Not to blatantly "pick the most controversial part of the article", but this explains a lot. Being analytical and having a skeptical attitude about things is not "toxic". But doing the same things and being insufferably rude about it can often be. The rest is just a matter of how you fix that state of things. Once you are so far gone as to even wear the "techbro" moniker as a badge of honor, I'd kinda suggest that you might want to change that attitude.
Thanks, I understand your remark better now. But I'm still not sure that the right choice is then to shy away from a mere rephrasing of things that are literally or almost-literally stated as such in the OP (and I don't just mean what I quoted, that was almost beside the point!), lest they then be perceived as a personal attack on OP themselves. That just seems like an especially insidious sort of projection.
You are very smart, that is a clever way to illustrate the point.
There are two examples in the article. The first one is about nurses and masks, when author's girlfriend evidently tried to convey her compassion to nurses who need to wear masks all the day long, but the author didn't pick this message, he stumbled over untruth and was unable to just let it be. The second example is about his father, who probably tried to ask for help nicely, to ask in a way that doesn't feel obligatory to conform. But unfortunately the author saw an untruth in a message and was unable to resist an urge to start a holy war against falsehoods, so he missed an opportunity to help without realizing it.
The second example is illuminating: he missed an opportunity. Maybe he was not interested in it, in this case he lost nothing. But maybe he was interested (or rather would be interested if he picked it from conversation), and in this case his loss was very real. It is not about niceness per se, it is about seeing world around you as it is. You can be nice then, or to be not nice at all, but if you do not see where are opportunities to be nice, you are losing an opportunity to choose.
If being more analytical leads to the less understanding of the world around you, and therefore you are missing opportunities, than maybe an analytical approach is overrated?
Though I feel very empathic to STEM majors who was trained to fight a holy war against untruths and cannot resist it even when this holy war sidetracks them from the core of a conversation. It is not easy to overcome this training and moreover it may be not just training, but a natural disposition too: maybe people who are less concerned about people are attracted to (or pushed into) STEM carrier paths. I do not see their behavior as toxic, one just needs to clarify his/her message when STEM major stumbled over an untruth. It is just like talking with kids, they also tend to react to a wrong part of a message.
But, but... but ¡¿¡¿por qué no los dos?!?! You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences. When I see people like the OP advocating for HN users to be less analytical or less critical about things (and there are many of them in places like Twitter), it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Yes, of course. And I didn't lost an ability to see untruths, it is just my reaction to untruths became more voluntary and conscious. And as I see the argument of the OP, he says that if you didn't learn how to step over untruths, you cannot avoid being sometimes "insufferably rude about it". Unintentionally rude, but nevertheless rude. He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
> it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Does it have important consequences? I personally am not bothered with it much, it doesn't hinder my ability to talk with them. I can deal with it on a case by case basis, when it becomes important.
The point is that people who make this argument will often let that implication stand. This is clear, given how the argument is phrased - and clearest of all, I would argue, when places like HN are called "toxic" or "bad/awful" in the process. And of course the distinction has consequences. Letting untruths fester can be dangerous or detrimental to the public in some cases, and this is precisely where a hardnosed "no BS" attitude is most helpful.
So now any level of criticism is "relentless"?
There are the exacting, detailed oriented, pedantic, focused engineers who just cannot think big picture. They're great at rules based / systems following work - and love picking apart anything not based in 'immediate reality'
There are the strategic, forward thinking, open minded who cannot execute a project to save their life.
There are the directive, steam rollers who bully a team - but great at getting stuff done.
Etc. Etc. Other types, but for brevity I cut it short.
Engineers by design are used to problem solving or working through the problem solving. If they're not solving the problem - then they would be in "what's wrong with this approach" mode and some may see it as rude.
Tl;dr: they aren't all being rude, sometimes it's just different styles of communication and sometimes they're compatible, and sometimes not so much.
(And sometimes they are being rude, and sometimes they maybe can't help it...)
