Argh! There’s an asshole on my internet!

This is NOT a how-to guide. This is NOT a survival guide. This is a rant.

I am a newbie to the world of programming.No, I am neither proud nor ashamed of it. I just stated it in advance so that you will (hopefully) read this post through my perspective. Thanks, in advance.

Every day that I read conversations on developer sites like HN or /r/programming, I get a little bit more disenchanted with the world of programming and software development. I feel the burden of the Impostor Syndrome grow a little bit heavier on my shoulders. I feel the monkey of worthlessness creep up a little bit more on my back.

I feel helpless.

There are a lot of assholes on the internet. What’s worse is that they are not your garden variety kind of assholes. Nope, these are entitled assholes. The ones that believe that since they have been writing software since the time that programs had to be punched on to cards and fed to a machine that was usually the size of three rooms, they believe that it gives them the right to look down upon any and all attempts by those who haven’t done the same.

Don’t believe me? Go and open any “Show HN” post on Hacker News. Heck, just look at this one. Sifting through the comments to find constructive advice is like hunting through a barn filled with haystacks to find a dried blade of grass etched with your name. In the spirit of the post, however, I have cherry-picked a few of the nastier comments for a quick show-and-tell:

Thanks for polluting my web history so that I can’t just hit “back” to get to HN. :P — pyre

Sample this one:

Bookmark hell? What about click through stuff hell? […] — alan_cx

And this one:

What is this? Sorry, but I’m not going to watch shapes flying around my screen to find out. — waterlion

What is wrong with you guys? That right there is a labor of love painstakingly created by someone who is excited about having created it. Would you like it if I came to the hospital after your wife had delivered your kid and told you, “Yuck! What an ugly kid! You would get the a plastic surgeon to straighten its nose before you show it to anybody else!” I’m sure I would come away missing a few teeth and a few rightly-deserved black-eyes.

Is it wrong of me to have started learning programming at the age of 30? Do my attempts mean squat if I didn’t start the same time as you did? Should I have stuck to my Physics degree and continued data-mining the CMBR for the rest of my life? Or blabbering away on-air when I clearly needed to step away and find myself a social life? I moved my cheese and you better make your fucking peace with it.

If you don’t like my work because it is bad, tell me about it. If you don’t like my work because you don’t like me, talk to the fucking hand.

I loved my Physics education. I loved my days in the radio industry. My restless spirit demanded that I make the most of whatever I had, that I move on to learning something new, something different each time. I had the means, the opportunity and the support of my family to satisfy my curiosities. Sure, I am not a master of all trades but I am certainly not the jack of all them, either. I don’t see you guys taking up cudgels with Pascal because he wrote treatises in Physics and Philosophy both, do I? Heck, I see you guys being in awe of successful people who have been college drop-outs/changed career-tracks all the time. Why the hypocrisy now?

Don’t get me wrong.

I do expect to get critiqued when I present my work to you. (I also hope to get some praise — I couldn’t possibly have done everything wrong, could I?) However, your critique better be about the quality of my work; any and all critiques about me as a person (or anything that isn’t about my work, really) are off the table. If your criticism has nothing to do with what whatever has been presented, then my response to you won’t have anything to do with your ‘criticism’ either.

We are not untouchables. We are students and learners.

There seems to be an implicit ‘caste-ism’ in the world of programming that (unfortunately) seems to run along the same lines as the ‘Chaaturvarna’ system that plagued early-India. I am not entirely sure about how the classes of developers are segregated but I am pretty sure that all new developers start at the lowest-rung.

No, there’s no harm starting at the lowest rung; you do, after all, start at the bottom and make your way to the top. However, it is a bloody outrage when the lowest rung is treated exactly the way Shudras were treated in early-India.

If we are really as bad as you think we are, we will also, in all probability, end up managing the code you write today. If you give this a little bit of thought, you’ll see how it can (and probably will) have serious repercussions on your fate, too.

Think about this: if, by some quirk of fate, you happen to be the lead developer for writing the software for a cryogenic freezer that is to be installed on a spaceship for an inter-planetary journey and we happen to be the maintainers for it, then FSM help you. Because you haven’t helped us understand what you were doing, we don’t really know what we are doing when we bug-fix your code. Poof, just like that, your shot at immortality is gone, vanished like the compiler error we ignored because you said it was unimportant.

Your knowledge cannot be pirated, only shared.

When you were starting out, you probably had someone who helped you see the way. A Jedi Master to your Padawan. Would you be the same if you didn’t have one? Or maybe, you didn’t have a Jedi Master to your Padawan and yet you turned out perfectly fine. Why would you want someone else to go through what you went through? Why not extend a helping hand and speed up someone else’s process?

You don’t have to do extraordinary things to be a good human being; doing some extra ordinary things is, more than often, sufficient. The smallest of gestures goes a long way. Try it for yourself. You’ll be surprised at how satisfying it is to be ‘paid in full with a glass of milk’.

I started this out as a rant and ended up preaching. Sorry about that. I just wanted to get this off my chest and the monkey off my back. I’ll continue hunting for that one dried blade of grass etched with my name in the barn full of haystacks for as long as I can. Or until depression conquers me, if that happens first. Until then, all I have to say to you is this:

Seriously, stop being an asshole.

If you have nothing constructive to offer, please don’t offer anything at all. You never know, your vitriol might just end up killing the next-big-thing on the internet.