How does toxicity in IT compare with other areas of activity?

Question

Career in IT

I have been involved in various aspects of IT for a long time (programming, using Linux, etc.). All this time I was talking both personally and on the forums and almost constantly observed some amount of aggression / arrogance / toxicity, etc.
And this was not always addressed to me. So, for example, it’s customary for me to google some question on the topic of configuring Linux and read dozens of posts about what a stupid topic starter is. Or even here, the answers to some questions are aggressive.
Actually, the reasons for "toxicity" in itself are also interesting to me and I would be glad to read something on this topic. But now I'm more interested in how the mood of the community correlates between different professions, for example.
I would like to see the opinions of people who have worked, for example, as a programmer and a doctor. Will he say that medicine is (for example) more toxic, or vice versa? Or, for example, maybe a Wall Street financial analyst will curse a newbie who asks a stupid question.
How do people who have moved from IT to a new profession feel and vice versa?
Interested in both the personal experience of people and some collective articles.
PS Dear moderators: if you close the question for some reason, could you tell me if there is a TM resource where this question would be more appropriate or it would not be relevant anywhere? (A post on habré with a poll seems like a bad idea)

Answer 1

There are two main reasons why there is so much talk about toxicity in IT:
If it weren't for these factors, you'd notice that IT is far from being toxic when compared to other professional fields. In areas where there is a high fee for error (such as medicine), you will be torn apart simply for demonstrating incompetence, and for actually making a mistake, you are likely to lose your job or even pay the price of your career. Only in IT you can fill up the prod and shrug your shoulders. In the areas of heavy manual labor (such as metallurgy), you would overestimate the very meaning of the word "toxicity", having gone through natural hazing with assault in some cases.

Answer 2

It seems to me that this correlates with a combination of personal qualities, traits such as:
complex,
self-doubt,
poor communication skills,
low level of basic trust in the world;
and related factors and behavioral characteristics, such as the predominance of competitive relationships, etc.
In the field of IT, especially among programmers, there are more notorious introverts who, in general, find it difficult to fulfill their need for communication, which, at the same time, can be seasoned with personal grievances and all of the above. So much for the concentration of aggression and toxicity, which at the same time can be a completely innocent inability to communicate otherwise :) I have come across this :)

Answer 3

This is a universal quality.
Just chat on other forums.
I have other professional interests, except for IT - and so in those professional forums there are exactly the same sraches as in IT forums.
Exactly the same is observed in English-language forums (if you don’t notice this, it means that you just don’t feel sarcasm well enough in English speech).

Answer 4

toxicity in questions is due to the fact that newcomers, instead of putting the question into Google, write how much will be 2 + 2 and clog up the info space,
although a huge number of complex and interesting questions remain unanswered
, now I have moved into a different area a little, I feel the same, people are everywhere essentially the same

Answer 5

Toxicity is a consequence of low intelligence.
Therefore, the most toxic workers are cashiers and watchmen.

Answer 6

Well, let's say we don't take forums and LJ into account.
They give a feeling of invulnerability, which leaves its mark on behavior.
In general, the trend is as follows: the lower the intellectual level of the profession, the more character and brute force are quoted. And the ability to use them at the right time.
In IT, as you might guess, in most cases this is not the case. Therefore, it-guys, if they show their desire to dominate others, then just through the so-called. toxicity. Note that as soon as there is a real chance of getting it in the teeth, then this toxicity miraculously disappears.

Answer 7

Among representatives of the CIS countries, unfortunately, "toxicity" is observed in many areas of activity: IT, marketing, music (writing / creating music), and in computer games, where most of them are schoolchildren, I think it's not worth talking about.
If you read Western forums and social. network, you can see that people treat each other very tactfully, even to beginners, whose (music, code, design, something else) leaves much to be desired.
In medicine, for obvious reasons, doctors treat each other more respectfully, even if they strongly disagree with each other. You rarely see accusations of incompetence, perhaps because there are no very young doctors. Higher education + internship + at least a couple of years of practice and you are already an adult / mature person, and youthful fervor is gone. You can't get into medicine from the street, you can't learn it at home at a computer, like "php in 10 hours", which is why the attitude towards other practitioners is appropriate.
In it, the entry threshold is lower due to the fact that you can read a couple of articles from your home computer, write 'Hello world' and you are already a "vaytish". As a result, after two or three weeks of practice, beginners climb here and on the forums, ask stupid questions that are googled once or twice. It's probably not right to call this stupidity, it's just that "google" is also a skill that trains as you grow in general. So, "toxicity" on the toaster is manifested mainly to beginners. Difficult questions are not so responsive.
On Habré, for example, everyone wants to show that he knows and can do a lot, and if he finds a flaw in the author's article, then pointing it out has a chance to get pluses. On Western sites, most often, comments like "Thank you, it helped me a lot", less often "Thank you, it's useful but ...", while we have: "Pfft ... why this article at all, if you can read something there, something here and you will know what is written in the article, it does not count for you, the author. and the tomato-signors will come and instruct such a comment likes. The author, in turn, begins to justify himself by saying that the article is actually not for the cool seniors who have come running here. Well, sticks flew ...
On the other hand, this forces the authors to write on the case, without water, not to repeat obvious points.
Well, in computer games (dotka, CS), you probably know how they like to "take their mother to the cinema", and shout obscenities into the microphone like crazy. And the phrases of a rich Russian, such as "cyka blyat", from representatives of our gaming community, every foreigner already knows, the entire Internet is full of these memes.

Answer 8

I would write that online, anonymity and mentality are to blame, but the reason is that you watch a lot of such information, and it seems to you that there is more of it here than in other places.
Do not read such forums and you will not see "toxicity", because the field of "toxicity" for programmers is a forum, for factory workers - a locker room and a kitchen, teachers - a corridor at recess

Answer 9

Well, I'm not from IT, but I occasionally come across IT. The most toxic IT people are sysadmins. And the most toxic sysadmins are enikeys.
As for "other" professions, it all depends on the profession itself. Somewhere for toxicity they can give in the teeth.