I just read it real quick and... I don't see the connection between the observations to the call to action. It kinda feels a bit like a "not like other girls" type of mentality. (which I'm aware...
I just read it real quick and... I don't see the connection between the observations to the call to action. It kinda feels a bit like a "not like other girls" type of mentality. (which I'm aware is a bit sexist and a way for people to put down women, but I'm not sure how else to describe this mentality)
The question I have, purely off of just reading this blog post, is why do I need to tweak and care about something like this? I don't really see any supporting points to it other than, "you can be a nerd like me"! How would that benefit all of us, besides me spending way more time than I need to in Android Studio when my job is to just write code to fix this bug? I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that I could learn more to climb the ladder, but I also have other hobbies that I care about more.
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Edit, after rereading too:
I understood that (no offense) programmers are just more skilled monkeys than the rest of us with a keyboard instead of a grenade.
Kinda feels super gatekeep-y to call people monkeys for not being as invested in something.
Yeah, I found the article kind of uncomfortable as well. I'm one of the people who came to programming first as a hobby, then as a job, so I suspect I count as a nerd for the purposes of this...
Exemplary
Yeah, I found the article kind of uncomfortable as well.
I'm one of the people who came to programming first as a hobby, then as a job, so I suspect I count as a nerd for the purposes of this article. And in fairness, the sort of person who enjoys programming when they come home from work is always going to approach the job differently from someone who stops when they clock off at 5pm.
But I'm also very sceptical of people who praise this sort of "nerdiness" as a virtue. Very often, the things that get celebrated are just shibboleths designed to create an in-group and an out-group. Learning Vim will not make you a better programmer. Spending money on a mechanical keyboard with a customised layout might make you type marginally faster, but it's mainly just a fancy desk toy. (I say this as someone with a split board as my daily driver.) Choosing the right colour scheme for your IDE, desktop, RGBs, and everything else may bring you a lot of joy, but it has nothing to do with programming.
That's not to say you shouldn't enjoy that sort of stuff, but it has no impact on your ability as programmer. It is to programming as sleeving all your cards is to Magic: The Gathering, or buying fancy needles is to knitting. It is a valid way to enjoy yourself, but it makes no sense to judge other people based on whether they do these things.
There is some stuff in this article that I'd agree with. The best developers I know will spend the extra time to understand the problems they're dealing with - spending longer trying to figure out why a bug happened in the first places rather than just trying to fix it, or reading the documentation in detail to understand the architecture of a given library of framework. (Ideally all in work hours.) I think that's what the author is trying to say at the end with the call to action. But that's not being nerdy, that's being conscientious.
I think the author is noticing a real effect that people who program as a hobby are also more passionate about their work. But they're mistaking the symptoms and causes of that effect.
Very well said. It’s conflating the amount of obsession one has with the quality of work and that is rarely if ever a direct correlation. One of the best developers I ever met used an Apple Magic...
Very well said. It’s conflating the amount of obsession one has with the quality of work and that is rarely if ever a direct correlation. One of the best developers I ever met used an Apple Magic Keyboard and Sublime Text with almost no extensions installed.
If you're selecting for the best skills, then your observation about a lack of correlation with an obsession over tooling is accurate. If you're selecting against average (read: mediocre)...
If you're selecting for the best skills, then your observation about a lack of correlation with an obsession over tooling is accurate. If you're selecting against average (read: mediocre) skillsets, then it makes some sense.
Stereotypically, 4 buckets of tool obsession in decreasing average skill:
Thoroughly customized optimizations that are 20 years old. No sane person would choose these today, but that was state of the art when they stopped reading HN & Product Hunt to discover new techniques on ricing their terminal.
Tiling WMs and blinged-out keyboards. Tooling obsession. You at least know they care. The kind of nerds the OP post praises.
Default configurations. The skill ceiling here far exceeds the ceiling of group 2—matches the greybeard emacs gurus. However, this group also includes, by definition, those who chose tech careers because they have the best paychecks (the kind of people OP wishes they interacted less with).
