The craziest thing to think about is that because a few kids at Instagram were dicks or because one or two of the thousands of Twitter employees did something bad, we extrapolate those behaviors to every tech startup worker.
My fiancee and I both work very hard, live in a modest house in the east bay and volunteer in our community quite a bit. I left San Francisco 2 years ago after being priced out of affordable living and I have no resentment to anyone working at a company that provides a lot of perks. So why am I lumped in with some guy at Instagram driving his Lambo to his mansion? We could not be any more different, beside the fact that both of the companies we work for are funded by VCs.
It can be both crazy and human nature. I think it's our duty to intercept and correct our harmful natures. The tendency to group and label people -- based on surface-level stuff like where they live or what color is their skin -- qualifies, in my opinion.
The people at valleywag have to know, deep down, about the fundamental dishonesty of what they do. They have a choice to do a different, honest job instead of pandering to the worst instincts of humanity.
The people at the second-tier mud-slingers that repeat stuff off of Valleywag (Business Insider) are just as culpable.
Or you know, it's not about individual people, but about what they do and cause AS a profession (or region or whatever).
That is, this or that individual X (say, tourist in remote beach) might be an OK guy, but the activity of all of them combined might be causing a certain phenomenon (say, pollute and disturb the beach, alter the local economy towards dependency on tourism, etc).
eh comeon tech workers are just people doing a job. the same issues/judgments apply to any profession (law, finance, journalism) but these guys are clearly just demonizing tech workers as a group when... they don't really cause anything en masse, are we blaming them for accepting salaries and being a little eccentric at times? they are just people with jobs.
this is real misdirected anger as the author points out, simply because tech workers are doing a little better than most. maybe there is resentment because people don't respect the work that they do ("they just press buttons and are overpaid") or there is jealousy because it is a profession where there is a huge amateur rank (people without degrees who are trying to bootstrap themselves into the tech world & making less than most of their college/masters-educated peers). I really think its something along the lines of this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise why not just complain about predatory lawyers/financiers etc.
Tech workers are not notoriously predatory so why should they be demonized as a group...? They are labor for hire, non-unionized at that. if you think they are harming the world in some other way, it may be better to blame the businessmen designing the requirement specs, or the users whose interest keeps the projects funded
My fiancee and I both work very hard, live in a modest house in the east bay and volunteer in our community quite a bit. I left San Francisco 2 years ago after being priced out of affordable living and I have no resentment to anyone working at a company that provides a lot of perks. So why am I lumped in with some guy at Instagram driving his Lambo to his mansion? We could not be any more different, beside the fact that both of the companies we work for are funded by VCs.