Most IT people and programmers (plus most engineers of all types) tend to be cynical people at heart. I believe this is a side effect of being more logical than most people. Cynics tend to view the world of man as a place where The more things change, the more they stay the same because of how they are more tied to reality than many other types of people. What exactly do I mean by being tied to reality? Look at it this way, people have a tendency to ignore the greater reality and focus on their subset of life on this planet. A person’s career path determines the average of how likely they are to focus on a larger subset of life. A construction worker is more likely to read up on his local news than browse the newsweb for international affairs. A school administrator may keep up with the latest trends in education so they are not out of place in meetings. A chemist would do the same for chemistry news from various science publications and websites, they may even keep up with the academic advances in their field. So what makes engineers different? The answer, I believe, is scope.

As I am but a mere developer, I cannot posture as to know the other fields of engineering very well other than the hearsay that wikipedia and its references amounts to. But what I can say is that most developers and IT people are directly tied to the web. It is both their savior and their curse. For IT people especially, there are so many possible problems and solutions that keeping track of all of them is virtually impossible. To counter this, IT people use the web (or rather search engines) as pointers to information. Rather than attempt to remember everything themselves, all of their knowledge is condensed into their massive array of bookmarks that they use to find out what they need when they need it should they forget it. New information can be found via searches and old information is easily reference-able via bookmarks. These people tend to become Informavores, digging through the vast expanses of the surface web looking for the information they need to solve the problem at hand. Repeat this process for the last 15 years since the web has become truly usable (coinciding with the rise of Google) and you have a great number people who are at home on the web and have become increasingly dependent upon it.

What does this have to do with scope of knowledge? These informavores will constantly hit useless and faulty information. Some, however, will run into information they weren’t originally looking for but still tag said information as interesting nonetheless. If they continue to consume information, they will eventually become more “open-minded” and gather more and more information about things that didn’t initially interest them. It is at this point, that the web becomes a curse. Knowledge is power, yet it is also a burden. Once you (or rather an introvert) understand(s) the meaning of something, it is very difficult to unknow. While most people’s locus of knowledge focuses on the local, IT people are more likely to come into contact with information that reaches far outside the local. However, this is compounded by their own introverted desire for further knowledge. A keen introvert will get to the bottom of things, their mind demands information that is accurate and useful.

Introverts who accumulate just enough knowledge in this fashion will become more aware of the world and their place in it. This knowledge is a burden onto them, as one cannot change the world via altruistic goals alone. With these burdens they must venture out into the world that continually reinforces the darker side of the information that they constantly come into contact with. The fact that humanity as a whole trends toward the negative. It is this, that turns engineers, IT people, and introverts into cynics.