cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38975713
Okay, at work I was surrounded by tons of people who were bigots. They would randomly say how they didn’t want free college because then who would serve at restaurants, while they would say that they care about the environment. They would casually say that the confederate flag was not a big deal. They would casually comment on how they didn’t have any black people in their schools when I sat down at the table. Whenever I sat down they would complain on how men salaries are higher than women, which I would have agreed on if it was not for the fact that the only people always discussing this was middle class white people, who only said this when I black man sat down, and statistically black people make the lowest salaries, so to me it felt like if someone from a buffet came to only complain to starving people that the next person at the buffet got more food than they did.
They made fun of my Mexican coworker who once got mistaken by the guy who was painting the stairs because he was Mexican. And many other microaggressions that are too numerous to tell.
But going to the point of my question: These people were pure asses, but they were brilliant at programming. They did so much better than me, and I was trying my best. It bothered me so much not just because their performance was better, but that they were bigots and their performance was better. It just felt like universal injustice. Made me wonder what was the point of trying if all your effort can just be surpassed by bigots.
I have to admit that I was pretty ignorant of corporate American culture, and had no idea what area I wanted to concentrate on. But somehow these people just knew all that shit. Like, I have no clue how they knew so much.
Which makes me wonder how do you deal with this feeling, and what gives you the motivation to keep trying, when even your best effort can be surpassed by people with terrible attitudes that you hate. Like, I know that I will never surpass people like that, and I don’t think the point of life is being in an endless scoreboard, but it literally just feels like pure ass, and I want to hear others experiences. I also hate feeling behind all the time.
I’m white so whatever I write here should be taken through that lens. I also work in programming.
Your situation honestly does suck. I’m not going to tell you to have a more holistic view of yourself because I know what it is like to really value a few talents you have. Giving that up is psychologically difficult and probably not the easiest way to address the situation.
Being talented and having decent opinions are basically orthogonal traits. Both extremes exist; people I know IRL can talk thoughtfully for hours about all sorts of topics but are demonstrably fucking useless at executive functioning to the point where they should not be in any position of leadership. And some people are just very talented but have absolutely shit opinions. However, the Dr. House style brilliant asshole archetype is not a desirable thing to be.
So for programming, we have this rather idiotic idea that our profession is about “hitting the high notes” or something and you either have the talent to do it or you don’t. Junior developers (I don’t know what phase of your career you’re in) are heavily inundated with this messaging. You have to be absolutely cracked, you have to be a hacker experimenting with all this random shit in side projects, whatever. The reality is very different. There is way, way more worthwhile work in this field than we have the labor power to do (speaking in terms of “software that I dream should exist” rather than present labor market conditions). If you’re an absolutely cracked programmer you can maybe do a few times as much work over your lifetime as someone else. Maybe even ten times; I’m not a denier that in particular contexts, some people are ten times more productive than their coworkers. I’ve been on both sides of that multiplier!
However, vanishingly little work in this field requires you to “hit the high notes”. The sort of work that does require it is largely sorted away for PhDs and researchers to handle. Even then, researchers are usually not anomalously talented; they’ve just worked at & thought about something for a very long time.
The world we try to address & automate with software is so unbelievably complicated that there is no substitute for just grinding away at the problem for a long time and addressing all the unforeseeable issues that arise. If you engage with a problem for long enough you will match or surpass your coworkers’ talents in this domain. Maybe they’ve just been wrestling with the problem for long enough that they have a brute force encyclopedic knowledge of all the possible ways things can go wrong. That’s the real thing you want to acquire, and you will acquire it. It comes over time.
As far as the injustice you feel with the present state of things, where your racist coworkers are more knowledgeable than you: understand that you have the same capabilities as them, and your knowledge will fill in with time. That is probably not much of a comfort. But truly, they are not inherently better than you in a way that matters.