It sometimes depends on the programmer’s situation. Maybe its “lose a ton of credibility or live on the street/lose your H-1B Visa”

Sometimes its either ship something broken or lose your job.

I say this as an autist who used to fucking loathe talking on the phone: Its that the phone takes up too much mental energy and time, yet has a time limit on your own responses. Its hellishly stressful when you are socially incompetent, and now a lot of even non-autistic people are becoming socially incompetent.

Now its funny, I hated phone calls back when everyone loved them. Now I’m pretty OK at them because I worked at a call center for a year and now it seems like everyone now hates phone calls. I kinda recognize that the one nice thing about phone calls is there is no “set up your account before ordering your food” type bullshit. There is a consistency to phone calls.

Its a mistaken desire to not have to actually work to live via turning hobbies into one’s job. The phrase “If you enjoy what you do you’ll never work again in your life” in application.

It doesn’t work.

I want a hug.

This is why you run stuff locally or not at all.

If this is a tactical move purely for selfish reasons, its not a good one considering the power Musk now wields. I think this is genuine from Gates. Saying it out loud maybe is a degree of performance, but I think he likely legitimately finds Musk’s fascist support a morally bad thing.

Assuming all billionaires are constantly playing some kind of 4D chess game is just as bad being overly charitable when a billionaire says or does something that could be seen as good. Remember, Elon Musk has put himself in the spotlight constantly despite it often times hurting him financially, his desire to be liked/beloved as a genius is also genuine its just fueling frequently terrible decisions.

That said, Gates is still an egotist and obviously pretty conventionally selfish (at what I’d describe as a pretty human level, if an average joe/jane came to have billions of dollars they’d probably treat the money in similar ways as Gates). Gates doesn’t deserve his wealth and Gates is no genius either, I just don’t think hes a fascist or a sociopath like Musk is.