There's definite merit to the critique, I think. I'm sure HN users are only a subset of the population doing technical work, let alone the portion of the population that hold executive positions in technical fields.

There are some fantastic responses in this thread which are exemplars to the contrary, but I do believe the majority of tech workers are not well-versed in the humanities and also have a tendency to trivialize the humanities disciplines and treat them as easy to comprehend and acquire a passing mastery of--it'd be the same as some literati or historian learning some HTML or perhaps even python in an afternoon and claiming all this programming and software development business is easy baby stuff. You often don't see this however, as I believe intellectual humility is a virtue that finds better expression in the humanities than it does in the sciences or engineering. I think this may have something to do with the greater communal/dialogic nature of humanities methodologies and pedagogy, which is usually less of a good fit (or at least not tried) in engineering disciplines.

The reality, as others have mentioned, is that humanities disciplines are rich, brimful of complexity, and greatly informed by historical developments. I think the latter part is something people tend to miss or have an inadequate regard for when studying art or literature (and indeed, even some of the practitioners in humanities fields are guilty of this). We live in an age that is obsessed with novelty and often limits the scope of relevancy to this extremely limited field. Thus, you get a whole industry of artists who are doing nothing but copying each other or copying things that have been done years prior without being aware of it.

Like any discipline, art takes years of dedicated study to master—and not only to master creating work, but to master reading the work, to learn all the codes, references, techniques—the whole glut, really, of art history that manifests itself in a panoply of ways in any given piece of work.

I've met a lot of adults in the tech sector, and other sectors for that matter, whose cultural intelligence starts and stops with the latest Marvel film. There's a lot of cultural factors that play into this phenomena, but I believe the major ones are:

a. Hyper-specialization in schools. One or two 101-102 level "core courses" in the humanities is not nearly enough to produce individuals I would consider adequately educated in the liberal arts.

b. Depreciation or even scorn for intellectualism and 'high-culture' in America, which may stem from America's youth as a nation state, the conditions surrounding its origin (quite literally a divorce from the "old world" where a rich trove of art history and valuation of tradition and the past comes from), and its emphasis on capitalism (this relates to the issue in the sense that, if something makes a lot of money it's perceived to be meritorious and spreads through the cultural consciousness like wildfire and enjoys greater persistence)

c. The concept of Mass Entertainment, at least in the US, is something like a systematically administered narcotic. A lot of Entertainment is designed to "turn your brain off" to a certain extent, promotes passive engagement, and is more or less a system and concept that was devised, to great effect, to simultaneously placate and influence the masses and maintain the capitalist status quo.

d. Phenomenological "Purism"—this idea is best expressed through the idea of "spoiler alerts". One's experience of the artwork is supposedly "impure", instead of informed, if tainted by prior reading or supplemental material. This relates to positions of anti-intellectualism. Opinion, pure and simple, is valued above all else. One's responsibility when viewing art is no longer to make an informed interpretation, but rather to express a reaction or gut feeling about the artwork or to get some fleeting momentary joy out of the surprise of experiencing it for the first time. To be awed by it. In other words, to commit as little effort as possible to actually crafting an understanding of a piece of art, to take a wholly selfish orientation toward to artwork, to consume pure and simple. This is an incredibly common perspective in my experience, and it both does a knock-up job at devaluing and limiting art's role in society (good only for brief experiential flights of fancy, not for, you know, saying something significant and being a force of change) and ensuring the populous remains affixed to spectacles and simple systems of valuation such as monetary value.

Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to all the broad statements above.