Unix greybeard wannabes. Their dotfiles are identical to group 1. However, a quick visual inspection of the candidate reveals that they're too young for those best practices to ever have been best in their short programming career. They chased what the TRVE PROVESSIONALS use to prove themselves better than the ricers and lost.
In my experience, the ones that obsess the most with their tools are the ones that do the least/worst actual work. It’s one thing to obsess over a build script or some part of the workflow that...
In my experience, the ones that obsess the most with their tools are the ones that do the least/worst actual work. It’s one thing to obsess over a build script or some part of the workflow that you’re using repeatedly, it’s wholly another to obsess over a personal preference. Your example of tiling WM’s and blinged-out keyboards doesn’t say anything about them caring about what they’re doing. So what exactly do we “know that they care” [about?]?
Based on what I see online and in real life, tool obsession doesn’t select against mediocre skill sets any more than it selects for the best skills because obsession over tools doesn’t actually relate to skill at all.
To offer an analogy, this is similar, to me, to people who are obsessed with musical gear that don’t ever play. The quality/obsession over the instrument/equipment doesn’t correlate to their skill at all.
Yeah… this is very gatekeeper-ish to me too. As someone that used to spend days setting up Linux installs with shell scripts, customize the crap out of my IDE, and install new stuff all the time...
Yeah… this is very gatekeeper-ish to me too. As someone that used to spend days setting up Linux installs with shell scripts, customize the crap out of my IDE, and install new stuff all the time just to test it out, I’m more interested today in getting shit done and yet I would still consider myself a nerd or a geek or whatever. The author is just wasting time to fulfill some anxiety or endless pursuit of perfection and it seems like they need to put down others to justify themselves and their behaviors.
It’s very reminiscent of the Linux/Android users on Lenny who say crap like “You’re not a nerd if you use an iPhone” because, unlike you, they have wasted countless hours to make sure that they can customize what font shows up below the icons on their Home Screen. It’s like “good for you” but I’d rather spend my time elsewhere and don’t need the judgement for something that doesn’t matter as much to me.
Apologies if the wording is triggering for you, but gatekeep-y? Only if said programmers are gatekeeping themselves, as nobody (myself included) is preventing or encouraging them to abstain from...
Apologies if the wording is triggering for you, but gatekeep-y? Only if said programmers are gatekeeping themselves, as nobody (myself included) is preventing or encouraging them to abstain from learning.
In fact, I'm basing this on two years of experience with mostly the same people (and a bunch of new ones) during which I've literally had people tell me that " I don't want to learn anything. If I have a problem, I just come to you, and you fix it" about small issues that should be entirely within their domain.
These kind of programmers are happy just punching the clock and pushing widgets. Nothing wrong with this, but this just is.
Not everyone is like this, but a big portion of them are.
Not everyone that drives a car should strive to be a mechanical engineer, but if everyone showed a little bit of interest about cars, they would benefit directly (know what they like or dislike, lesser chances of being swindled at car shops, being able to change a tire and do some basic maintenance), and we all would benefit indirectly (manufacturers would take what people like into consideration more etc.).
One thing I notice is that this perception is largely a holdover from an earlier era, before the professionalization of development role and the calcification of methodologies like agile. Consider...
One thing I notice is that this perception is largely a holdover from an earlier era, before the professionalization of development role and the calcification of methodologies like agile. Consider this quote from the 90s:
Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am, it's because they were up all night.
~ Tom Van Vleck
While the quote is anecdata only, it matches both my memory of how people perceived programmers computer geeks as well as my experience from that time. At that time, being "into computers" was a much broader brush, and much more of an identity. If it was also a job, that was incidental.
These days, most of the developers I know do it as a day job just like any other and are much closer to baseline in terms of norms and interests (this is largely the point of the article, I think). But it was not always so.
It really feels like the author wrote this after trying to talk to a co-worker about some niche technology, and was surprised to find that not every programmer is interested in every facet of...
It really feels like the author wrote this after trying to talk to a co-worker about some niche technology, and was surprised to find that not every programmer is interested in every facet of technology related to programming.
