IMHO the immaturity you're speaking of stems from High Conscientiousness. When conscientiousness becomes obsessive, we worship The Right Way, The Right Tools, The Right Culture. We believe in tools and methods like they have some magical power. We get more concerned about the "how" than the "what" we output. Dogmatism creates immature thinking and debate.
High conscientiousness correlates with agreeableness; it's rare to have a highly conscientious, highly disagreeable person who would actually go out other way to offend others. So I don't think that's that's the explanation.
Further, commentors on any particular subject are, I think, statistically more likely to be monomaniac obsessives, and that correlates with poor social skills (e.g. truth-seeking at the cost of empathy). In other words, autism.
Fair point, but it correlates more with Neuroticism. Conscientious people could be agreeable because they tend to believe "what's in the water", or the dogma of the place and time. This could cause them to be disagreeable with those outside their tribe.
Thank you so much for those links. It resonate a lot with a previous experience I had in a company which was so obsessed with doing things "the right way" that they ended up with the most over-engineered abomination I've ever seen*.
They applied all the rules and "best practices" they saw on Medium with maximum strictness (of course) and were very adamant on doing everything now in the "right true way" in the codebase.
I had trouble putting words on that behavior, describing it as "religious fundamentalism, but with code", so I'm glad to finally have a better word for that.
* It was a simple corporate website, with a few, simple forms (though with visuals bells and whistles added), and some semi-customized pages. It could have been a minor project (in term of technical complexity, not business impact), and somehow was so overcomplicated that there was like 5 or 6 front-end dev working full time on useless churn, like adding more configurability to their deployment process, or changing a library with another based on the number of Github stars.
I doubt that’s what happened at the Star Citizen sub-reddit … Also, this is interesting but there are just a lot of young people in programming forums being a bit immature. If you go to CppCon or GDC or some other tech conference, you don’t get the same discourse as in forums.
ehhh, I think if you watch the cppcon videos, you can get a taste of what the OP is talking about.
The cpp community is possibly the worst offender on some of the points. Speakers walking on eggshells and having to have a laundry list of caveats comes to mind.
It's more mature in the sense that you probably wont see a lot of memes, the insecurity and ego still permeate the venue and community.
I'm electing not to. I don't want to put any one specific persons behavior under a microscope publicly. There are specific examples that I'm thinking of, but linking to a video of them attaches a face, voice, name, etc.
I'd hate to put myself out there doing a talk and be on the receiving end of that sort of indirect criticism. It wouldn't be feedback to the person, it'd just be something for us to argue about whether they're exhibiting a given behavior or not.
Most of us are scared by the ambiguity of actual creative work, so unless we are under the threat of deadline, we seek out "structured games" to play so that we can put off the anxiety of freeform work. These games are:
(1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools
(2) Learning Game: Books, podcasts, courses
(3) Maintenance Game: Cleaning up our desktop, desk, house, etc.
(4) Process Game: Setting up new processes and following them
The knowledge that things are actually easy and straightforward means we actually need to do the creative part of the work--many people are not ready to face that knowledge.
> (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcasts, courses (3) Maintenance Game: Cleaning up our desktop, desk, house, etc. (4) Process Game: Setting up new processes and following them
I…I…I am triggered by this.
So it’s as if, people such as myself are on the hunt for artificial positive feedback loops that are functionally beautified masks of procrastination. Fueled by, perhaps a subconscious lack of confidence, or a sense of ignorance. Something to that effect.
So now imagine an entire department, teams, organizations all suffering from this? This can explain a lot.
I wouldn't write these off entirely. One of their positive outcomes is that you get to switch. Switching is important so you don't get bored or fed up. Just don't take these things too seriously, and don't stick your newfound hype into everything. Let things breathe, sleep on them. For like a few months or years.
> (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcasts, courses (3) Maintenance Game: Cleaning up our desktop, desk, house, etc. (4) Process Game: Setting up new processes and following them
This is exactly what I have been doing for so long (~2 years), I get hyped about a new project, delve into the "best" way of solving the problem and encounter 4-5 shiny new things, spend an unreal amount of time scaffolding and using new tech to create a base framework for whatever I am doing, and then when I actually have to solve the problem my productivity stagnates and I procrastinate more.
Even now I am conflicted/lost on what to do, this response is tbh a cry for help from people who have encountered something like this. Any insight would be great.
I am certainly guilty of those, but I would point to larger pressures at the team and org levels - continuing to do things "the old way" (regardless of how old, just "the way we have been doing them") means no budget for big new projects to "modernize" apps and systems, no chance for managers to put their stamp on things with big new projects, etc.
Based on this description, I should vary my playing of games.
Anyway, I find the usage of the term "game" to be quite odd. Why not "strategy?" I'm not sure I agree with the overall point, but enjoy how you've operationalized/categorized behavior in this way. There is value in that.
I used the word game because game implies a sort of "formal structure" or "submission" to a set of rules and constraints. This kind of structure relieves us of the anxiety of choice. It's so powerful it can be euphoric, that's why people pay for others to dominate them . I think it's also why we get into drug habits and a lot of other vices that add structure to our lives.
It's fine in moderation but tackling ambiguity regularly makes magic happen.
It applies to product development too. Obsessing over "doing the things the right way", "using the right tools", "100% test coverage" is not enough to create a winning product. It is very easy for engineering teams to get caught up in those intermediate goals rather than the actual goal. I'd say it's one of the most common reasons technical founders fail.
Then you have hackers like Pieter Levels making millions/year with a single gigantic PHP file on a single server.
