The Dark Side Of Software Development That No One Talks About

Replace Software Development with any job and you are really on to something.

People are mean and jerks are everywhere. Perhaps somehow society has convinced us otherwise, but there are a lot of terrible people out there.

A lot of people do evil things, a lot of people hurt other people. This is not new and it's not a secret, people for whatever reason are more oblivious to it than they should be or perhaps people are so accepting of inappropriate behavior in our entertainment mediums that we are desensitized to it until it happens to us. I really don't know for sure.

What I do know is not everybody deserves a say in everything. Sometimes people are wrong, or are trolling, or just have no place in the conversation. The right thing to do is to remove those people from the conversation if they aren't being constructive.

> Software developers are jerks.

> Chances are if you are doing something unique or you propose a new idea, you’ll have more critics than supporters.

In my experience, it's not fellow developers who have issues with new (better) ways of doing things -- it's the non-technical management types who see disruption solely in terms of the effect on office politics.

From the item: "The truth is not everyone has your best interests at heart. The truth is that a large number of people would like nothing more than to see you fail...."

Without getting into why, one of the reasons the above is a bit astonishing is that it frequently leads to project failure, and in startups that usually means company failure. You can't depend on simple notions of self-interest even in situations where failure will mean all involved will lose their jobs.

This. Some people are mean.

I have found that the more loudmouth and jerk-like the person is, the more they are covering up the realization that what they have/do is not all that unique, significant, or otherwise difficult yet rather comfortable and lucrative. Thus, they feel compelled to loud mouth barking and posturing to protect their bone. It's probably the same kind of mentality of a dog that snarls at his owner that just put down a bowl of food.