One can come into contact with many of the same "rude" type, but it's generally due to the fact that hiring in any given organization is generally based, at least in part, on "cultural fit". This means the various types of engineers will tend to segregate a bit over time. For instance someone who is a bit more contemplative may not meet the "cultural fit" requirement at a crypto defi shop, but might do well at a national laboratory. (And vice versa). This is why we shouldn't meet a group of, let's say "strong personality types", and assume that all engineers in other places are similar in nature. That's not at all how it works.
It's second only to my all time favorite of "I left a company, and here's a blog post about why you should care" post.
Only in this industry can people lack the self-awareness and realization that nobody cares.
but then it occured to me that there, people, sadly, do care...
The audience for "celebrity gossip" is billions of people. The audience for fashion (and related magazines) too. And the audience for influencers is tons of people who are not influencers and rarely any "less-famous starlets".
As a counterpoint, one of my genuinely favorite post is Michael Lynchs "Why I left Google" post and his yearly solo developer updates. A lot of people simply blog as a way to organize their thoughts, not because they believe people care and need to hear what they have to say.
"Why I left Google" quoted returns 7790 results. It conveys nothing of status and says more about the environment of the person who thinks it does.
I might as well read "Why I left Wal-Mart," except that I expect those articles, were they ever to be written, would show a wide latitude of interesting personal experiences, and not the self-promoting pablum that particular genre of LinkedIn fluff provides.
Your comments is written as those were somehow a trope...
And those I remember were mostly about the issues with hosting something popular and getting hit on HN or virality (e.g. the guy who made the "is it stuck yet" about the ship in the Souez canal).
Don't look into the Influencer industry then...
(Though, there, the audience DOES care!)
HN is filled with toxicity, especially if you have a thought that runs counter to the normal accepted way.
Compared to the real world, HN is still a bowl of cherries.
so yeah, by comparison HN is rude as hell
So what. The world shouldn't be gentle padded walls and protective headgear. That's part of what's wrong with US and Western European culture: extraordinary, pathetic intellectual weakness and cowardice rather than mental fortitude and strength. The West is soft and weak mentally - constantly crying like a spoiled brat to be protected from ideas, arguments, debates, anything disliked or disagreed with - and it's only getting worse.
You could have gotten across the same message by saying something like "Sure, being rude is bad, but you shouldn't let politeness descend into agreeableness to the point where people are shying away from real conversations in order to avoid upsetting people". Same message, much better tone.
But 20-somethings haven't yet got there and sometimes think they are in the top of their maturity and wisdom.
I guess it's life. One day they might look back and cringe on the idea of calling themselves "techbro" like if it was cool or something. And might say "what was I thinking?" Oh well :-)
But, I was surprised that techbro has such a negative image too and used as an attack. Only found that out when I moved to Seattle. Sometimes it helps to adapt it, because for sure the community/locals on some level really do push it to a label.
Meanwhile, across the country in Florida - everyone encourages everyone to do what you want, learn, succeed and it wasn't rare that in university, outside university events IT/coders/artists and such all hung out together.
But, certain environments affect the meaning and acceptance of words. I still am flabbergasted that my experience in Seattle is still like that and that I was "shamed" for doing what I love. Seattle was the only place also that people in tech would also omit they work in tech and do anything, everything else.
These people were "finance bros" working in hedge funds before the VC/startup industry took off, and crypto became the most popular way to scam people.
Edit: actually the "overly analytical" might fall more into the stemlord category, who routinely get mislabelled as techbros.
Your early 20s are still late puberty. And even as an adult, you've still so much to learn.
But I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that he was calling himself a techbro at least semi-ironically. Of course in five or ten years' time, that too may become unacceptable, like ironically calling yourself a racist.
Gather round children and let me tell you a tale about a time before it was broadly trendy and profitable to do technical work, when bros sold mortgages and stayed in sales, and we were all geeks and nerds (whether we identified as that or not).