I think his assessment about the software industry being anti-intellectual is not out of touch, unless you have had the privilege of working with people who like to learn things beyond new programming patterns in their favorite language.

Often, to even suggest an alternate way to look at things—perhaps functionally—or to advocate a new method be learned is often met with disdain.

  * "We don't have time for that."

  * "What we have works. If it ain't broke don't fix it."

  * "Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them."

I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

As a small anecdote, there has been an interview from which I was rejected simply because in a programming puzzle, I employed high-order functions to solve the problem, without:

  * loops,

  * off-by-1 errors,

  * null pointer dereferences, or

  * type unsafety.

The sad thing is that this kind of behavior wasn't local to this particular company. It runs rampant.

An industry which is focused on results generally occludes importance in the path to achieve the results. And it is often the path that can be optimized by some metric by use of intelligence.

>>> Get those monads out of here. I don't understand them

This is actually may be a valid reason, unless the specific code can be supported by one person and this person doesn't mind being chained to a desk. If the company has code that only one person can understand, the company has a big problem. Of course, this can be solved by hiring more people that understand this, but it may not be always easy/practical/affordable/feasible.

>>> I think the stagnation in the development and popularity of many mainstream languages underscores this point.

Slow development of mainstream language is a good thing. Mainstream should be stable. Exciting things should happen in the cutting edge and then be slowly brought into the mainstream.

Yes, Exciting things are foreign and alien. We must protect ourselves from that frightening strangeness.

The problem is not fear, the problem is unfamiliarity and cost. If US company decided that all company communications from now on would be in Mandarin, it would be a mistake - not because Mandarin is particularly bad or frightening, but because most people in US would not know how to speak Mandarin and thus would not be able to participate in communication without very substantial effort.

Code is a form of communication too, and it must be done in a way that is understandable to fellow developers, otherwise costs of development raise immensely and the whole project comes under threat.

A lot of engineering (as opposed to computer science) is about eliminating strangeness and minimizing risk.

Probably because those areas of engineering are about making things that work.

Bosses understandably want to commoditize programmers.

Speaking of "strange tools", Rich Hickey mentioned the phenomenon of helping commoditize yourself by shying away from the unfamiliar (in Simple Made Easy).

Everybody wants to commoditize programmers. Commoditizing is how you build mass production, mass production is how you get cheap accessible goods, cheap accessible good is how you keep 7 bln people fed and reasonable comfortable. I get it that for a professional programmer the threat to his priesthood status is unpleasant, but it's where it is going, and it is inevitable.

I wish HN would let you block users, so I wouldn't have to read the same micheleochurch tripe in every article.

Taking a lead from another current thread [0]: on what basis is this tripe? I find micheleochurch's comments always thought-provoking; not always grounded in the world I see, but that's not what I look for in a good comment. I want to be provoked to think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

To be honest, I actually find value in clearly written content that I consistently disagree with. It allows me to pause and consider different angles of perception especially when it comes to SV, in this case.

I think the alternative, being surrounded by a bubble of things that I agree with, is far more dangerous (though understandably more pleasurable of an experience).

> The idea that software is an extremely anti-intellectual industry is remarkably out of touch.

Have you ever worked at a web development shop? Your bio says you're a biology guy caught up in programming, so I would guess you've found a more intellectual strain of the industry - if so congratulations. Enjoy it, because you're one of the lucky few. I slowly die of boredom in the web development field...

I wouldn't dismiss the advice so quickly! I've known several promising young computer scientists (one now at an illustrious and wealthy tech company, one hopefully entering a graduate program at a famous university, etc) who would hide in their companies' offices and take naps.