking" Fuck off you discovered basic rhetoric. You didn't even independently discover basic rhetoric which at least would be impressive for a 14 year old.
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.
“Why don’t you just learn to code?”
wages plummet as the qualified labor force expands faster than the job market
“No not like that!”
But mostly only in the imperial core and also there are fewer and fewer opportunities. The time of blue markets is getting more and more over.
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.
Oh yeah, definitely. Although there is a lot of reactionary content, predominant even, on every social media platform I'd say. But like you stated, definitely a lot more on Reddit lmao
computer scientists are either shitlibs or communist trans women in knee socks. sorry i don't make the rules
The ugly truth is that IT has always been an industry that caters towards the worst of the bourgeoisie. Go back to the 1960s when mainframes took up an entire room. What businesses had the money to even house those mainframes or the business need to justify those mainframes? The answer is basically the military and financial institutions. Your average COBOL developer worked for the military or for some bank as a number cruncher. You might have some oddball developer who worked for NASA or who worked for the FBI in number-crunching surveilled citizens as part of counterinsurgency, but that's it. The fact that modern IT people gets funneled towards working for Raytheon or Chase is just par for the course. Obviously, if your industry is catered towards the MIC or banks and pays those workers 6-digit salaries, the workers of that industry would be among the most reactionary.
When the Altair 8800 dropped, all it did was introduced computing to petty bourgeois hobbyists because no actual prole was walking around with an Altair 8800 in 1975. The petty bourgeoisization of tech is when you start seeing libertarian brainworms like how the information superhighway will liberate humanity somehow and various other technocratic bullshit. Even FOSS and piracy, the few good subcultures within tech, sprang out from a petty bourgeois milieu and thus inherited these petty bourgeois brainworms.
As an aside, this also explains why subcultures that spring forth from IT like gaming are also deeply reactionary. Why are nerds more prone to reaction compared to other marginalized subcultures like skaters or emos? It's because nerds are attached to tech, which has a reactionary superstructure.
I imagine that a lot of geeks and nerds have seen society’s shift from mockery and disdain to embracing their culture. And are upset that the world is able to comfortably enjoy their stuff without paying their dues. Or at least, that’s the perception of it.
Most previously marginalized subcultures like punks get mad when their subculture becomes mainstream and commodified. The difference is that punks just call people poseurs while gamers become fascist gamergators.
I'm still learning, could you please explain how the superstructure of tech is reactionary? Is it due to its proximity with things like weapons companies, tons of investment, intelligence agencies, and so on?
Yes, pretty much. A superstructure springs forth from a material base, and if your material base is constantly within close proximity to the center of capitalist power (financial institutions, MIC, counterinsurgency) due to those mainframes requiring plenty of capital to set up, then that will have a huge distorting effect. Along with this, the high salary of tech workers would naturally would dampen any revolutionary potential, and it shouldn't be a surprise tech workers would have reactionary ideas. It's only with the Altair 8800 that petty bourgeois hobbyists started to get into tech and the class character of tech turned from something completely upholding the bourgeois status quo into this half status quo/half libertarian hybrid. Raytheon engineer finding innovative ways to bomb brown children represents the old-school form of reaction while some cryptobro trying to scam you represents the newer form of reaction.
Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine goes into the history of the Internet, starting from its very beginning as a tool of surveillance against dissidents during the Vietnam War into contemporary times. He isn't a Marxist, but he makes a very compelling case that the Internet and tech in general have always been close to the center of capitalist power. He also draws a connection between Fukuyama's end of historyTM and the techbro's obsession with technocracy. The 90s represented the end of history, in the sense of conscious human activity towards self-actualization, and the beginning of technocracy, in the sense of technological improvements that's aimed towards some techno-utopia. Or in simpler terms, the techbro believes that the human problem of politics has been completely solved with neoliberalism and in this transcendence from history and politics, all future problems are simply apolitical technological ones that will inevitably be solved with an apolitical technological solution.
Seriously, go read the book. So many things about how techbros and Redditors think and act starts to make complete sense.
I have a great section from that book saved as an image, regarding the bipartisan privatization of the internet in America in the 1990s
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/be5c5f4b-b63f-4966-853c-c6f645705097.png
Show
Yes. Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley provides a good overview, though he lays it on a bit think.
It's a really weird confidence to have.
On one hand you thought it was easy, you're soooo smart right? But at the same time WHAT IF... other people could learn my profession just as easily as me? I think the latter parts of their psyche understands that anybody can learn to read and write code.
