the technology industry spent forty years accumulating a very specific kind of trust and mostly had boring motives, which made us appear trustworthy and largely benign
Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.
“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”
Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.
Ohhhh yes. Here it comes
“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”
Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.
Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?
Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.
This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.
Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.
Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.