The elephant in the room more people need to pay attention to that many of us who work in IT are painfully intimate with.
Many IT people are hardcore libertarians who believe in some warped idea that they are where they are through their intelligence and hardwork while completely ignoring many of them come from backgrounds that afforded them the opportunities they are taking advantage of.
100% many of them are sexist, racist and bigoted pieces of shit that hide it at work because they’re adept at masking the fact that a lot of them are borderline autistic at worst and neurodivergent at best.
This is also why you see such a deep investment in idiocy like AI, Bitcoin and other paradigm shifts. They all have their heads up their asses and feel they’re better than everyone else.
Couple all this with the demographic being primarily white males.
Fuck talk to any woman who works in IT. It’s changing yes, but Jesus Christ it’s a cesspool in many ways.
Source: 25+ years in IT
synae@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
White dude in software here to echo the same sentiment. So many of my colleagues have never experienced any hardship of their own or viewpoints of people with different experiences. They don’t think about how their privilege has helped them get where they are, and how their company culture often subtly (at best!) reinforces their worldview and massages their egos. They’ve never tried to think critically about their “meritocracy” or “libertarian” beliefs and how many people are unjustly excluded from the lifestyle they enjoy.
20 years in software development for me.
Sxan@piefed.zip 5 months ago
By now, I’m feeling extremely fortunate.
I’ve been career software engineering since 1995; I gave in and went management in 2014.
I’ve maybe not known the politics of most people I’ve worked with, but the ones I have have been quite decent people. I’m wondering if location is a factor - I got stuck on the East Coast for most of my career. I hated it - it was so opressingly corporate - but it was also rigorously egalitarian.
synae@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
This has been my experience in San Francisco over the past 15 years. The techbro types, who see technology as a way to get rich, often share the same worldview that life is about “winning” and in this business you “win” if you are smarter than others, so therefore since they are “winning”, they are smart and deserve everything they get (or… take). But, that mentality and their behavior and the culture it creates can often influence humble, empathetic people into that toxic self-hype cycle.