[neutered_knot]

Yes. I’m an academic computer scientist at a top-25 US university. I find that people in the field tend to be excessively critical and very often lack empathy. There is some culture of intellectual one-upmanship where it is more socially desirable to identify flaws and unhandled corner cases in an idea than to recognize some overall value that could be improved on. Perfection is very much the enemy of good enough or better than what we have now.

Ideas that survive are the ones that anticipate and pre-empt criticism rather than the ones that are creative or innovative. There is little consideration of ethics and value or harm to society.

Honestly, I think it is damaging to the field. It is very demoralizing for newcomers to be subject to repeated criticism and not encouragement. There isn’t much culture of mutual support. I’ve been told by NSF personnel at review panels that CS grants proposals get much lower review scores than those of other sciences because the CS reviewers are so critical and that’s problematic for the field as a whole because it was hard to justify finding proposals with low scores when the funds could go to higher scoring proposals in other fields (though this was many years ago).

So in short, yes, it is also my experience. I’ve worked around it by trying to work with people from other disciplines which have better cultures.