I used to be a zOS mainframe systems programmer, but I wouldn't expect people to necessarily want to learn about the shenanigans or tooling in that environment just because they are a programmer. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
The call to action reads like "my reductionist assumptions about programmers wasn't true, so please try to make them more true." Either that or it's another developers who don't go all in on tech all the time should.
I say this as someone whose life was consumed with technology for 20 years, culminating as director of engineering for a large organization with its own fiber wan, etc. But it's ok to have a life beyond what you do for a living, even if you like what you do.
So my call to action for the author is to accept that it is ok for someone to write code for a living, and be invested in solving problems with the technology, not invested in the technology itself.
Anecdotally, I began my tech career as various flavors of “developer” and my coworkers at those jobs were writers, musicians, and artists outside of work. Eventually I progressed to “software...
Anecdotally, I began my tech career as various flavors of “developer” and my coworkers at those jobs were writers, musicians, and artists outside of work. Eventually I progressed to “software engineer” roles and I would describe my colleagues in those positions as “nerds.” It wasn’t until I entered that world that mechanical keyboards, vim keybindings, and shell customization were water cooler topics.
In my experience, terminal powerusers are disproportionately likely to be musicians compared to the general population. However, a random musician is slightly less likely to know what a CLI...
In my experience, terminal powerusers are disproportionately likely to be musicians compared to the general population. However, a random musician is slightly less likely to know what a CLI terminal is than a person chosen at random from the whole population.
acoustic rock, though I could be swayed towards a really over-the-top hair metal release. It honestly still hasn't taken proper form yet. Mostly just me and my guitar, singing about the importance...
acoustic rock, though I could be swayed towards a really over-the-top hair metal release. It honestly still hasn't taken proper form yet. Mostly just me and my guitar, singing about the importance of data ownership
I wouldn’t expect them to be positively correlated, maybe even negatively correlated, and neither of those are common, so the intersection would seem to be quite rare.
I wouldn’t expect them to be positively correlated, maybe even negatively correlated, and neither of those are common, so the intersection would seem to be quite rare.
Oh I dunno about rarity, I'm just speaking to the culture I observed in an office of developers vs. one of software engineers. It's ultimately just a title (I was doing roughly the same sort of...
Oh I dunno about rarity, I'm just speaking to the culture I observed in an office of developers vs. one of software engineers. It's ultimately just a title (I was doing roughly the same sort of work in both situations) but the latter paid better and the people doing it seemed more invested in technology as a personal interested and passion. The "developers" were more likely to chat about their favorite bands and bars. The "engineers" tended to chat about conventionally nerdier things.
Again, totally anecdotal. I'm sure this varies from workplace to workplace, not necessarily linked to job title. Also I'm comparing smaller agencies to larger tech companies, so I'm sure that plays a role too.
I've seen this same kind of variety from office to office within the same company. People tend to enjoy being around other people with similar interests. That's going to leak through in hiring, no...
I've seen this same kind of variety from office to office within the same company.
People tend to enjoy being around other people with similar interests. That's going to leak through in hiring, no matter how neutral you try to make the process.
I think part of what they're trying to say is that there's lots of diversity among developers. It's not that cultural stereotypes are never accurate, but they vary quite a lot, both between...
I think part of what they're trying to say is that there's lots of diversity among developers. It's not that cultural stereotypes are never accurate, but they vary quite a lot, both between organizations and within organizations. (And that's especially true internationally.)
Personally, I embraced the nerd stereotype. In college, I read books like Steven Levy's Hackers and Usenet forums, finding things like the Jargon File. This was an appealing culture I wanted to join.
But it was mostly in my head. I didn't meet a lot of other people who were into it in the same way, either in college or at work. After a while I realized that some of these stereotypes didn't fit me either, even though I was pretty knowledgable about them.
Years later, there was a "tech bro" stereotype and I was dismayed to see people making assumptions about programmers based on it.
Nowadays I see these things as very vague, abstract assumptions that are only loosely related to the world. There's rarely much point in talking about vague groups of people.
It's just the same old bullying of nerds, but with a new stereotype that's palatable to the times. A bunch of nerd culture got assimilated into the mainstream, and more people will jump on someone...
Years later, there was a "tech bro" stereotype and I was dismayed to see people making assumptions about programmers based on it.
