Michael’s Substack
A thought I had a bit, well, for a long time, was what were the occupational hazards of computing, tech, and to a lesser extent office work in general.
Is it me, or do online forums lately feel like they are full of pedants who have stopped trying to be nice to each other? We could say that is a cultural preference in behavior, much like (apparent) German directness vs Americans like myself who cannot end a conversation without saying “thanks!” 15 times. Or New Yorker efficiency (which I appreciate!)
In tech, it feels we are always looking for problems. We spend our time fighting outages and preventing them. We do code review. We try to get the most done with the least amount of time possible. Everything is about not screwing up.
If you have a startup you are leading, not screwing up may also mean avoiding company death, navigating political hellscapes, avoiding bad hires, and fighting through competition in the market. All of this involves imagining all that can go wrong and trying to steer around it.
One, we become focused on the negative, so we train ourselves to see flaws. This focuses us to be negative by a fault, and we see this online when say, there’s a post about a cool article. The first comment will be a criticism of a minor point wrong in the article, and then there will be chains of comments criticizing the criticism. It’s like nobody even read the article. This also leads to a lack of appreciation and gratitude where nobody says “that was a really great idea”, “I like that they said this…” or “thanks for sharing!”.
