I never bothered with the "normal" friends, they all seem like they bond over common interests like everyone else, and... I'm not actually that interested in clubbing and restaurants(The big things where I was).
Before the pandemic I was super into renfairs and live action roleplay and met a lot of my best friends through that.
I also have a few friends I know from various places I've worked, but... not many in traditional software development.
I really think that software development got "too easy" for them, and now all the fun logic challenges are in super abstract stuff and constant fussing, and that somehow leads devs down a hole of isolation.
Random Code blogs basically tell you to constantly rewrite and refactor and perfect and to always be trying new code katas.
The whole culture revolves around tinkering with random small toy projects. Which is extremely isolating because.... nobody cares all that much. Anyone who would care has their own random toy projects.
It's hard to make friends when you are encouraged to spend your free time on things that, almost by design, nobody else will care about.
Programmers seem to hate software. It's always bloat this, insecurity that, all day. That's also isolating, when the whole industry feels so negative about their own work.
Some of it is legitimately crap, but I feel like even some of the people doing amazing world changing stuff probably enjoy playing with Vim plugins more than their job.
Nobody wants to be social when they feel like shit, or be around other people who visibly are depressed.
Not that that's how I think it should be, of course, but it seems to be true.
It seems like there is a cloud of darkness over software culture, and the whole "nerd scene" in general gets sucked into it.
Something is also wrong with video games too but I'm not sure what. They are no longer ultra exciting. Nobody camps out in line for a Wii. LAN parties are mostly gone.
Something happened to the tech industry and everything "Nerd related".
Maybe it's just because I've only ever worked tech and it's like this everywhere... but software seems uniquely isolating.
Before the pandemic I was super into renfairs and live action roleplay and met a lot of my best friends through that.
I also have a few friends I know from various places I've worked, but... not many in traditional software development.
I really think that software development got "too easy" for them, and now all the fun logic challenges are in super abstract stuff and constant fussing, and that somehow leads devs down a hole of isolation.
Random Code blogs basically tell you to constantly rewrite and refactor and perfect and to always be trying new code katas.
The whole culture revolves around tinkering with random small toy projects. Which is extremely isolating because.... nobody cares all that much. Anyone who would care has their own random toy projects.
It's hard to make friends when you are encouraged to spend your free time on things that, almost by design, nobody else will care about.
Programmers seem to hate software. It's always bloat this, insecurity that, all day. That's also isolating, when the whole industry feels so negative about their own work.
Some of it is legitimately crap, but I feel like even some of the people doing amazing world changing stuff probably enjoy playing with Vim plugins more than their job.
Nobody wants to be social when they feel like shit, or be around other people who visibly are depressed.
Not that that's how I think it should be, of course, but it seems to be true.
It seems like there is a cloud of darkness over software culture, and the whole "nerd scene" in general gets sucked into it.
Something is also wrong with video games too but I'm not sure what. They are no longer ultra exciting. Nobody camps out in line for a Wii. LAN parties are mostly gone.
Something happened to the tech industry and everything "Nerd related".
Maybe it's just because I've only ever worked tech and it's like this everywhere... but software seems uniquely isolating.