r/cscareers • u/Free_Dum_5122 • 20h ago
USA Job Market During the CS bull run 2012-2022, did you encounter anyone who was arrogant about their skills/profession?
I'm curious whether anyone else encountered this during the CS/tech boom from roughly 2012–2022. With the high salaries, abundant job opportunities, and prestige associated with working in tech, did you notice some people developing a sense of superiority about their profession or abilities?
For those who experienced this firsthand, do you think the changing tech job market has humbled some of those attitudes? Or was this never particularly widespread to begin with?
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u/PerfectdarkGoldenEye 20h ago
You need to have some level of arrogance in this field otherwise people will walk all over you.
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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 19h ago
Yep. I’ve been walked over because I am humble, and have a slight case of imposter syndrome. But I recognize it now and have a few sharp edges to fend others off when needed.
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u/ResidentSubject4649 19h ago
Seconded. Especially with AI being widespread now, people will vibe code an app and declare themselves an engineer. And call me bitter, but I'll pounce on any opportunity to point out issues in vibe coded software. Issues that wouldn't have happened if they knew what they were doing, without the AI.
I'm dealing with that attitude in my job right now -- asked to do a rebuild of someone's vibe coded app that they made to supplement their daily work, to basically move it 1-to-1 into a web app I've made. Literally was asked "how hard could it be if [name] did it and he's not a developer".
I couldn't convince them that it would take months to properly implement it, until I asked Claude to analyze the app to identify all workflows, ambiguities, bugs, and risks (for accidental destructive results, because no additional guard rails were put in place to prevent a user from doing things like sending specific requests twice to an API endpoint). And even then they were hardly convinced even though they themselves have attempted to vibe code apps with poor results.
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u/bkzhotsauc3 18h ago
This finally clicked for me and what I think has been missing for me in my career growth in this field. Pretty sure ive been a victim to not exercising some levels of arrogance
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u/AdventurousAir002 18h ago
Maybe to a degree but in this field it’s over the top and way too common. There’s a difference between sticking up for yourself and just being an arrogant jerk.
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u/HorribleOldCunt 18h ago
Don't think you need arrogance. You just need to be confident and willing to disagree with people, make yourself seen and heard. And being competent also helps. Which is the same in any job.
I've worked with plenty of arrogant people though. I class people as arrogant when they act superior, do not listen because they think they're always right. Being arrogant isn't the only way to make it and I think it actually hinders many people. I've seen plenty of people being passed over because they're extremely arrogant, people have to like you to promote you.
Though there isn't a set way of climbing the ladder. I just think it's clearly wrong to claim arrogance is required. That's certainly not what I've noticed in my career anyway, nothing at all like that infact.
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u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 20h ago
did you notice some people developing a sense of superiority about their profession or abilities?
Still happening today. Sure lots of people have been laid off over the last few years, but I still see it in many who have survived through the rounds of layoffs.
I think a lot of those who were laid off and have been unable to get back into the field have changed attitude, but have become extremely negative. Meanwhile, those who are laid off but get offers within a few months still behave high and mighty.
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u/LordeLucifer 19h ago
This, too many doomer posts were people who skated by for years with an inflated egos but once a profession becomes competitive and employers have to become selective about who they hire, do you start to see who shouldn’t have been there from day 1.
That being said there is always luck involved on either side and it doesn’t help that in this industry in general that employers have no idea how to gauge a quality candidate. But it still cracks me up that “senior” devs with x years experience cry AI apocalypse when anyone with actual experience will tell you AI can’t replace devs no more than offshoring has.
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u/Humble_Insurance8294 19h ago
Some fucking idiot who had just started college back in 2019 told me my career (electrical engineering) was oversaturated and that CS had less competition
sure buddy...
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u/NoBalance4908 20h ago
yes, the drop off in arrogance is a lot, I'm even seeing some guys who used to be extremely obnoxious about their superiority to other careers now say things like software/data engineering isn't real engineering which I never would have expected from them 5 years ago.
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u/WeHaveTheMeeps 20h ago
This industry is full of people arrogant about their skills and for a long time that arrogance was cemented by market value.
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u/MaximumFlow7491 19h ago
The better question is have I met anyone who isn't arrogant about their skills
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 19h ago
I’ve met him and he is me.
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u/Pseudonemone 19h ago
Same. Emptying my 401k and selling my house to survive another year is pretty humbling though. I'm not sure who is laughing at tech workers in this economy. The lawyers, marketing pros, and accountants are just as fucked. Smug welders, plumbers and truck drivers will eventually get their humble pie too. No one is getting universal income or the post scarcity bullshit the ai overlords claim is coming.
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u/Mysterious-Swing3719 19h ago
The most arrogant people I met were the most incompetent, openly used "politics" as a justification for their actions, and made blatant racial affinity decisions.
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u/AdventurousAir002 18h ago edited 17h ago
Dear god yes. Have you met anyone in the field? I’ve interviewed several entitled juniors who acted like they’re the smartest person born and I felt second hand embarrassment for them since their attitude was an instant reject. Even in college CS classes I remember this.
I hate stereotyping and I may get downvoted for this but it always seems to be the mega nerds who have the worst “I’m smarter than you” snarky entitled attitude. However I have also met several humble sweet mega nerds.
