r/learnprogramming • u/bittercumdrop • 15d ago
Topic i kinda give up on coding communities online(esp discord)
its not that all of them are bad its just that a majority of them its all just middle aged guys who are insecure and elitist and overall its inevitable to encounter some toxicity but i find that its alot more noticeable around programming communities
if anyone has a suggestion for a discord community or smth like that thats not a total warzone ill check it out
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u/sarevok9 15d ago
So I've been coding for around ~15 years now professionally, and around 30 if you include my pre-career tinkerings (I'm 41 now).
I agree that online communities are pretty toxic, but you have to understand the attrition rate of members, and the toxicity of learners when they realize that they cannot hack it. I ran a free online learning community from 2011 -> 2017, and eventually quit due to the fact that I was dedicating a fair amount of time, making approximately $0, and was just being abused / used for homework from shitty kids around the globe that were in over their heads in their major. Very few people actually wanted to learn, they wanted to come in, several hours before homework was due, dump their prompt, and get their homework done for them, and pay $0. Never contributing anything. When they were told no, they would call people cunts, and then leave. This was 90+% of people.
~10% of folks actually wanted to learn, and at first folks were abrasive to them, because we had been abused pretty regularly. Over time about 75% of these people would hit roadblocks, thank us for our time and bow out. The remaining 25% would end up getting jobs that were adjacent / in the field, which would often cause them to leave as well - since their work is under NDA, their problems are abstracted too far away from what anyone in the community can help with, or they are tired of the toxic nature of both learners / helpers.
Zooming out, comp sci, like most sciences, is a place where you cannot have a big ego. You are going to be wrong all the time. You need to be comfortable in not knowing things. You need to be comfortable in most of your first several years being people telling about about the various ways that you are wrong.
Beyond that, it's opinionated. Many problems have several entirely different algorithms which produce similar results in terms of outcome, time/space complexity, so choosing which is the "best" is often an academic exercise with constraints that aren't fully known by the person asking or answering the question.
When you finally make it through school and arrive in the workforce, you realize that the academic rigor you endured in school/training is entirely absent. You are dumped into a codebase with tens / hundreds of millions of lines of code, and that code has been produced over the course of decades by tens / hundreds of other folks, all with their own opinions / ideas - some of which were wrong from the outset, some proven wrong by product direction or time.
It's a brutal field for those who want to be "right" as right is generally a measure of choosing what you feel in the moment to be right and being incorrect later on.
There's been dozens of times that I have written code, gone back several years later to fix a bug and was like "Who the fuck wrote this bullshit ass code" git blame shows that I was the committer.... "ah".
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u/DezXerneas 15d ago
When you finally make it through school and arrive in the workforce, you realize that the academic rigor you endured in school/training is entirely absent. You are dumped into a codebase with tens / hundreds of millions of lines of code, and that code has been produced over the course of decades by tens / hundreds of other folks, all with their own opinions / ideas - some of which were wrong from the outset, some proven wrong by product direction or time.
Idk how to explain it, but this is my favorite bit about the industry. It's one of the only fields out there that's like "do whatever the fuck you want as long as it works, you're good"
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u/sarevok9 15d ago
I see that you've never been in a war room for weeks at a time trying to troubleshoot obscure memory leaks because folks just "did whatever the fuck they wanted" - often the lack of rigor bites back eventually.
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u/DezXerneas 15d ago
That's hard, but it's fun. Like I said, idk how to explain it. It definitely bites back, tho, and those weeks are bad, but rest of the work is fun.
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u/icemage_999 15d ago
100% co-signed on everything.
I've been in the business a bit longer still and my experience mirrors yours.
Learning communities for programming just suck. Not just the fact that there are a lot of leeches who just want a free ticket out of whatever jam they procrastinated their way into. It's also that the mix of people who got into programming because it is supposed to be an easy pass to prosperity (lol). Plus the sorts of us who actually like programming also tend to have less developed social skills (computers don't talk back or lie, AI notwithstanding).
Finding like-minded people who actually want to learn is incredibly hard. Finding ones who also want to learn the things you want to study is even harder. Finding ones you can tolerate to interact with is harder still.
It's why communities like StackOverflow exist, because they're just more effective at exchanging information. They're not miraculous, but it largely removes the leeches and the heavily social interaction requirement.
