You sound like you have an inflated opinion of your programming skills and sense of not belonging / being unlike others. I may be wrong, I don’t know you at all, but that’s what your comments makes me think - and in that case you may want to check both that ego and self-flagellation before it bites you back.

In programming jobs, there’s lot of people very good at programming but less so at social skills, it’s very frequent, I see those profiles a lot at job interviews. In that situation, you have to understand that many people are like you - and even those who don’t for the most part are not more or less able to do their job nor less smart. People thinking they’re better at programming than the rest that way are generally rightly seen as assholes, and they most often than not are detrimental to projects, as well as despised by most.

Once you get that, you have to remember to not fall into the trap of thinking that you have the higher, more important, hard skills and that this plus your poor social skills excuses you from being nice and judging questions from other as stupid or unimportant - and at interviews they’re generally prepared beforehand and have mostly deeper reasons than just the question being asked. Moreover, once you realize that many other people are actually knowing much more than you without being assholes, that might be a hard reality check.

Many people are not passionate about programming, but MANY also are, and are very competent. There’s nothing special about anyone that makes him/her immune from being outed for not being nice at interviews.

I empathize a lot with this comment.

In tech (though I would guess as in many other technical domains), many people do seem to easily bully people for not knowing things or making mistakes. I’m guessing it’s just people having high insecurities themselves, it’s even more of an ego thing when considering that computer things are considered as a “nerd” pastime (a group considering itself “smart”). Not knowing things - even things that we would have thought are really simple - should be OK on an help channel as long as you’re not abusing the helpers’ patience.

I’ve been a witness of these situation countless times, the sane way of handling this for me have been to just consider that these are mostly people externalizing their poor self esteem and to just continue conversation (at worst with the other people) as normal.

Of course those concepts are intertwined in some way.

But as a full time lead dev of a relatively big project, I find that a lot of people, often junior devs, concentrate a lot on what they think is “good code” and not a lot on whether they and other devs are having fun. It may make sense when you’re junior and you have to learn a lot at once, but when you’re experienced enough I feel that focusing on having fun, both for you and your team, should be much more important to us than focusing on precepts you read on having fast code and theoretically clean code, as long as it doesn’t lead the code to be less fun to work with in the long run.

For example, doing R&D re-implementing things from scratch, in most cases just to throw away the great majority of it, could be considered as fun by most programmers, even when it makes not much sense because what you did before also worked. As with switching some architecture around (perhaps wrongly, but it’s hard to know sometimes before you tried it).

I’ve come to very much dislike scrum or agile management as well due to all its protocols and the ways it enforces a certain way of progressing (with tickets, progress reporting, mostly short-term work) which focuses on the project’s goal (which really is what the company wants), sometimes at the expense of devs experimenting and just having fun (what I advocate we should aim for). Though it all depends on your project and company I guess.

Having fun when programming should be much more important than having correct or fast code when you’re a programmer and should be what we should aim for first.