It's just the same old bullying of nerds, but with a new stereotype that's palatable to the times. A bunch of nerd culture got assimilated into the mainstream, and more people will jump on someone if they step too close to things associated with the autism spectrum, so people who wanted an acceptable target to bully contrived a new stereotype.
See also, calling people "weebs," but with an added stench of racism/nationalism. As if there should be anything remarkable at all about being interested in the culture or media exports of other countries...
An alternate perspective: the "tech bro" stereotype is explicitly prejudiced against programmers/people in tech who aren't nerds, at least not in the classical sense. A stereotypical tech bro is...
It's just the same old bullying of nerds, but with a new stereotype that's palatable to the times.
An alternate perspective: the "tech bro" stereotype is explicitly prejudiced against programmers/people in tech who aren't nerds, at least not in the classical sense. A stereotypical tech bro is extroverted, energetic, and affluent, and has an inflated sense of self-importance. They're more likely to be into (for lack of a better word) "normal" activities like hiking and partying than stereotypical nerds, too.
Idk the definition of tech bro keeps changing. When I was in college it was the VC-types, the “idea people”. Hence the “bro” part. Recently it’s been used more often with any young men in tech,...
Idk the definition of tech bro keeps changing. When I was in college it was the VC-types, the “idea people”. Hence the “bro” part. Recently it’s been used more often with any young men in tech, including the nerdy ones that wear the (usually hideous) company swag hoodies and spend all their time playing video games.
Well yeah, not every programmer is a hobbyist, that much I agree with. I don't think that's a bad thing. I guess I can understand how it can be annoying that some aren't as invested as you when it...
Well yeah, not every programmer is a hobbyist, that much I agree with. I don't think that's a bad thing. I guess I can understand how it can be annoying that some aren't as invested as you when it comes to your professional work, but this is kind of a weird way to complain about it.
Is it actually affecting the author's work to a measurable degree? Then it sounds like a team dynamic issue, and you should probably say something like "hey I need the team to stop throwing bugs over the fence at me without actually investigating first". Does the author have a say in hiring decisions? Can you not filter out these candidates during the hiring process? Is the author a manager? Tell them you need them to step up.
Other than that, 9-to-5 programmers are in the workforce because they can be productive, mostly in companies who also think they can be productive. I don't see why they'd need to change if their team doesn't need them to.
Outside of a professional context, I don't think this is a good take. Programmers shouldn't be required to set up dotfiles or have a Neovim config or whatever (and I do both of those things). Would they be better programmers if they did more deep dives into more topics? I dunno, maybe, depends what they want. But if they don't want that, then what's it to you?
I have never much cared about picking one tool vs another because in the kind of work I do its really the problem I am trying to solve thats more interesting to me than the specifics of how I...
I have never much cared about picking one tool vs another because in the kind of work I do its really the problem I am trying to solve thats more interesting to me than the specifics of how I implement it. If someone tells me to use VHDL vs verilog vs HLS, it really doesnt matter because the underlying functionality is the thing Im spending a bunch of time trying to work through.
On the other hand sometimes someone up the ladder will decide that some new methodology or tool or whatever is really useful and will decide that the whole team ought to be using that, and then I have to come up the learning curve of learning this new thing. And it doesnt particularly help me because im not familiar enough with the thing to reap the full productivity benefits. Then we will use it until the end of that particular project before I get put on some new project with some new person that wants to do some new workflow change. I dont get enough tike to ever fully acclimatize to any particular thing.
So in general when I get the freedom to choose my own style I tend to just try and use what I already work well with rather than experimenting with a bunch of new stuff.
Not sure where I land on this spectrum. I’m on the cusp of having been working as a dev for a decade and having engaged with programming in a hobbyist capacity another decade preceding that, which...
Not sure where I land on this spectrum.
I’m on the cusp of having been working as a dev for a decade and having engaged with programming in a hobbyist capacity another decade preceding that, which is where I learned enough to break into the industry. I have no formal credentials. Clearly my interest in the practice as a whole, including the software, equipment, and other associated minutiae is reasonably strong otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am today.