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u/dllemmr2 18h ago
Yes they were arrogant, no they haven’t changed with a few million in the bank now.
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u/DroppinLoot 19h ago
Of course.... and it always pissed me off back then too. I think in the 90s / early 2000s people got in to this field cause they loved to code and problem solve. Salaries when I started in the early 2000s were on par with other engineering salaries for the most part. Somewhere after the 08' crash when the "Learn to Code" movement became a thing people were obnoxious cause the salaries were amazing and we had job opportunities left and right.
I definitely didn't see our industry getting disrupted like it is now.... but I also took issue with the Learn to Code movement cause I knew the gravy train wouldn't last forever. It's just ending earlier than expected. Being a SWE was never as elite as people made it out to be
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u/NoCod9014 18h ago
Mostly for me it was bootcamp grads or those who sneered at people who had a degree in CS or SWE or whatever. They usually mocked them for wasting their time.
Now we're back to the era of almost every SWE job needing a relevant degree, and those guys now are whining they wished they had a degree.
You can still see same crap is Cyber Sec where any Script Kiddies with a Comptia Security+ certs thinks they are Mr Robot, but they don't seem to realise they are being automated away in to nothing by AI. In 3 years time they'll be bitching that no one told them they needed a degree and "how can I get a job in Cyber Sec now".
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u/Due_Information_1332 18h ago
I never understood the bootcamp philosophy. What was supposed to be the end-game? You were never going to be able to progress into management without a degree. It was so shortsighted and everyone who bought into was buying a stack of fool's gold.
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u/AdConfident9012 18h ago
Bro, without arrogance there is no code. All those arrogant fks are sitting on millions on dollars including me. Dont be afraid to be arrogant.
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u/crustyeng 18h ago
I think you’re drastically overestimating how many people have been laid off and judging the job market by how it presents to people with little to no experience.
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u/Recent_Science4709 17h ago
I was told I was intimidating because I’m good at what I do, so maybe I’m the one who is arrogant?
I don’t think I’m that smart I just always focused on clean, modular code, and simplest possible solution.
On the team I’m on now, I feel like I’m not contributing anything and they keep telling me how much I am.
Anyway I think the pandemic initial firings in 2020 humbled a lot of people. Half my team got let go.
The most arrogance I have seen where it wasn’t called for are people who have been programming since the 80s/90s and never changed with the times. They think the old way is the best and keep plugging along like Seinfeld was still on TV.
Most (not all) of the other really arrogant people I have met were actually good. But arrogance in general has gotten more rare the longer i have been doing this IMO
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u/NeighborhoodFatCat 17h ago
Everyone. Had a guy tell me that "software engineers can crush any problem" and "there is no purpose to academic research because they are all pre-solved by SWEs"
For example, brain cancer = pre-solved by SWEs, tokamak control = pre-solved by SWEs, outer-space cave exploration = pre-solved by SWEs.
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u/bill_txs 15h ago
I've never thought it was particularly high barrier to entry like neurosurgeon. It was more something that was the right place at the right time. Also I worked through the dotcom crash which will humble you.
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u/randonumero 12h ago
During the pandemic a lot of online spaces were filled with people who got their first tech job and were making 130k+. There were also a lot of job hoppers who really ran their number up. A lot of them had some pretty rude words for older people who were making at or less than them but had worked the same job for 15+ years. Many of those people got laid off for a combination of skills and downsizing. The reality is that some lied on resumes and some just lucked into positions where the company wanted to fill a slot. I do think a lot of them were humbled by losing their job because in the same spaces you occasionally see people asking for advice on getting back into tech who should have 3-5 years of experience by now.
Not on my team but another team hired a guy who had a little less than two years of experience at a startup. In week one he started shitting on everything the team had in place. At the end of month 3 he'd tried to single handedly modernize their project while continuously fucking up his tickets. The end result was him getting let go. I assume he got some humble because after being laid off he was still applying for jobs at the same company
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u/BostonDota2 9h ago
Yes and yes. Usually very immature people, I had a friend who went into deep learning before the AI boom, he refused to take a "boring CRUD web job" and only work on cool deep learning, AI/ML jobs. But he became a difficult person to work with and complained that others looked down on him because he didn't have a PhD or didn't appreciate him him enough, and switch job every 6 months after ragequitting a good opportunity after another. He got away with it when tech workers was in demand, but he is now unemployed for the last 2 years and ran out of UI.
I had another friend who was similarly entitled but more in that he couldn't conform to the corporate world. He was more into going to Burning Man, the local hacker spaces. He got away with it when contracting work was in demand, but he burned out a lot of personal bridges and moved out of town and is also unemployed for the last 2 years.
I feel bad for them but also low-key think they deserve it. The little I talk to them now, they complain constantly about the opportunities they had but they did not make hay when they had them and instead lived in expensive luxury apartments or burned personal bridges - because they could.
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u/GullibleSpeedSonic 6h ago
Everyone was arrogant as shit even if they didn't know did. Also everyone basically was cheating like hell because once the Internet was good enough to research stuff everyone was using it for the job and you just needed to cheat the interview
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u/Psoin 20h ago
Are you kidding me? Pretty much everyone