I would agree but only in the context of tge "smart jerk" meme which bears all of the marks of sociopathic manipulation - especially with vagueness.
Essentially the real jerks are the sociopaths who try to bully everyone else into compliance and not upshowing them with their ability to actually do their job instead of wasting time on office politics. I'll take a whole team of surly coworkers over those assholes any day of the week but I have a strong and justified prejudice against sociopaths because they ruin everything they touch for self-advancement.
For everything that’s wrong with Reddit, I don’t think it’s tall poppy problem is as bad as it is on HN.
Most stories about exceptional achievement on HN will be met with all sort of anecdotal derision. “10x developers don’t exist”, “10x developers are sociopaths”, “10x developers are ‘brilliant jerks’”... other common themes are that people must have exploited others to achieve their success, or that their success is unreasonable because they made too many personal sacrifices to achieve it, or that their success is unfair, because not everybody has the same social skills as them, or whatever other ‘privilege’ people want to nitpick in order to deride them.
This is probably a function of the target audience. If most people on HN work at SV-ish companies where all developers are at a very high level, then the biggest observable difference between them is how obnoxious they are.
Personally I’ve observed HN to have a pretty strong culture of tall poppy syndrome, which would explain that.