With that said, my preferred setup tends towards semi-default, mainly to enable me to get a Mac from first boot to usability with as little as 30m-1h setup time without a dotfile repo or setup script or anything like that. There are bits and pieces that I’m opinionated about, but ultimately I want to get things done. Would I prefer to be using one of my custom built keyboards in a dual-screen setup with everything dialed in? Sure, but nothing but a lightly customized MBP and reasonable desk will work in a pinch.
This applies for personal projects, too. I’m not averse to trying new tools when it makes sense, but if getting it all set up is too drawn out I’m very likely to pull the escape hatch and revert to known good configs so I can get to work on the project itself. As much as I want to learn new things, if I can’t start making real progress on the project in mind in a reasonable amount of time alongside learning I can feel frustration begin to well up.
I suppose my attitude can be summed up as “curiosity with a purpose”. If a tool or technique quickly proves to be a boon to the goal of creating something, learning comes easy, but otherwise it can be somewhat patience-testing.
One interesting addition that I'll leave here, is that what I see lately is a clearer separation towards the extremes: either someone is not nerdy and doesn't care at all, or someone is hyper...
One interesting addition that I'll leave here, is that what I see lately is a clearer separation towards the extremes: either someone is not nerdy and doesn't care at all, or someone is hyper nerdy and goes into material that is way too technical for me.
When playing a video game meant learning to use the command line, kids learned it. The barrier to entry into general tech is so much lower than it used to be. Learning an IDE these days doesn't...
When playing a video game meant learning to use the command line, kids learned it.
The barrier to entry into general tech is so much lower than it used to be. Learning an IDE these days doesn't have to mean learning more or key combinations - you can now program without learning any of these and relying heavily on your mouse.
All of this makes tech far more agreeable to far more people than it used to be. Low income kids often get some programming in school. Girls are now targeted instead of discouraged from learning.
As other job categories dwindle because of AI and robots, there will be more need for folks to maintain the system one way or another until we hit the next singularity. Non tech people can see this as well as we can - they know jobs are going away.
The whole rockstar/lone wolf thing fell out of favor a long time ago for companies who realized it created bottlenecks and often unmaintainable code. Those tropes tend to come with the personality type mentioned in the article.
I just read it real quick and... I don't see the connection between the observations to the call to action. It kinda feels a bit like a "not like other girls" type of mentality. (which I'm aware is a bit sexist and a way for people to put down women, but I'm not sure how else to describe this mentality)
The question I have, purely off of just reading this blog post, is why do I need to tweak and care about something like this? I don't really see any supporting points to it other than, "you can be a nerd like me"! How would that benefit all of us, besides me spending way more time than I need to in Android Studio when my job is to just write code to fix this bug? I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that I could learn more to climb the ladder, but I also have other hobbies that I care about more.
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Edit, after rereading too:
Kinda feels super gatekeep-y to call people monkeys for not being as invested in something.
Yeah, I found the article kind of uncomfortable as well.
I'm one of the people who came to programming first as a hobby, then as a job, so I suspect I count as a nerd for the purposes of this article. And in fairness, the sort of person who enjoys programming when they come home from work is always going to approach the job differently from someone who stops when they clock off at 5pm.
But I'm also very sceptical of people who praise this sort of "nerdiness" as a virtue. Very often, the things that get celebrated are just shibboleths designed to create an in-group and an out-group. Learning Vim will not make you a better programmer. Spending money on a mechanical keyboard with a customised layout might make you type marginally faster, but it's mainly just a fancy desk toy. (I say this as someone with a split board as my daily driver.) Choosing the right colour scheme for your IDE, desktop, RGBs, and everything else may bring you a lot of joy, but it has nothing to do with programming.
That's not to say you shouldn't enjoy that sort of stuff, but it has no impact on your ability as programmer. It is to programming as sleeving all your cards is to Magic: The Gathering, or buying fancy needles is to knitting. It is a valid way to enjoy yourself, but it makes no sense to judge other people based on whether they do these things.
