People in IT are assholes. I've only worked in retail, food, biotech and IT but IT has been my least favorite because of my coworkers. I see the shitty attitude is just an in-general IT thing and accepted.

a friend of mine once told me that everyone in Phoenix is an asshole. I laughed and pointed out that there was no way she had met even a significant fraction of people, that human relationships are built with all sorts of biases, and there was no way she could make that assessment without generalizing to the point of uselessness.

she called me an asshole in reply.

you have pretty much the same problem here. you have no reasonable basis upon which to make that statement. it is offensive and generalized to the point of uselessness.

"If everywhere you look, everyoneais a jerk, you might be the jerk."

(Not saying anyone here is a jerk. That quote kind of changed my perspective on a situation)

Generalize much? I have worked in different teams.

The "being an-unfriendly-*" problem has often to do with tight timelines and problems/bugs that seem completely weird. Frankly, that can drive you nuts.

It's not really an excuse, but it can probably explain some behavior.

I wouldn't say it's accepted. IT and engineering staff are often given very little respect outside of their own departments in organizations, but they're tolerated.

I hope we see the "shitheads get ahead" mentality give way, or at least recognize that we're first and foremost facilitators of business and that working to earn respect from coworkers is an important part of that.

I've had to deal with bone-headed obscure bugs in the Linux kernel... Strange feature regressions, kernel-bundled drivers that used to work but have mysteriously become broken over a year ago and were never fixed because nobody gives a damn about making older hardware work. Seems unfair to treat someone like shit for a crime Linus must have been guilty of himself at some point. Unless he somehow thinks that Linux is so perfectly tested that no kernel ever gets released with really annoying bug that crash production systems. As far as I can see, the GCC people are fairly responsive, they're going to fix that bug, and that's probably the best one can hope for.

> imagine if you'd spent countless hours getting to the bottom of an obscure bug that turned out to be a completely bone-headed [...] problem outside your control

I imagine everyone on HN has been in this situation many times during their careers.

Yep definitely, but compiler bugs are a particularly painful\opaque breed of problem. In the overwhelming majority of cases the safe\sensible way to debug an issue (if you don't want to turn yourself slowly insane) is to take compiler correctness as a universal constant. When this turns out not to be the case it's infuriating. Perhaps this assumption is made in error but as I said it's a reasonable one to make.