why all the tech guys write like this
It was almost 11 at night when the founder called me.
“I don’t know why I’m having problems with this project,” he said in lieu of greeting. “Why is this all so hard? I don’t understand why this is all so hard.”
I had no context regarding this complaint. I wasn’t the person he should have been talking to. I was just the last person he’d talked to that day. He didn’t want to put any thought into figuring out who to call, so he called the last available number.
I wasn’t new to the personality type. He demanded results from his employees. He worked weird hours. He took meetings in parks. He practiced radical candor. And above all, every message he sent:
looked like this
No capitals, no punctuation, no grammar checks, no spelling checks. Words were casually strewn across the screen, without research or validation.
can we fix this
what can we do
what’s best
i don’t understand
And I think of this today, when I see certain emails from certain disclosures. I think of it when I see Sam Altman justifying the development of government-sanctioned murderbots, all while his bio reads, “AI is cool i guess.”
In tech, a “casual vibe” is an affectation intended to convey friendliness, authenticity, and humanity. In reality, it’s a lack of respect for the person on the other end of the text; a carelessness of thought, character, and action that dangerously pervades our industry.
Leaders in this world are discussing ground-shaking things. They are discussing layoffs, automation, and scarcity. They are waxing philosophical about unprecedented waves of human suffering.
And all with the formality of writing a to-do list.
The sloppiness of the text is not the problem; rather, it is indicative of something greater — a willingness to shift the work. Rather than speak with clarity, they rely on someone else to interpret. Rather than issuing clear directives, they rely on others to execute.
Rather than having a vision, they break what is there and hope that a vision will emerge from what they have broken.
We should be mature by now. Tech is no longer in its infancy. But we still have an industry that honors the disruptor, the out-of-the-box thinker, the maverick. All these affectations are, in the end, quite shallow… and concealing minds equal in depth.
If a man acts erratically, we assume he is a genius. If a man acts confidently, we assume he has knowledge we don’t yet have. This despite being proven wrong time and time again.
And visibly embedded within the “Glass Onion” of this world is one truth: we are at the whims and mercies of these unremarkable people, these casual sociopaths only propped up by their willingness to be destructive.
