> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

Absolutely yes.

HN posters are by far the noisy minority.

Even on HN the vast majority of readers don’t post. HN posters are a sliver of a sliver.

> Are you saying senior engineers who don’t use HN have different values from those that do?

non-california, non-big city senior engineers have wildly different values from HN users. i'm not sure about non-HN big city or california engineers. i suspect that HN accurately reflects the values of folks working in SF/LA.

if i tried to explain the shit HN freaks out about every day to my coworkers, they'd think i was making everything up.

They don't even necessarily have different values. A lot of online people are virtue signaling to get virtual points.

In particular, the viewpoints that are downvoted differs from those that aren't. There's probably a lot of engineers that, like me, have learnt that HN isn't very fond of posts arguing for other perspectives in relation to big tech, and therefore will refrain from presenting them. Even if they don't, their posts will be hidden from view quickly enough to prevent them from affecting the overall tone.

Yep, that is what I'm saying. Most of my real life SWE friends have attitudes that seem different from folks on this site. Perhaps they are secretly harboring the same views, but I'd guess that there is a selection effect that biases the sort of folks who comment here.