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Some of the very worst of the worst liberal takes, apologia for fascist shit, and of course cryptobro grifts and even Tesla worship keep coming from there. It's fucked.
I don't want to say all programmers or tech workers are like that, but I don't like what I've seen so far from people with a .programming suffix on their names. 
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.
Those people exist, they aren’t bots. They’re roaming at your local Trader Joe’s and Best Buy.
Are you my neighbor? 
I left the country, so probably not anymore 
take me with yoooooou
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).
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".
As a programmer, I'm here to say that my people are not alright.
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 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.
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.
It doesn't get much better IRL
I live a bus trip away from Silicon Valley; it's bad. Very bad.
Bookstore conversations with them (often unsolicited toward me) go up to and just about reach excerpts of Mein Kampf. 
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 
I directly received the argument, in public, that "eugenics is an objectively good thing actually, but sadly isn't likely to be put into practice because humans are too emotional about it, which eugenics would also fix." 
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.
It's like you've just walked into the RL equivalent of a SlateStarCodex thread.
The most fucked up part is when they drop little smug hints or just namedrop the LessWrong cult and seem more surprised than anything that I recognize what they think is mystical, secret, and elite insider knowledge. Even calling it a cult doesn't seem to startle them as much as just calling out that their secret club isn't secret to me.
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.
They want to be noticed but also want to be held in awe as mysterious sorcerers that command the future.
They're just cryptofascist nerds pretending to be "nonpolitical."
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.
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.
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.
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 ofstream instead of cout.
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.
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.
somebody told them the fart app they coded was 31337 so they thought that meant they were gonna be in the 1%.