The 5 Worst Habits of Software Engineers

This isn’t one of those blogs that writes a 600 word preamble. Software engineers can be irritating. Here's why:

Laptop Stickers

I was around when laptop stickers were somewhat acceptable. College logos, old-school memes, a TV show reference, maybe a National Park sticker. That was fine - cool even. Now they just scream “I’m about to show you a meme from 2011 and say ‘Happy Friday!’ in Slack.” They have become the dad jokes of tech. Nobody cares that you went to “DockerCon 2009.”

Editor’s note: DockerCon didn’t even exist until 2014.

Office Attire

Look, I'm pro-casual. My first job made me wear a blazer and dress shoes, walking a mile through swamp-ass DC heat just to sit at a desk and not talk to a single client. Completely unnecessary.

But some engineers take “casual dress” and push it too far. Rule one: wear pants, not shorts. Everywhere. Especially in an office. You’re not a child. Rule two: hygiene. Shower, trim the beard, wear clothes that aren’t on their third straight month of service. It should not take HR-sanctioned bullying to remind people that deodorant exists.

While the identical tech bros in their solid-color athleisure are boring, at least they aren't offensive to multiple senses at once.

Snobbery

The engineer ego is unmatched. How many times have you heard someone say “this place would collapse without me” while they spend their day fucking around with dashboards and tweaking the same chunk of code for the fourth year in a row? Meanwhile, the marketing team just pulled off a campaign that brought in $3 million in new revenue.

Check yourself. Your company needs PMs, it needs recruiters, it needs people who don’t spend their day nitpicking API naming conventions. Rolling your eyes in every meeting because not everyone speaks in your narrow dialect of technical trivia is childish.

And while you sneer at other departments for “doing nothing,” they’re looking right back at your anime T-shirt and seeing an overpaid "coder" who would rather get a root canal than talk about customer impact.

Blind

Blind started as a platform for transparency across the industry. It is now the world’s saddest locker room. A dumping ground for (very) thinly veiled anxiety, bad advice, and just outright racism and sexism.

You don’t even have to take my word for it. Open the app. It takes about five seconds to find a front-page post that makes you want to walk into the sea.

Programming Interviews

We have entered the interview arms race. Candidates grind LeetCode for weeks, companies keep raising the programming bar, and the whole thing has spiraled into a sterile, joyless speed coding contest that has almost nothing to do with the job.

And I'm not even going to address rampant problems with conscious or unconscious bias that many engineers either ignore or downplay.

Could you pass your own company’s interview right now without a few weeks of practice? Be honest. Probably not. I am not suggesting we should scrap technical interviews. Fundamental data structures, some system design, that stuff makes sense. But maybe weave them into actual problems you might face in real life instead of building an unsolvable gauntlet.