site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

For more perspective here is my resume

Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me.

Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

Constantly apply to every job listing

This is a low success strategy and will burn you out. You're still early in your career so I empathize but the reality of the matter is that you do need to be networking with people so that when you need a job or you want to move up for more money, your talking to a human whom you know and who knows you already. Resume blasting was mostly dead five years ago and with AI HR systems it is 100% dead today.

Networking in a nutshell:

  1. Find people who are working on things in areas that genuinely interest you. Twitter is bizarrely high leverage for this. I have scored many clients via cold DM on twitter because they posted something like "I am working on a banana counting machine" and I DM'ed with "That seems cool. I've been in the banana counting game for 10 years. Want to trade notes?"
  2. Add value in whatever small way you can without expecting anything in return. The default way this is done in networking is to recycle your network meaning you see that Person X is into thing Y, and you also know that Person Z is into thing Y. You introduce them. That's sort of networking 101. I think a better strategy is to shoot random e-mails / texts / DMs to people you already know asking for nothing but a 15 minute catch up call. No objectives, just listen to them talk about work. People like to be heard, a the kids say, and just kind of generally strategizing about work and career with other people pays off well if you're actively engaged and earnest present with it. If you're not, you'll come across as a scuzzy network robot.
  3. Returning to twitter - this is where real tech networks exist and evolve. Linkedin is a hellscape for jobseekers and ... in general. There are some things that Linkedin is really useful for (mostly, getting to people who are Linkedin addicts but have budget and authority). I'd say skip it or use lightly.
  4. (And this one, I think is 100x more true in the age of LLMs) Have a digital public presence that is your own. Not linkedin, not even twitter. Build a blog. Substack is getting pretty cringe and hearing someone say "hey take a look at my substack" is almost a counter-signal. There are plenty of other plug-and-play blogs that don't force branding and their platform into your face. If you're already semi-regularly posting on forums, you can carve out the 1 - 3 hours per week it takes to post a solid 1000 word blog post. Once a week is fine for someone employed full time.

One of the many failures of the boomers was in failing to teach their children the reality of networking and jobs. My own folks, as much as I truly do love them and as much as my upbringing was 11/10 fucking awesome, failed at this as well. I was told, up until college, that you got a job by working hard, having a slick resume and a good handshake. Then I got to a fancy college and all of my friends who had grown up knowing the game went "lol, no, bro, it's networking."

Whatever the outcome of LLMs, I'm quite certain that the returns to cultivating deep relationships will grow ever higher. I feel good and bad about this. It's good to have meaningful connections to real people but, on the other hand, schizo posting with you degenerates is fun the entire original promise of the internet was that physical proximity no matter constrained meaningful knowledge sharing and productive interaction. I suppose the remedy would be a fundamentally new protocol that enforces "humanness." Twitter's recent bot nuke is a gesture in this diretion, but now I am getting off topic.

I guess trying to explain the benefits of networking to a Boomer is like trying to explain to a fish why it benefits from being underwater. The idea of scrutinizing stuff that works is not something that even occurs to most people.

Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me. Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

I mean, i do know how to develop software, ive develop my own programs here and there, but I've actually decided that id like to stay on the infrastructure side of tech, as i personally find it more enjoyable.

The networking advice is probable my best shot at the next job. Ive also heard that many jobs are part of a "hidden job market" where friends of friends get each other hired via referrals. Ill look into it.

Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.

If only this were true. I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work in a way that indicates they clicked through the links in my resume and read the well formatted READMEs on the projects I maintain. When I do interviews, the rubrics I’m supposed to work towards don’t have any way to include an assessment of open source work, and other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work. The general sentiment seems to be that evaluating open source work is unfair to people who’ve done their work in corporate environments. I’m sure there are some hiring managers in some companies who can and do use it as a signal, but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill. It’s not terrible advice because it can’t hurt, it’s just not the magic foot in the door some people hope it would be. There’s no magic key if you’re early career, especially these days. I feel bad for the youngsters.

Your networking advice sounds good, but I find it exhausting and I know a lot of great hackers do to (not claiming to be one of them). Building your personal brand is probably great for your career, but I want to write code, not win instagram to get a job. Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.

I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work Other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work.

These sound like companies that will fail

but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill.

The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.

Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.

Sounds like you should change careers.

I'm being pretty harsh on purpose.

"The job market isn't what I want it to be." Correct. You can either adapt to it or try something else. Complaining alone gets a person nowhere. It's an old redpill quote, so take it for what it's worth, but the saying goes "Life never gets easier, but you can get better."

Technical hiring has been fucked in one form or another since the easy money days of 08 - 16 (roughly). The people who succeed are the people who don't follow the herd and make an effort. If all you want is to resume spam that's fine - expect resume spam level results.

If you, instead, build a network, build a brand (also - who said anything about Instagram? Some of the biggest voices in tech still run their own personal text heavy blogs. Gwern comes to mind). If you don't want to do either of those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.

These sound like companies that will fail

All have been well established and successful to varying degrees. I’ve observed this pattern at FAANG, at unicorns, at established enterprise shops, basically everywhere. The only place that seemed to engage with my open source work was a very early stage startup, so maybe it helps there but for the vast majority of tech jobs it just doesn’t matter.

The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.

Just write a virially successful project with enormous buzz bro. It’s a totally viable career path for average devs to become the Twitter main character for a week and land a job!

Obviously this will work for some people, but that doesn’t mean it will for most.

Sounds like you should change careers.

I’ll hang onto the gig where I get overpaid to write fun little programs until it gets automated away, thanks though. I was talking about barely having the energy to do extra unpaid work for fun on open source stuff. That I do it at all means I’m in the top few percent of professional devs passion wise. Open source work is not normal, and if you think it is you must be way out of touch with most of the industry.

This feels like getting a job on hard mode. People should be able to find work thru normal processes not needing to be sort of a small business owner after graduating.

This seems like a sign of let’s shut down the Indian IT mills. If companies really needed employees you could get work thru formal processes instead of networking. It seems like there are a lot of people in his situation. Being better at networking changes who gets the job but not the overall need. If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

If jobs are plentiful then companies would hire off the resume pile instead of selecting someone they are already friends with.

Managers will always go for friends (or at least former coworkers/employees they were on good terms with) first if they can. When jobs are plentiful, they'll search the resume pile, but only after exhausting the group of people they know.

The problem with people talking about "networking" is there are some people good at networking, and these people tend to be concentrated in professions such as sales, marketing, and in management in all fields. Whereas other people are bad at networking, and some fields -- certainly including non-management tech -- have a lot of those people. Telling those people to do networking is a waste of breath; at best they might know what networking is (but just as possibly the term may have no sensible referent), but they have no way of doing it.

Which of course is why networking works so well in those fields. You have to do networking to get a sales job, but everyone's doing it; it's a minimum requirement and you need more, or at least to be better at networking than your competition. If you can do networking in tech, you're way ahead of the competition.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats