I observe this compulsion a lot and in my opinion, it's almost always coming from resentment driving ego in an attempt to compensate for insecurity and self-loathing, which ultimately ends up misdirected towards others. It's almost always accidentally entertaining, but sadly ends up diminishing rather than elevating discourse.

To refute GP's point more broadly -- there is a lot in /applied/ computer science (which is what I think the harder aspects software engineering really is) that was and is done by individuals in software just building in a vacuum, open source holding tons of examples.

And to answer GP's somewhat rhetorical question more directly - none of those professions are paid to do open-ended knowledge work, so the analogy is extremely strained. You don't necessarily see them post on blogs (as opposed to LinkedIn/X, for example), but: investors, management consultants, lawyers, traders, and corporate executives all write a ton of this kind of long-form content that is blog post flavored all the time. And I think it comes from the same place -- they're paid to do open-ended knowledge work of some kind, and that leads people to write to reflect on what they think seems to work and what doesn't.

Some of it is interesting, some of it is pretty banal (for what it's worth, I don't really disagree that this blog post is uninteresting), but I find it odd to throw out the entire category even if a lot of it is noise.

what compels me to be which way? to call out obnoxious things in the people i'm surrounded by? dunno probably my natural revulsion to noxious things?