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Notes -
By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.
I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.
By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?
I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe
Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.
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