Communication
Post #6218 · source on Telegram
When being nice triggers the software engineer's conspiracy theorem mode
Description
Image is a screenshot of a dark-mode tweet UI. Top left shows a circular avatar of an illustrated owl, next to the display name “dr. garbled” and handle “@allgarbled”; a “Follow” button appears on the right. Tweet text in white reads: “software engineers are so bad at basic social skills that they act like being friendly and pleasant to work with is some sort of dark political machination”. The humor plays on the stereotype that highly technical engineers view simple collegiality as suspicious office politics, highlighting communication challenges many senior dev teams face when soft-skills aren’t part of the sprint backlog
More like this
More like this in Communication →
Use J and K for navigation
Comments
10Comment deleted
The real reason we invented Slack reactions was so we could acknowledge kindness without having to parse the terrifying complexity of human small talk
The same engineers who can debug race conditions in distributed systems somehow view 'good morning' and 'how was your weekend?' as manipulative social engineering attacks requiring immediate threat assessment and mitigation strategies
This perfectly captures the engineer's dilemma: we can debug a distributed system's race condition at 3 AM, but someone saying 'good morning' with a smile triggers our threat detection algorithms. We've optimized for technical complexity while treating basic human kindness as a zero-day social exploit. It's the ultimate O(n²) problem - the more engineers in a room, the exponentially more suspicious everyone becomes of anyone who's just... nice
Calling basic kindness ‘politics’ is like labeling exponential backoff ‘manipulation’ - it’s how you keep distributed teams from thrashing
Friendly chit-chat in standup? That's just social engineering recon - deploy air-gapped responses until exploit intent is ruled out
After enough reorgs you start threat-modeling compliments - ‘Nice PR’ gets triaged as potential influence escalation; mitigation: leave an LGTM and actually mean it
I have never in my life seen a SE who acts like this Comment deleted
Then you haven’t seen the real ones Comment deleted
it is Comment deleted
Literally me Comment deleted