So the title is a little misleading, the author does not believe arrogance is a real problem in the community and claims to have to look hard to find arrogance.
I'm not a big fan of the social justice community, but they are right about arrogant programmers. They aren't racist or misogynist, they're equal opportunity assholes.
In my experience most people who are oblivious to the arrogance of the programming community are themselves the arrogant ones. There are a lot of friendly people, but if you're a real noob and try to contribute shitty code to a big open source project with real programmers, you're gonna get your ass handed to you.
Even the groups of programmers who claim to support "safe space" environments are chock-full of arrogance, they just don't use cuss words and belittle you in a more passive way. I assume it's pretty much the same in every profession when noobs make mistakes.
It's not just if you try to contribute bad code, just asking the wrong kind of question can get a lot of crap back at you.
Of course, if you're genuinely a beginner you don't know you're asking the wrong kind of question.
Yes, it's frustrating to help someone who is strugging to run/consume Foo only to eventually find out what they actually wanted to do was Bar and that consuming Baz would have been a much simpler solution.
But if you don't have the patience to help, don't try to! Too much programmers think they can fix the world and go around trying to correct beginners[1] when they should just get out of the way.
[1] Many high rep stackoverflow users suffer from this, they've seen the same shit too many times and rather get out of the way and let others help the beginners they'll shut down those beginner questions. If a question was valid 5 years ago it should still be valid today, but they seem to forget what it's like to be a beginner.
I really don't want to agree with this, but I must. Anecdotally: I just joined a team of side project programmers, and while getting up to speed on a new branch of the project, I had the phrase "You just don't understand, you really need to pay attention" uttered at least three times in four hours, and in a group of three people, one of them actually uttered the phrase "I'm bored, how does this affect me".
Now then, perhaps I am a terrible programmer, and perhaps I just have no chance to understand what's being said because of this fact. But... why did ask me to join them then? Why didn't they let me go, if this is truly the case?
The underlying issue, after getting communication actually occurring in two directions, is I was being subjected to the results of several previous poor developers - I was getting the brunt of their frustrations which was actually aimed at other folks. Doesn't make the earlier parts of the conversation any less arrogant, or tolerable, unfortunately.
I'm not a big fan of the social justice community, but they are right about arrogant programmers. They aren't racist or misogynist, they're equal opportunity assholes.
In my experience most people who are oblivious to the arrogance of the programming community are themselves the arrogant ones. There are a lot of friendly people, but if you're a real noob and try to contribute shitty code to a big open source project with real programmers, you're gonna get your ass handed to you.
Even the groups of programmers who claim to support "safe space" environments are chock-full of arrogance, they just don't use cuss words and belittle you in a more passive way. I assume it's pretty much the same in every profession when noobs make mistakes.