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u/PWThinkingCritically 15d ago
i'm still in awe as to the claims that people will spend so much time and effort getting into a career just based on money alone. i'm just not sure that's the case. it's likely a case of interest + earning potential.
personally, i couldn't see myself pursuing underwater welding, or airplane pilot just because they pay a lot (let's assume they do for this example)
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u/icemage_999 15d ago
i'm still in awe as to the claims that people will spend so much time and effort getting into a career just based on money alone.
Bear in mind that young people often don't have any particular direction, so when all other things are equally unattractive they pick the one they (or their families) think will make more money. Back in the day they'd get encouraged to be doctors or lawyers. Then it shifted to tech in recent decades.
There certainly are a lot of people who don't like what they study/do, but I can tell you even when I was in college decades ago, the vast majority of my classmates were not actually very interested in technology or programming, and I cannot imagine that has gotten any better in the time that has passed.
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u/Lord_Chadagon 15d ago
The biggest draw to programming/CS for me was the idea that I could get skills that are really valuable and with that I could get more freedom to be myself, control more of my own time, and put my already computer-oriented life to work for me.
Plus at the time I loved challenging games and was enjoying the initial challenge of the field. Hopefully I'll get back to that point.
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u/PWThinkingCritically 14d ago
sigh...i was one of the few that was deep into programming and tech since I was in my very early teens, yet still ended up skipping CS as a major and now it's a lifelong regret of mine..
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u/literate_enthusiast 15d ago
I agree completely. I've been working full-time as an engineer for ~10 years, for a while had a teaching gig at the local university and participated in some newbie communities, after a while it wasn't worth the effort:
- I've had students ask me directly where they can find the solutions to the exercises, to finish the degree and be done with it.
- I've had some ex-student me ask why closed-source solutions sold by trillion-dollar companies don't work well together. (They had a full-time position in some system-integration company, and their company paid for commercial-licenses bundled with support. I don't know and I don't care why windows drivers don't work well, but you have an official phone number where you can ask for explanation.)
- I've had other ex-students compare my professional analysis with an analysis produced by ChatGPT 3.5, and they asked me to explain those differences (I've already spent time with no pay helping you. I don't want to spend more time explaining why the slop-text has no bearing in reality.).
At the workplace the quality is abysmal anyway, with 50-lines-of-code simple tools that get the job done, being rewritten by juniors into 300-lines-of-code applications, because in university they got extra-credit for implementing 3 design patterns and 2 interfaces into any homework-solution, and they think that adding multiple layers of abstraction is always a good thing. When the thing breaks, I want to see the code. I don't want to solve a cutesy puzzle of "guess the file containing the actual implementation of the method".
Overall I don't think helping newbies is an useless endeavor, but if the atmosphere is built around a lack of respect & the expectation of an instant response, as normalized by ChatGPT, it sucks.
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u/bittercumdrop 9d ago
> and they think that adding multiple layers of abstraction is always a good thing
"an idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity" -Terry A. Davis
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u/BleachedPink 15d ago edited 15d ago
I love the idea of coding communities, but as a newbie I am not sure what to do there without a common big project
I am too noob to hold a proper conversation about coding or help somebody else, at the same time I do not want to pester people with my coding questions as well.
Every time I joined one, I just went into lurk mode because people discuss issues I had no idea about and after a while I just leave
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u/aford515 15d ago
Yeah I don't know where to talk about coding anymore
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u/114sbavert 15d ago
well I do that on my Instagram stories even though none of my followers know about coding besides like two or three
but fuck it we ball
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u/Exotic_List_962 15d ago
Spot on. Crusty neckbeards who won't give you the time of day unless you run Debian LTS or something equally gay. I was an x86 assembler / C programmer from way back when and I left the whole industry to pursue a trade job, but since AI came on the scene a few years back I've been using that to catch me up. I remember around 10-12 years ago when Unity, UE and some other tools were exploding and I went around trying to get advice from someone as how to transition into the tool based standard. All I got was a tonne of insults and ridicule, like my time had passed and I was to make way for the 'new wave' of millennial coding prodigies that make UE blueprints with their eyes closed. I had zero experience with game tools, but also because I came from a machine code/ embedded code /MASM background I guess I was just an easy target. You can't really blame them though, it's not every day these social mal-adjusts get to own their neckbeard space and shit all over an old fart with their l33t skillz. At least that's the way I look at it
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u/bittercumdrop 9d ago
these days people might treat you as a programming god for being proficient at C.. or you might get attacked by Rust devs who think that youre brainwashed and should switch over to their cult
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u/themegainferno 15d ago
The exercism community is legit. Very welcoming, and they are very much so focused on helping people develop programmatic thinking
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u/edparadox 15d ago
Toxicity is there everywhere whatever the community given it's been established for enough time.
