The Insane Cult Of The Asshole

If we had to choose just one profession that falls into the cult of the asshole, software craftsmanship (call it engineering or development) would certainly come to mind. Writing code is ripe to endless, serial, toxic demonstrations of manhood, bundled together with an endless admiration for those historical figures (usually referred to as “pundits” or “moguls”) who show certain supposedly manly traits.

Let us elaborate on the various ways assholes enhance and enliven the lives of software developer teams worldwide (I hope your irony radar is not broken).

If you are tasked with the ungrateful job of writing code for a living, you may have noticed that it is, indeed, a very typically masculine activity–and if you have not yet, just look around your open office space and count the proportion of colleagues identifying themselves as something else than white cis males between 25 and 35 years old. If that number is above 10%, you are really in a special workplace (where special is oxymoron for weird or unusual).

The industry (for various reasons) perpetuates this state of things, keeping itself in a state of blissful ignorance, hubris, and high-hormone idiocy. Software is important, we hear every day, so clearly those who are writing it must be hailed as the holders of some occult knowledge and the purveyors of infinite wisdom. Through bribery, hubris, or ill luck, some of those same assholes find themselves years later in management positions, and continue the tradition by hiring more people like themselves, because that is what humans do unless you stop them.

One of the major fallacies that these testosterone bags tell themselves is that “A-players only hire A-players”, an atrocity they most probably learned via TikTok because, let us be honest, most of them have not looked at a book from the distance since primary school, and might as well be convinced that the Second World War happened during the Renaissance. Needless to say, these are the kind of idiots that still require candidates to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard, even when (and especially when) such knowledge is of utter uselessness in the day-to-day work of their company.

In between sprint reviews, daily scrums, and protein shakes, assholes brag of the amounts of code they have rewritten over the weekend in C++, Rust, or other languages favored by those manly enough to face the wrath of the compiler, test suites and teamwork be damned. They will also routinely flex (both offline and online) on programmers using any other technology than theirs (it does not matter which one, really) as lesser engineers. They have been called by the technology God to bring knowledge and wisdom to otherwise ignorant immortals. Lucky us.

Of course, their SLOCs are above the clouds, which means that in those environments where particularly ignorant non-technical business managers abound, they will be heralded as the mythical “10x engineers” or “rock stars” they claim to be in their résumé. It does not matter that they increase employee turnover, that their code breaks all the pipelines on Earth and cannot be maintained by any intelligent being on this galaxy because it is an architectural mess that does not translate into any tangible increment to the bottom line of the business. These are programming Gurus, or Gods, and should be hailed, venerated, promoted, and rewarded as such.

These assholes also spend an inordinate amount of time worshiping various figures (always masculine, of course) such as Larry Ellison (a particularly popular figure among assholes during the 1980s), Bill Gates (same, but during the 1990s), or Steve Jobs (whose peak of popularity was in January 2007). Since the mid 2010s, this role is best served by the master billionaire asshole of the tech industry, the savior who will bring mankind to a brighter future of electric cars and holiday trips to Mars, the visionary who deserved a biography by Walter Isaacson while still alive, the one and only Elon Musk.

The reasoning is simple. If these people are all billionaires, and they are all assholes, clearly we all need to be assholes to become billionaires. The human species naturally follows hierarchies and alchemy, so what is above is below, and as Scott Galloway said,

It appears our idolatry of innovators has seeped into the minds of the uber-wealthy, sickening them with an uncontrollable tendency to fellate the cool kid for a chance to sit at his table in the cafeteria.

Ouch. Scott has written some more about the hubris of the tech industry, and it is definitely worth reading. But I digress.

(OK, credit where due: the transformation of Twitter after Elon Musk transformed it into “X”, a certified cesspit of first-class hatred and bigotry, is precisely the best example we have at the moment about the negative effects of assholes in a human group. So, thanks Elon for that, I guess?)

Other critical characteristics of asshole software engineers are that they would not talk to any customer ever (“not my job” is a fallacy, remember), they will not write a single line of documentation, they will endlessly complain about how everything “kills their flow”, block all dialogue with members of the business team “because they are idiots”, will refuse to analyze a problem in detail (let alone write a specification) because “it’s not agile”, and other niceties of the kind.

And then there are the extreme cases, which unfortunately also exist in our industry, even if most of them will dismiss those reports online with laconic comments such as “what are your sources”. As a rule of thumb, assholes will, if left unchecked (and if motivated to continue in these ways by their peers and management), migrate from a mere anecdotal mansplainer into an insufferable bigot, and later into a bully, a harasser, and then worse.

Yes, worse, because as Hannah Arendt explained, our world is filled with Little Eichmanns all over the place.

We all witness unruly (I am being polite here) behavior in the software development teams we inhabit, every day. Only a few of those teams, thankfully, have management members that actively target and disarm such individuals. Unfortunately this is not always the case, and more often than not, assholes flourish in small and big companies alike. As an industry, we need to be aware of the toxic tendency of our field to produce such individuals. It is a natural outcome, just like weeds appear in a wheat field.

In other words, the question you should be asking yourself is (in particular if you are a team manager, but not only), what are you doing to block assholes from killing your project, your morale, and your team?

If your answer to the question above was “I don’t have assholes in my team”, you might want to stop for a minute and reflect. They are everywhere. And you, your organization, and its policies are most probably hiring, enabling, and empowering them. Also, despite what the press would like you to believe, D&I policies are not enough. We have to do more than that.

Our world does not need more people who are able to write code; now that ChatGPT is taking that task into their (in)capable hands, what we need is to (finally!) start building teams that work with higher values in mind, such as compassion, solidarity, and respect.

Cover photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash.

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