There is some stuff in this article that I'd agree with. The best developers I know will spend the extra time to understand the problems they're dealing with - spending longer trying to figure out why a bug happened in the first places rather than just trying to fix it, or reading the documentation in detail to understand the architecture of a given library of framework. (Ideally all in work hours.) I think that's what the author is trying to say at the end with the call to action. But that's not being nerdy, that's being conscientious.
I think the author is noticing a real effect that people who program as a hobby are also more passionate about their work. But they're mistaking the symptoms and causes of that effect.
Very well said. It’s conflating the amount of obsession one has with the quality of work and that is rarely if ever a direct correlation. One of the best developers I ever met used an Apple Magic Keyboard and Sublime Text with almost no extensions installed.
If you're selecting for the best skills, then your observation about a lack of correlation with an obsession over tooling is accurate. If you're selecting against average (read: mediocre) skillsets, then it makes some sense.
Stereotypically, 4 buckets of tool obsession in decreasing average skill:
In my experience, the ones that obsess the most with their tools are the ones that do the least/worst actual work. It’s one thing to obsess over a build script or some part of the workflow that you’re using repeatedly, it’s wholly another to obsess over a personal preference. Your example of tiling WM’s and blinged-out keyboards doesn’t say anything about them caring about what they’re doing. So what exactly do we “know that they care” [about?]?
Based on what I see online and in real life, tool obsession doesn’t select against mediocre skill sets any more than it selects for the best skills because obsession over tools doesn’t actually relate to skill at all.
To offer an analogy, this is similar, to me, to people who are obsessed with musical gear that don’t ever play. The quality/obsession over the instrument/equipment doesn’t correlate to their skill at all.
Yeah… this is very gatekeeper-ish to me too. As someone that used to spend days setting up Linux installs with shell scripts, customize the crap out of my IDE, and install new stuff all the time just to test it out, I’m more interested today in getting shit done and yet I would still consider myself a nerd or a geek or whatever. The author is just wasting time to fulfill some anxiety or endless pursuit of perfection and it seems like they need to put down others to justify themselves and their behaviors.
It’s very reminiscent of the Linux/Android users on Lenny who say crap like “You’re not a nerd if you use an iPhone” because, unlike you, they have wasted countless hours to make sure that they can customize what font shows up below the icons on their Home Screen. It’s like “good for you” but I’d rather spend my time elsewhere and don’t need the judgement for something that doesn’t matter as much to me.
Best I can tell they're calling everyone monkeys. Just some of us type on keyboards and others handle heavy machinery.
Apologies if the wording is triggering for you, but gatekeep-y? Only if said programmers are gatekeeping themselves, as nobody (myself included) is preventing or encouraging them to abstain from learning.
In fact, I'm basing this on two years of experience with mostly the same people (and a bunch of new ones) during which I've literally had people tell me that " I don't want to learn anything. If I have a problem, I just come to you, and you fix it" about small issues that should be entirely within their domain.
These kind of programmers are happy just punching the clock and pushing widgets. Nothing wrong with this, but this just is.
Not everyone is like this, but a big portion of them are.
Not everyone that drives a car should strive to be a mechanical engineer, but if everyone showed a little bit of interest about cars, they would benefit directly (know what they like or dislike, lesser chances of being swindled at car shops, being able to change a tire and do some basic maintenance), and we all would benefit indirectly (manufacturers would take what people like into consideration more etc.).
One thing I notice is that this perception is largely a holdover from an earlier era, before the professionalization of development role and the calcification of methodologies like agile. Consider this quote from the 90s:
While the quote is anecdata only, it matches both my memory of how people perceived programmers computer geeks as well as my experience from that time. At that time, being "into computers" was a much broader brush, and much more of an identity. If it was also a job, that was incidental.
These days, most of the developers I know do it as a day job just like any other and are much closer to baseline in terms of norms and interests (this is largely the point of the article, I think). But it was not always so.
It really feels like the author wrote this after trying to talk to a co-worker about some niche technology, and was surprised to find that not every programmer is interested in every facet of technology related to programming.
