gods in hoodies
There’s this phenomenon around doctors we ironically like to call “Götter in Weiss” (gods in white) where I live. It’s about how there is a generation of doctors that are used to being revered, insist on always being right and never listen to the patients. They are patronizing, smug and dismissive, especially because they aren’t used to ever being challenged. They use the prestige and privilege that comes with being a doctor and the white coat to become nearly untouchable, unquestionable - even in other topics they know little about.
I wonder if it has anything to do with consciously (ab)using the halo effect, but in this case as: Seeing someone is a doctor makes you think they are smarter or more right, and those doctors using this consciously.
I see something similar in tech. I think there is a specific kind of IT employee that is always riding on the coattails of the giants and that people know those and use these products. They know how to use the fact that people immediately think of FAANG to their advantage when they say they work in tech, and their ego is boosted by decades of being the family tech guy that resets the router or puts the icon back on the desktop and is thanked with “Wow you’re so good at this! You’re a genius! I could never understand this stuff!”. People think “You work with computers, that makes you smart.”
The result is them totally overstating their skills or what they do at their job because they wanna be treated like the next Linus Torvalds who always has the correct tech opinions and is doing Something Super Important™️. They’ll act like they’re currently building AGI at their job, or the other next big thing, in hopes that they seem more smart or their opinions hold more weight, like what the gods in white are doing.
I think it’s safe to say many, many people in IT jobs are not in fancy, prestigious positions. So many are stuck in helpdesk positions, in government departments, in small firms, at universities or IT departments of companies not in the tech sector. What they do is resetting people’s passwords, pressing power buttons, putting a cable back in, doing a fresh install on someone’s machine or tell a user how to do something. The others, who actually do significant programming, deal with some boring old CRUD apps with an awful documentation, insane amounts of tech debt and no regard to best practices, so everyone working there periodically has to complain about the codebase on HN. Every other week, there’s people online complaining about supposed idiots at work that were hired based on simple leetcode grinding and that are doing their daily work with help of their stupid friend Chad Jipiti and StackOverflow. They’re there for the money and the social capital of saying you work in tech.
My work’s IT department is unreachable before 9am and unreachable past 2pm, they play XBox in the office, and sometimes they remove and destroy the harddrives of the old office PC’s they wanna sell. 60% of the IT issues I ever had were solved by me eventually because they couldn’t. I had to find my own fix in the Microsoft forums for why zipping folders suddenly didn’t work anymore because they were useless. I’m responsible for an Oracle APEX database in our subdepartment, but the IT person officially responsible for any in-house APEX applications doesn’t know shit about APEX and doesn’t make an effort to change that. Instead, I pick up the slack. For a decade now, they’ve been struggling around with Drupal for our Intranet site and it’s only getting worse. We don’t even have a functioning search bar!
I have the same experience with the IT departments of my phone plan provider whenever their app messes up, with the supermarket chain I use that can’t even get it right to let you create an account in their app, and my university’s IT department too, who can’t even help with the university’s VPN. I sometimes read so much tech bullshit online, and then I think about who could possibly be behind it. These people, I guess. The people in my IT department who overstated their job to me so many times, forgetting that I was a trainee there for a few months and know how it really goes. They so badly wanna roleplay as a Silicon Valley programmer, it’s insane.
The only good experience I have is who my employer hires externally - our external IT providers know what they’re doing and are professional, fast, and really good at their job. But my god, is it a minority in my life. It’s them who deserve the recognition and trust, meanwhile in my experience, the people roleplaying about how hacker-y their job is while thinking they’re gods in hoodies are the ones who are bringing you your new monitor to your desk. The flexing in front of laypeople and assuming you have some sort auf automatic authority on topics because you happen to work in the same general field as the big ones is cringe-worthy.
Anyway, that’s what’s happening in my bubble.
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Published 05 Mar, 2025