Nah pretty much all programmers are like this. Please somebody develop a COVID strain that only targets people who know what the fuck a leetcode is. I'll gladly sacrifice myself if it means being able to rid the world of the disease that are people who call themselves a software engineer instead of a coder/programmer
I'm a programmer. I think this is mainly a problem of people who are only programmers and nothing else, to the point it becomes their entire persona. I'm more than just my job, I have interests and hobbies outside of it, but some people get sucked into thinking they are their job.
Definitely this. Most programmers I see slowly become supporters of Big Tech/GAFAM (Sometimes this is an "ideal" employer, though the conditions are horrible), besides promoting the "tech will solve all our problems! we just need more of it!" idea.
I know many programmers that (as myself) would never work for a bank or a GAFAM company because we know they are a cancer to society.
And we are getting more by my point of view.
I saw some too, though they tend to skew to the libertarian side of things.
Not furries though. Though honestly I mostly see those on the Hardware side, or at least pretty close to the cold iron.
All the leftist programmers found hexbear and lemmygrad first, all that's left is the libertarian cryptobro lolicons
As someone who wanted to get into software development originally, who went to college with a passion for computer science and familiarity with programming from the beginning, there were a few major road-blocks. One, the classes were very poor. We approached programming the way the worst History classes approach transformational periods. Instead of rote memorization of dates and battlefields, it was rote memorization of standard library functions. Our first project was the canonical "Hello World" program, and the last project of the semester was writing the same program except it used an
ofstreaminstead ofcout.Then there is the job market. I was looking on Monster and shit and it was all Bloomberg fintech shit. Or it is a meaningless app with obligatory Facebook account tie-ins to compete with the one million other meaningless apps on the app store. The only interesting stuff going on is in the Free Software world, but those poor bastards don't get paid (and only recently has the patreon model gotten anywhere). Anyway, I became a CNC machinist.
In a lot of ways, to become a professional software developer you need to not give a shit.
Yeah I initially got a compsci degree (while very lib/not caring) thinking this will be the thing that is easiest to do while making a comfortable amount of money to survive (already hated capitalism before I knew what it was).
Turns out it's not even easy, it's ridiculously competitive now. Then, as I learned more, I started to hate it. 90% of jobs here are either: Raytheon/Lockheed shit, or health insurance (let's create a way to deny your claims with x% more efficiency!)
That plus my significant issues (might be autistic or something) means I might just give up on work entirely.
Having worked in tech. The people that get into programming are the kinds of people that spent their youth inside for a variety of anti-social reasons. I'm not saying that it's all of them, but there is a significantly above normal number of neurodivergent people within programming with a very large variety of social issues. Working within any tech you learn that you need to figure out oddities about various people in it and play around the various issues people have to get anything done.
Also on the business side of things it's filled with the worst people imaginable and if you survive your first year or 2 you select for the people that are willing to put up with the worst people imaginable. This then selects for even worse people, over and over and over again.
As a woman I also must be much better and more independent than the men to be treated well.
it's filled with the worst people imaginable and if you survive your first year or 2 you select for the people that are willing to put up with the worst people imaginable. This then selects for even worse people, over and over and over again.
This also describes the US military
IMO, anybody can be good at coding. Humans just *think *programmatically to solve problems a lot of the time.
You start them when they're young, okay child tell me how to make a piece of toast
"You just make the toast" - a child
"no small one, START w/ 'picking up the
toastbread'"Slowly over time a child will understand what it is to do programmatic-style work. Once there, they "learn" a language. *Plenty *of people say they just can't learn a language (cough cough USA/UK?). I say bullshitttt. You're smarter than you think
Thank you xoxo
Edit: I'm actually a box of rocks masquerading as a techie
That's really not too different from how a dev approaches a problem tbf, especially now that we can do step 2 exactly like you phrased it to some AI code generator instead of searching for it ourselves on StackOverflow
I think a lot of people who hang out in these spaces have a strictly professional relationship with software and work either as code monkeys or team leads ordering around a bunch of code monkeys. Going through University you could definitely tell who approached Computer Science out of pure interest and who approached it for financial gain, and the difference often presented itself through a strong sense of curiosity beyond what was required for the task at hand. It's a passion for some people and job for others, and you'll have people who conform to the space for personal gain and people who push the boundaries of the space because they don't agree with what that space represents or simply because it's fun to break boundaries.
What if it was a passion until my third month of maintaining billing software?
After the revolution, all programmers will spend at least 1 year breaking rocks with hammers by hand.
Any attempt to "optimize the workflow" or "automate the task" will result in being assigned to bigger rocks with smaller hammers.
Good question, the answer is -
hands you a comically small plastic hammer
points at Mt Rushmore
