I’ve been thinking for a minute about that: how technical people in Silicon Valley and the game industry can politically end up on the extreme right or let’s say a much harder left than most people on the West Coast. When you would think that uh, they would not.
I think it’s due to programming: you cannot program something in many different ways. There’s a few ways at best, only one in a lot of cases if not most cases. Thus, programmers learn, apply and thrive through rigidity. Which is the opposite of a comprehensive and empathetic mind, and pretty much the opposite of what designers go through. Our process is a lot more about seeing all angles, pondering and then min-maxing a decision. Programming is about one thing to get going, the simplest or most straightforward way to do it, usually the better.
Designers thrive with dynamic content. We create dynamism, that’s our goal. Creating the experience. Programmers moderately like this because it’s really hard. “Staticness” is sought after and usually a good thing technology-wise (more stable, less need for re-factoring). Look at websites: we went from static to dynamic to highly dynamic and back to static.
Anyway I’m pretty sure that this rigid mindset is definitely not helping us outside the world of computers say, in real life with individuals that are all different, for instance. That creates dudes who only think in terms of “well IF this and that THEN that”, without really thinking that more often than not, life is quite more complex and nuanced than that. Edge cases everywhere, bro. Everywhere.