Sometimes it’s “reaction formation”. They like a thing. That makes them uncomfortable. They instead go hard in the other direction - they hate the thing it’s horrible and bad and the worst.

Sometimes they’re just… basic, and need the world to fit into simple boxes. Anything else stresses their brain.

I had an interview a few weeks ago (one of like 3 this year) where it was revealed they still write these.

They asked how we kept all the stuff organized at my last job. All the cucumber stuff. I said we just kept the tests next to the file they’re testing- foo.py has a sibling test_foo.py- and we didn’t find much value in adding extra layers. If you want to test the API returns 403 when you request another user’s file, you can just write like

def test_403_when_requesting_other_user_file() -> None:
  response = requests.get("whatever/etc")
  assert response.status_code == 403

You can be pretty to the point.

We used docstrings to explain non-obvious things. Swagger shows the API docs in a nice webpage for anyone curious and authorized.

He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.

Many people operate primarily on the emotional level. That’s a polite way of saying they’re stupid. Idiots. Like a child who’d rather have 4 shiny pennies than one tiny dime.

If we’re not going to round them up (which, give me the infinity gauntlet and…) then we need to appeal to their idiot emotions. Find something they consider in-group, and frame whatever reasonable policy they’re opposing so their benefits are foregrounded.

I kind of intensely dislike that whole… natural language wrapper thing. It adds at least one whole extra layer to maintain for no real benefit. No one non technical is going to read it. If they were some magic competent person, they could just read regular doc strings.

But on the flipside, it’s hard for me to stay concentrated while at home.

While I believe that is true for you, I don’t believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.

The office is super distracting for many people.

Oh, I read your thing backwards then.

I can’t imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).

Can’t relate to it. And I’m a very social person that likes interacting with people.

Every day I’m a little surprised there’s no news story of some workers beating their “no, you have to come into the office” manager to death. They’ve got means, motive, and opportunity, and it’s extra funny because if they’d been allowed to work at home they wouldn’t have at least two of those.

But really we’re ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.

Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming “you made this possible” until they can’t even cry anymore.

Working from home doesn’t appeal to the emotional needs of fragile managers.

I wonder about this a lot, too!

Some cursory searching shows a variety of causes. Maybe from a young age they were repeatedly taught that being wrong made them bad and stupid and unworthy of love, and that’s deeply wound around their subconscious now.

It’d be just sad if it wasn’t causing incalculable harm to society.

Some people have such a fragile ego, such brittle self-esteem, such a weak “psychological constitution,” that admitting they made a mistake or that they were wrong is fundamentally too threatening for their egos to tolerate. Accepting they were wrong, absorbing that reality, would be so psychologically shattering that their defense mechanisms do something remarkable to avoid doing so—they literally distort their perception of reality to make it (reality) less threatening. Their defense mechanisms protect their fragile ego by changing the very facts in their mind, so they are no longer wrong or culpable.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-squeaky-wheel/201811/why-some-people-will-never-admit-that-theyre-wrong

:shrug:

Most people don’t like when their ego is threatened. They’ll make up any excuse to protect their flimsy sense of self worth.

It’s easier to just go “I guess I was wrong” but most people are emotionally fucking cowards.

100%. I think a lot about one of my friends when trying to think about that kind of user. Smart lady. Advanced degree. Has her life together. Would absolutely not want to try to install an OS. Wouldn’t even know how to start.

But I’m confident if I handed her a Linux laptop, she’d use it just the same as a Mac or Windows machine.

Right. Inertia is the metaphor I used to express that idea.

I don’t think that’s actually very many people. Not for their personal computers. Most people don’t run much more than a web browser, if they don’t play games.

Dude really was a moron, wasn’t he?

A leading hypothesis is management are fucking stupid. Throw them back into the trenches. Let them do some actual work for a few years

Good. Fuck Microsoft. No regrets about running Linux for the past few years.

It’s not the PC games keeping people so much. Proton solved a lot of that problem. It’s inertia.

Most people don’t care about things. They just don’t. Their brains just don’t have the juice.

My leading hypothesis is “management is stupid”. It explains a lot of this sort of thing.

I recently reopened Witcher 3, and was kind of surprised by how the graphics aren’t as lifelike as my memory. I remember being a lot more impressed by the bodies when it was new.

Good. Break them up. Criminally charge their leadership.

Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”