Ask HN: How to stop competitiveness within the Dev world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to stop competitiveness within the Dev world?

15 pointsbsvalley12 comments

I've been trying to understand why developers are so rude and arrogant these days. After looking at a lot of possible causes, it seems that competitiveness is one of the major keys. It feels like comparing sizes at school, you will never get a clap from a colleague when you say something right and relevant, only your weaknesses are highlighted and the list goes on.

How could we prevent competitiveness within the Dev world? Our lives could be so much better if we were all team players.

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Perhaps because the reality of being a developer is that its a pretty boring job most of the time. Once you have worked at a few different companies on a few varying projects with a few different technologies you realise that 90% of the time you are building CRUD applications. Also working on other people's code which is significantly worse than your own can be frustrating.

So for me having a competitive element to what i consider a fairly boring job definitely makes it much less boring. As for rudeness and arrogance I try not to be those things but if somebody else is i just ignore it. Simple as.

Developers who are not team players do not make it far in my experience.

It's not really due to competitiveness. Some people want the other party to be better.

It's sort of like religion. My IDE is better than yours, my tech stack is better, and you're just ignorant for not being enlightened.

I don't think there is a solution to the arrogance. One of the root causes is that everyone thinks they're hackers who found a better solution. The other cause is that they've invested a lot into what they learned, so they don't like it when better tools obsolete that.

I get what you saying, this is really a problem for this field. When I started college in 1990, I had spent a lot of time programming and playing around with a commodore 64. Computer science was the 'easy' option for me, so that's what I did. After a semester of observing the types of arrogant people I had classes with, I decided, I don't want to work with people like this for the rest of my life. So I changed my major to another science and graduated. The problem was, there were very few jobs in that field, so I took a job doing something else. I spent years coding on the side, and finally got a programming job, and then a BS in CS.

I've often reflected on where this arrogance comes from. My personal theory is that a lot of people, when they show an ability to work with computers, get a lot of positive attention from those around them because most people don't have the patience or inclination to understand machines so well. I think for some this leads them down the path of really building their identity around what they can do. And when you deeply identify with something like that, it becomes very personal.

This isn't true of everyone, you can have passion without being arrogant, but it is quite common I believe.

Another factor is probably the perceived competition for jobs and promotions. Many think that to reach the next level, or get the six figure salary, they have to out compete others. And this is true, to a point, as the technical coding interview shows.

Edit; something related is the 'tribalism' around languages and frameworks, frontend vs backend, os's etc. When you're just starting out, it's easy to become invested in whatever technology you learned first. You'll write a lot of code and become really accustomed to the tools, libraries, building and deploying. It's only when people branch out and spend a lot of time with other languages and frameworks do they start to see the commonality between them. There's been a lot of convergent evolution over recent years imo. I find that people who understand the basics (http request/response for example) are much more adept at debugging, trouble shooting, and jumping between languages and frameworks.

That seems very likely-- lots of devs do tie CS in as a big part of their identities.

I've been a dev at 5 companies in 15 years. I've never heard any praise for any developers' contributions after they've left the company. But you'll ALWAYS hear denigrations like "he wasn't very good which is why X is so shitty." And it's ALWAYS the person who is most plentiful with praise at group meetings.

"I think we should focus on the positives." - says guy who talks the most shit.

Developers are some of the biggest fucking assholes I've met. At least everyone I know has called someone else a fucking idiot at least once. I've been called that as well. No matter how intelligent, hard working, and productive a developer may be, there will always be at least a few people to talk shit about him/her.

One thing I see is a kind of bigotry.

For instance, there are some people who only use Microsoft tools since they have an MSDN subscription.

There are other people who run Linux and use only open source tools.

Frequently people in those community think the other one "sucks", even though they both get their jobs done.

If I can I use Microsoft tools because that's what I'm experienced and more productive in. I know that say Java, Ruby, Python etc don't suck but I won't code as fast in them.

I find most developers quite nice. This is in UK and Australia, but from many ethnic backgrounds. Assholes are occasional but definitely the exception in my experience. They tend to be people that have many years service and have built up a moat to protect them and so they can get away with it. Although maybe not if the "victim" use anti-bullying laws to their advantage but it takes some balls.

Diversity, culture differences. It has benefits but it also comes with a few challenges. I work in the Bay Area and here people are coming from all over the world. We ultimately see different cultures and styles interacting with each other. Some people come from places where you have to be extremely competitive in order to get the basic things such as education and a job. Especially when you have a billion people in your own country and everyone is trying to work in CS. Or, if your parents are trying to make you the number one. Telling you that being number two is not an option for you.

I think this is a false dichotomy. You can be competitive without being arrogant or rude. Competitiveness isn't the problem, it can even be fun when used right.

I think it can happen when a person identifies themselves with their ability to program. Emotionally then they won't be able to approve their colleagues (even if their mouths move that way), because it'd undermine their own confidence in their own existence. Many of us who program here think "I'm a programmer." And I think that's where the trouble starts.

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