Tech Has a Toxic Tone Problem – Let’s Fix It (2016)

Not everyone in tech is condescending or rude. Let's not generalize things here. I know plenty of people who are happy to explain things and don't go down that route of being an ass because someone else is not grasping an idea. Also, sometimes people are just in a bad mood. Happens even to the most compassionate people.

I feel that this is a cultural problem that has to do less with tech and more with people in general. It's like that first time you go to NYC and someone treats you like shit when buying a coffee or something. First, you are dumbfounded, then you're kind of start to realize that's how everyone there behaves, finally, you stop caring. As much as I would love to change behavior and be treated more warmly, I also understand the nature of their cold behavior so I'm not gonna judge it.

... Yes, I dislike the condescending nature of communities like StackOverflow but at some point, you have to ignore it and try to get only the good stuff from it without focusing on the tone. If you let an asshole demoralize you, it's going to be very hard to move forward in any job, not only tech.

I'm all down for creating more compassionate and warm interactions in this industry, and I really hope more initiatives around this keep coming up since it will make people more aware of how they treat others. But this is not gonna change the fact that there are a lot of assholes out there and it's just easier to learn how to filter out the rudeness than trying to change their behavior which is probably more deeply enrooted into them that the very topic that they are trying to explain.

A related problem is the complete lack of tone in text-based discourse, and the brain's penchant for subconsciously assuming text was written in a certain tone, with no mental "error bars" around this assumed tone.

I see on Twitter all the time conversations that escalate to arguments, usually starting with a minor disagreement that one party reads as more hostile than was perhaps intended. It takes a lot of effort to write text that cannot be misread in a negative light, and people usually don't bother.

Listened to a podcast with Matt Mullenweg recently about remote working, and his company advocates a policy of "assume positive intent" when reading messages from colleagues. I think this is helpful: share the burden of avoiding misinterpreted tone between both the writer (who currently shares the blame usually) and the reader.

At some point in time, did "they" stop being playful children, becoming obnoxious, rude and condescending?

Replace "they", with "we" above, and of course not limited to tech or IT.

The ironic thing is it's the weaker minds who are so easily misled, and need help from others to remind they are bigger than the circumstances who somehow shaped them.

This is one of the issues that prevent gender balance in many areas, and hurts both genders to boot.

where would linux be today if Linus had to continually worry about not offending people? i've been on teams with some "toxic" outstanding devs, i'll depend on the software written by those people every time.

seems like a More Women In Tech group, despite not being explicit. homepage is 26-3 images of women vs men, when an accurate representation would be something like 8-2 in "favor" of men.