Hey everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! It’s been a while since my last blog—once again, I took a bit of a break. This time, I was going through a job transition, which ended up taking longer than expected. But, finally I’m back.
I’m back to talk about a serious issue that surrounds us, yet few to acknowledge. The surge of rampant individualism in the tech industry. Over the past four years, I have dedicated myself to building and improving tech communities. Starting during my college days, and I continue to work on it today. I have watched multiple communities evolve—thriving on shared learning and collaboration. But recently, I am noticing a shift. Individualism is creeping in, slowly messing up the connections that made this industry so special.
What is individualism – is it good or bad?
Before we start talking about individualism in tech community, we need to learn what actually is individualism. Individualism is the belief that people should be free to make their own choices. And live their own lives according to their own values. This is the opposite of collectivism, which is the belief that people should be part of a group or community. And that their actions should be guided by the group’s interests.
Individualism obviously has both positive and negative side. On the positive side, it can lead to greater creativity, innovation, and personal freedom. Take any famous sports person for example. On the negative side, it can lead to selfishness, isolation, and a breakdown of social bonding. No need of example for the counter part. I know you are already imagining someone like this, that you know.
In the tech community too, individualism is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it can lead to the development of new and innovative technologies. On the other hand, it can lead to a lack of collaboration and a breakdown of the community spirit.
Recent events
The tech community has always been a place of collaboration and open sharing of ideas. However, in recent years, communities are being built around persons not ideas.
One other example of this is the increasing number of startups or well established companies. That are keeping their ideas and technologies secret. This is in contrast to the open-source culture that has been a hallmark of the tech community. In the last few years, we have seen a surge in the development of large AI language models,. With companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta leading the charge. Other than Meta, none of these companies have made their models open-source—not even the smaller ones with fewer tokens.
These directly impact the younger generation, who are still in schools and colleges. This creates a distorted view, where everything seems to be the result of a single individual, company, or institution. It disregards the contributions of peers, predecessors, and the community that built these foundations, often going unrecognized and unrewarded.
Long-term effect in the industry
I see the effect of choosing individuality over community everyday in my work. Some of them are good, some are bad.
I first experienced the negative side when I joined the industry as a junior Salesforce developer in a large corporation. The seniors who initially trained us admitted that they didn’t fully understand the entire code base or workflow. Because, their seniors weren’t familiar with each other’s code. The project keep on reallocating people between teams without providing enough time for handovers. Which always left a knowledge gap between older and existing team members.
People who are unfamiliar with the collaborative nature of technical teams often fail to recognize the importance of helping others. Peer learning and mentorship are foundational to tech culture. A highly individualistic approach is bound to fail. As they focus more on their own achievements rather than building a good piece of software.
I’ve seen firsthand how a lack of community and collaboration can impact junior developers. Now that I’m a senior developer, I often see juniors lost and overwhelmed. It’s hard for them to know who to ask for help or where to find the information they needed. And in this gen-z work culture, they would not ask the questions to anyone. They would wait for the person with whom their vibe is matched, and ask the question to them. This limits exposure and ultimately slows down the project.
The Solution
The solution of this problem is Us. If we change ourselves and start seeing the bigger picture, it will ultimately change the industry. The Tech industry is not about Google or Meta or X, it’s the people.
Stop building communities around person, build it for an idea. The face of a community is what it can do, not who are doing this. Let’s break the distorted view created by egoistic maniacs and start working on our dreams, together. Prioritizing shared goals, open communication, and mutual respect – It’s time to shift our focus from individual achievements to collective triumphs.
P.S. Dipu, a former member of our team, is back and has shared his interview experiences in his latest article. Feel free to ask him any questions in the comments.