I used to be a zOS mainframe systems programmer, but I wouldn't expect people to necessarily want to learn about the shenanigans or tooling in that environment just because they are a programmer. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
The call to action reads like "my reductionist assumptions about programmers wasn't true, so please try to make them more true." Either that or it's another developers who don't go all in on tech all the time should.
I say this as someone whose life was consumed with technology for 20 years, culminating as director of engineering for a large organization with its own fiber wan, etc. But it's ok to have a life beyond what you do for a living, even if you like what you do.
So my call to action for the author is to accept that it is ok for someone to write code for a living, and be invested in solving problems with the technology, not invested in the technology itself.
Anecdotally, I began my tech career as various flavors of “developer” and my coworkers at those jobs were writers, musicians, and artists outside of work. Eventually I progressed to “software engineer” roles and I would describe my colleagues in those positions as “nerds.” It wasn’t until I entered that world that mechanical keyboards, vim keybindings, and shell customization were water cooler topics.
is it rare for someone to be a writer/musician and also a terminal poweruser?
In my experience, terminal powerusers are disproportionately likely to be musicians compared to the general population. However, a random musician is slightly less likely to know what a CLI terminal is than a person chosen at random from the whole population.
Hmm, I wonder what kind of demographic my Linux-themed rock album will pull
Math rock, prog rock, butt rock, or hair metal?
acoustic rock, though I could be swayed towards a really over-the-top hair metal release. It honestly still hasn't taken proper form yet. Mostly just me and my guitar, singing about the importance of data ownership
I wouldn’t expect them to be positively correlated, maybe even negatively correlated, and neither of those are common, so the intersection would seem to be quite rare.
Oh I dunno about rarity, I'm just speaking to the culture I observed in an office of developers vs. one of software engineers. It's ultimately just a title (I was doing roughly the same sort of work in both situations) but the latter paid better and the people doing it seemed more invested in technology as a personal interested and passion. The "developers" were more likely to chat about their favorite bands and bars. The "engineers" tended to chat about conventionally nerdier things.
Again, totally anecdotal. I'm sure this varies from workplace to workplace, not necessarily linked to job title. Also I'm comparing smaller agencies to larger tech companies, so I'm sure that plays a role too.
I've seen this same kind of variety from office to office within the same company.
People tend to enjoy being around other people with similar interests. That's going to leak through in hiring, no matter how neutral you try to make the process.
I think part of what they're trying to say is that there's lots of diversity among developers. It's not that cultural stereotypes are never accurate, but they vary quite a lot, both between organizations and within organizations. (And that's especially true internationally.)
Personally, I embraced the nerd stereotype. In college, I read books like Steven Levy's Hackers and Usenet forums, finding things like the Jargon File. This was an appealing culture I wanted to join.
But it was mostly in my head. I didn't meet a lot of other people who were into it in the same way, either in college or at work. After a while I realized that some of these stereotypes didn't fit me either, even though I was pretty knowledgable about them.
Years later, there was a "tech bro" stereotype and I was dismayed to see people making assumptions about programmers based on it.
Nowadays I see these things as very vague, abstract assumptions that are only loosely related to the world. There's rarely much point in talking about vague groups of people.
It's just the same old bullying of nerds, but with a new stereotype that's palatable to the times. A bunch of nerd culture got assimilated into the mainstream, and more people will jump on someone if they step too close to things associated with the autism spectrum, so people who wanted an acceptable target to bully contrived a new stereotype.
See also, calling people "weebs," but with an added stench of racism/nationalism. As if there should be anything remarkable at all about being interested in the culture or media exports of other countries...
An alternate perspective: the "tech bro" stereotype is explicitly prejudiced against programmers/people in tech who aren't nerds, at least not in the classical sense. A stereotypical tech bro is extroverted, energetic, and affluent, and has an inflated sense of self-importance. They're more likely to be into (for lack of a better word) "normal" activities like hiking and partying than stereotypical nerds, too.
My understanding is they are pro patriarchy, a bit misogynistic, and just generally inconsiderate.
Idk the definition of tech bro keeps changing. When I was in college it was the VC-types, the “idea people”. Hence the “bro” part. Recently it’s been used more often with any young men in tech, including the nerdy ones that wear the (usually hideous) company swag hoodies and spend all their time playing video games.