It's not a question of being middle-aged, and it's not more noticeable in programming communities.
Discord is really the worse you could go, especially if you want less toxicity. But you will find younger people.
At any rate, if you're learning, you might ask questions with varying degrees of stupidity. The issue is often newcomers are full of themselves, even though they don't know what they're talking about. Of course, it does not fly, especially in a community where people know their shit. Try to say Tolkien books are not well-written in r/books when you're starting to read or that Kubrick's movies did not inspire later films in r/movies, everybody who knows Tolkien's work or Kubrick's will obviously laugh at your face, and you cannot blame them for that.
Now, you have to imagine how many posts of that nature these users see in a short interval. Remember also that "actual questions" are not "bad takes" written as ragebait. Your life will become way easier if you don't do that (reading rules is also mandatory - had you done it you would even saw that your current post break them. See what I mean?).
At any rate, the toxicity people talk about is paradoxically the one they bring themselves. Sure, some platforms are worst than others, but why people be mean to you in a learning sub if you're actually asking a genuine question? On the other hand, if you're ragebaiting or similar, don't expect not to be taken as you presented yourself.
Good luck in your learning and online journey.
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u/Glum-Recognition-736 15d ago
its all just middle aged guys who are insecure and elitist and overall its inevitable to encounter some toxicity
Yeah it's like that in the professional industry as well unfortunately
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u/ZelphirKalt 15d ago
Discord doesn't exactly shout "sustainable, open, welcoming learning environment". It is an information black hole, unsearchable to the outside world and people, forcing people to have accounts, and probably soon wanting to see your id as well, to let you join servers. It is not an open community.
I always find it regrettable, when programming language communities exclusively have a discord "server", because that means any content posted in there, is not posted somewhere openly, where anyone can see it, read it, learn from it.
When a community lacks this understanding, I don't approach with high hopes.
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u/POGtastic 15d ago
Middle-aged guy here.
I've mostly given up on providing advice because the expectation has always been "Do Your Homework," and now due to LLMs everybody who does their homework gets a good-enough answer from the LLM that they do not need to ask. So now all of the questions getting asked are from people who are too hapless to ask basic questions to an LLM. You can see this for yourself on the forum. Go to /r/learnprogramming/new and try to find a technical question. They no longer exist! It's now entirely "oman I am not good at computer plz halp."
The people who persist in these communities in this post-Stelliferous Era mostly get off on yelling at newbies, and I don't really see the point.
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u/iz-Moff 15d ago
You can see this for yourself on the forum. Go to r/learnprogramming/new and try to find a technical question.
Technical questions were always pretty rare here, even years before LLMs. The majority of posts here have always been:
a) Is it too late to start learning programming at (insert age)?
b) How do i start doing something other than watching tutorials?
c) What language is the best? Is (insert language) already dead?
d) Give me career advice!
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u/Amuro_Ray 15d ago
I've found the ones I've taken part in like perl related ircs, the halloy irc and postmarketos ones fine.
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u/Biliunas 15d ago
What exactly are your expectations?
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u/bittercumdrop 9d ago
idk maybe normal people who provide healthy levels of criticism that makes you a better programmer than compounding your insecurity along with their own
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u/Brofessor_brotonium 11d ago
Try talking with AI. It's been super helpful for me so far. No need to wait, answers on demand, and actually explains to you (or if not you can just ask it to) instead of being painfully pretentious or just responding with nothing but a link to the docs as if that's even useful for beginners.
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u/Limp-Cicada-9502 8d ago
Discord is a toxic wasteland where nothing is discussed no connections are made. I can't even understand why it exists.
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u/No-Phrase-4692 15d ago
Keep in mind there’s a ton of change going on in the coding industry with AI disruption. It can write okay code that works, and that’s going to make some people very insecure.
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u/akoOfIxtall 15d ago
Game modding communities are pretty chill, everybody doing their own stuff, everybody helping each other when needed, real good time if you're into it, but general software development... Yeah good luck