TL;DR The fact that other people find programming to be fun angers and upsets me. Additionally, I feel inferior when talking to them, therefore they should stop having fun.
He doesn't seem to be able to get past the fact that it's not the act of typing in code that's the fun part, it's the acts of creating and discovery, and the hours or days of trying to solve a challenging problem or find an elusive bug, followed by the elation of finally figuring it out.
I'm going to make a completely wild assumption, but the fact that he calls himself a "software engineer" and not a "programmer" or a "developer" kind of implies that he works at the kind of place where programming is boring drudgery.
This is a response to a bunch of the TL;DRs I've seen.
He doesn't resent the people he mentions in the article because they're happy or having fun. He points at specific behaviors and elements of the culture that he doesn't like and gives examples. The fact that so many have a knee-jerk reaction to this article, rather than a thoughtful one, serves his argument. At some points in the article he does come off petulant and young. He probably is young. But in other places he has good observations about some distasteful peculiarities of the culture. For example, he brings up the delusions-of-grandeur-like advertising for an event called, "SuperHappyDevHouse." The state of the culture is not a frivolous issue. A lot of smart people can be pushed away from CS if the culture isn't right.
A tech journalist wrote about it like this: "That’s what we want to do for others- we want to enable them to come together for a common purpose to help humanity. We see different parts of technology as different elements that come together to create a key that will unlock a door that will change the world."
The tech journalist was surely not writing a humor piece.
I actually had the impression this is a pretty accurate tl;dr. The 'feeling inferior' part is maybe a bit exaggerated, but he definitely doesn't understand why people would enjoy getting together on a weekend for a social hacking session.
I don't much like the post, but a charitable partial reading would be something like: I feel left out of / alienated by hacker culture because, although I'm a programmer by trade, their culture isn't really my culture. It wasn't phrased like that, but it is a fairly common sentiment in a lot of fields.
I even have it somewhat in mine, though it's more of there being multiple cultures and me being part of a less-dominant one: I research AI in videogames, but am not really part of "gamer culture", though I do play and study games extensively. I just tend to prefer playing and analyzing more simulation / indie / art types of games, and historically important games, and don't really keep up on recent AAA titles or feel part of the Penny Arcade / Kotaku culture. Sometimes that leads to awkwardness if people expect that everyone who studies videogames is "a gamer" in that cultural sense, so I could see a way that there could be programmers, even good ones, alienated by hacker culture if they feel it's assumed they'd be part of it, but they aren't.
I knew people like this. I worked in a database consultancy full of them. They eventually drove me out, because I couldn't connect to them on any level. They had no excitement for computers, or technology, or anything they did. They had a job, and they did that job (usually poorly, but the two boss guys were legitimately good at what they did, so were able to set out the database schemas and such so nothing got too fubar'd later on). They're the sort of people who say "a job's a job" and can sit at a desk from 9-5 doing pretty much anything as long as a pay check arrives.
What surprised me about people like this is that I always ascribed the ability to do a job in that manner as something that required a lower intelligence quotient: you had to be OK when presented with broken processes, manual tasks that are easily automated, and have little real pride in the product you produce. I thought this sort of stuff would drive reasonably smart people mad. But here they were, reasonably smart people, who just didn't care. They were all a product of CS when it was the "money" degree, like BioChem is now. The smart choice they made was "If I don't give a shit about any job I could possibly do, I may as well be paid decently for it." The author even says "I also have no idea what job I'd do otherwise," even though he clearly dislikes what he's doing.
The author is alienated because he doesn't give a shit, and he's found himself in a position where that isn't status quo. A lot of the posts here are surprised he's got this far; which I think shows HN's fairly biased population. There are loads of programmers who don't care. They aren't working in the Valley at companies you respect, because to be talented enough here requires passion (he seems to indicate he's in the Valley, but that doesn't mean he's at a company you respect ;) ) But someone, somewhere is coding crap bespoke software, and all those CS grads that aren't in the Valley are getting hired by someone. It's easy to forget all these people when you live in hacker communities like the Bay Area, Portland, NYC etc.
The author was fine with the idea of a social event for software engineers. Until he read more about it.
But then I kept reading the article, and it became more disturbing. A tech journalist wrote about it like this: "That’s what we want to do for others- we want to enable them to come together for a common purpose to help humanity. We see different parts of technology as different elements that come together to create a key that will unlock a door that will change the world." Wait, what? It’s a one-day event. How are you going to change the world in one day? If they could really do that, then imagine what they could do in a year. This sounds like someone with delusions of grandeur. Or a cult.
The name of the event, "SuperHappyDevHouse", is annoying, too.
It looks like my takeaway, but that could be because the article was too long and I didn't read past the second paragraph. Maybe it gets better?
I was too annoyed to continue. Software development is a craft. That doesn't mean you can't punch a clock, go for it. There are commodity photographers who punch clocks, doesn't make them justified for getting annoyed at ones who are more passionate about photography than they are.
There's room for craftspeople at every level of the scale, frankly... and there are plenty of shops that applaud the sort of attitude the author seems to have about software development.
You're right. I read it, sorry. Still don't like it. The whole thing is obnoxious, and sadly ironic. It reads like "I don't like how you guys make me feel like I ought to be more like you, so you ought to be more like me".
Nobody is shoving anything in anybodies face on this.
Also this is an interesting quote:
What is it about computer science and software engineering that causes people to become obsessive, arrogant, elitist people?
I think we've got the cause and effect reversed here. A better question is what would make obsessive, egomaniacs (those other terms are a bit ugly) want to write software. To that question I'd answer Are you kidding? We play God in a little box all day and organize intangibles for a living! You couldn't design a better career for those attributes.
Better question posed to the author: Why did you decide to do this? Cause it sounds like you've got accountant-envy.
This is how I read it. The author clearly doesn't find anything enjoyable or redeeming about the career path he has chosen. Instead of switching careers to something more amenable to his personality, he chooses instead to bitch about those of us who enjoy what we do.