Well yeah, not every programmer is a hobbyist, that much I agree with. I don't think that's a bad thing. I guess I can understand how it can be annoying that some aren't as invested as you when it comes to your professional work, but this is kind of a weird way to complain about it.
Is it actually affecting the author's work to a measurable degree? Then it sounds like a team dynamic issue, and you should probably say something like "hey I need the team to stop throwing bugs over the fence at me without actually investigating first". Does the author have a say in hiring decisions? Can you not filter out these candidates during the hiring process? Is the author a manager? Tell them you need them to step up.
Other than that, 9-to-5 programmers are in the workforce because they can be productive, mostly in companies who also think they can be productive. I don't see why they'd need to change if their team doesn't need them to.
Outside of a professional context, I don't think this is a good take. Programmers shouldn't be required to set up dotfiles or have a Neovim config or whatever (and I do both of those things). Would they be better programmers if they did more deep dives into more topics? I dunno, maybe, depends what they want. But if they don't want that, then what's it to you?
I have never much cared about picking one tool vs another because in the kind of work I do its really the problem I am trying to solve thats more interesting to me than the specifics of how I implement it. If someone tells me to use VHDL vs verilog vs HLS, it really doesnt matter because the underlying functionality is the thing Im spending a bunch of time trying to work through.
On the other hand sometimes someone up the ladder will decide that some new methodology or tool or whatever is really useful and will decide that the whole team ought to be using that, and then I have to come up the learning curve of learning this new thing. And it doesnt particularly help me because im not familiar enough with the thing to reap the full productivity benefits. Then we will use it until the end of that particular project before I get put on some new project with some new person that wants to do some new workflow change. I dont get enough tike to ever fully acclimatize to any particular thing.
So in general when I get the freedom to choose my own style I tend to just try and use what I already work well with rather than experimenting with a bunch of new stuff.
Not sure where I land on this spectrum.
I’m on the cusp of having been working as a dev for a decade and having engaged with programming in a hobbyist capacity another decade preceding that, which is where I learned enough to break into the industry. I have no formal credentials. Clearly my interest in the practice as a whole, including the software, equipment, and other associated minutiae is reasonably strong otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am today.
With that said, my preferred setup tends towards semi-default, mainly to enable me to get a Mac from first boot to usability with as little as 30m-1h setup time without a dotfile repo or setup script or anything like that. There are bits and pieces that I’m opinionated about, but ultimately I want to get things done. Would I prefer to be using one of my custom built keyboards in a dual-screen setup with everything dialed in? Sure, but nothing but a lightly customized MBP and reasonable desk will work in a pinch.
This applies for personal projects, too. I’m not averse to trying new tools when it makes sense, but if getting it all set up is too drawn out I’m very likely to pull the escape hatch and revert to known good configs so I can get to work on the project itself. As much as I want to learn new things, if I can’t start making real progress on the project in mind in a reasonable amount of time alongside learning I can feel frustration begin to well up.
I suppose my attitude can be summed up as “curiosity with a purpose”. If a tool or technique quickly proves to be a boon to the goal of creating something, learning comes easy, but otherwise it can be somewhat patience-testing.
One interesting addition that I'll leave here, is that what I see lately is a clearer separation towards the extremes: either someone is not nerdy and doesn't care at all, or someone is hyper nerdy and goes into material that is way too technical for me.
When playing a video game meant learning to use the command line, kids learned it.
The barrier to entry into general tech is so much lower than it used to be. Learning an IDE these days doesn't have to mean learning more or key combinations - you can now program without learning any of these and relying heavily on your mouse.
All of this makes tech far more agreeable to far more people than it used to be. Low income kids often get some programming in school. Girls are now targeted instead of discouraged from learning.
As other job categories dwindle because of AI and robots, there will be more need for folks to maintain the system one way or another until we hit the next singularity. Non tech people can see this as well as we can - they know jobs are going away.
The whole rockstar/lone wolf thing fell out of favor a long time ago for companies who realized it created bottlenecks and often unmaintainable code. Those tropes tend to come with the personality type mentioned in the article.