Every city has a culture and NYC especially does. That said, I find this disdain for tech workers to be universal in every city. Even in SFBA, it exists largely and tech workers themselves are self-loathing. I was always around people who were so critical of tech even in SFBA and thought I'd never meet people who hated tech and tech workers more... then I moved and realized most of society would prefer us to be dead than living.

I didn't think people in tech were any weirder than the general population. Then I kept meeting infra engineers from big tech and I understood where the stigma came from. These folks make up the majority of engineers in big cities. You don't need thousands of engineers to work on the Instagram/FB app itself. You need thousands of engineers to make it scale to billions of users. There's always less openings for product engineers than there is for infra.

My behaviors are pretty normal. When I avoid the conversation, I get a lot more good feedback and people at least in NYC assume I'm in finance or something. It's when they find out that I'm in tech that they really start to distance themselves. I've learned to avoid the conversation due to this.