11 ms·

Writer of "Of Geeks and Girls" responds to some HN comments

32 points by araneae 17y ago

mcantor 17y ago
Apparently one of the comments that the author took umbrage to: "Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what 'normal' people do." When do "real" developers drink their beer?!
- notauser 17y ago
  When I worked in software Engineering (big E, giant processes) the developers left at 4:30pm every day except Fridays, when they left at 12:30. (Thanks to flex-time and a 7:30 start.) That environment was remarkably un-geeky. A median engineer was about 45, university qualified, with a house, husband or wife and kids. They had very little interest in programming but a quiet pride in Engineering. If you want to write software in that kind of environment you don't even need to mix with the comp sci geeks at university - you can get a masters in maths, physics or any engineering field instead.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Oddly enough or not, It seems that this environment has had a mix of women whereas the "three-guys-and-a-dog-startup" generally hasn't. Make of it what you will.
    - notauser 17y ago
      But this isn't limited to software start ups, and I have a pretty big sample set to look at. The angel firm I'm advising is involved in or funding about 20 ventures, of which only two are software related. Only one of those has a woman involved in any capacity. Overall there are an insignificant number of people of either sex who are willing to take on the very real risk of bankruptcy however - to me the male/female split seems much less remarkable than the 99.9%-0.1% split with the general population.
- weaksauce 17y ago
  While coding apparently: http://www.xkcd.org/323/ http://www.xkcd.org/323/
- djcapelis 17y ago
  Before, during and after work. Sometimes especially during.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Perhaps this is just me being youthful and naive, but I'm astonished here at how many people drink and get stoned before every class. I don't think I'd have ever fully believed that idea, of people just vastly abusing substances and still getting their work done, had I not met people who took shots and smoked a blunt in between every class.
pyre 17y ago
> the study singles out Star Trek memorabilia, comic books and energy drinks as examples Really? Women are repelled by energy drinks? I've known plenty of women that are/where addicted to energy drinks... Or is it just that drinks like Bawls isn't as 'mainstream' as something like Red Bull or Mountain Dew's AMP drinks. If that's the case, then it's women that are being too discriminating. "He's drinking something that isn't a name brand! I totally wouldn't fit in here!"
- substack 17y ago
  As a male, computer science major, and avid coffee drinker, I too am repelled by energy drinks. That aside, in my experience I see two mostly-exclusive classes of "geek": people who are much more fascinated with producing technology and people who are much more interested in consuming it. Departments should be targeting producers irrespective of gender issues because they make better computer scientists. Increased diversity is a bonus.
  - javert 17y ago
    The notion of "people who are much more fascinated with producing technology" vs. "people who are much more interested in consuming it" really strikes a chord with me. I'm in grad school for CS and I've never really been a "geek" except that I've always loved programming and the like. I've always felt "different" from what is normally called a "geek". This is a start at explaining it.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Bingo! The evaporation of the dot-com boom got a lot of status/wealth seeking drones out of CS departments, but left a lot of the geek-culture asshats that come in thinking that their meager IT helpdesk skills have something to do with CS. It's the worst with video games: there's the standard "I like playing games, so obviously I'm a CS genius" type that my college friends called 'gamer scum'. At least with the way the big-budget games industry is going a lot of these people are now headed into Art Production where they fit in.
    - 17y ago
trominos 17y ago
"'Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,' says one commenter. Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid." It's different because, as far as I know, it's not actually true that black people are lazy or that Latinos are stupid (on average). Whereas that comment as quoted is technically (more-or-less) correct.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Former investment banker here. I got the feeling that my ex-coworkers were at the center of the social mainstream. But when I was at the office late on a Sunday night, I could see that they were hard workers with a focus on getting things done when it mattered. The biggest difference between a banker and a computer geek is that the banker drinks more and has a better looking girlfriend. Both of them work hard when the success of a project depends on it.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Past a certain point it becomes "live and let live". I'm sure the things you like are things that other banker might not be able to stand; similarly, if you tried walking in his shoes you'd find how uncomfortable you found them. So from just what you wrote it sounds like you and the other guy found an equilibrium, where you were both happy with what you had.
  - trominos 17y ago
    Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also outside the "social mainstream" of workers. EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently work long hours you definitionally put yourself outside of the "social mainstream," because I was thinking of "social mainstream" as "the set of people whose non-work lives are fairly similar to the median". Whereas I think you're using a definition closer to "people who aren't 'weird'/'losers'". I don't think that's what the original commenter meant, but it's possible. And if that's what he meant, I think you could be right. [/EDIT] For the record, I don't (necessarily) agree that geeky people are more likely to do good computer work than non-geeky people. I just think that it's a valid point of discussion, and that in particular comparing the quoted comment to racism instead of addressing it is both incorrect and incredibly obnoxious.
mattmanser 17y ago
> The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it. I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore. No thanks. I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines and talking makeup too?
- unalone 17y ago
  Dude, have you talked to hairdressers? I have. When I was younger I'd be surprised at how much they were comfortable talking about. We'd talk about cinema and literature and politics and they'd have an opinion about everything. It struck me how these people, who I'd once thought were emptyheaded, were actually smart, well-balanced people who just happened to love their occupation. Then it made me realize that perhaps I was the emptyheaded one for believing in the idea of the "average joe". Now I am a little bit older — not much older, mind you — and I've learned how stupid it is to believe that anybody could be at all considered average. In various positions I've talked to a slew of people I'd once have dismissed for their commonality. I don't think I've ever met somebody who I'd call stupid. A lot of them you'd think are stupid until you talk to them and realize they've just got a few stupid beliefs ingrained in them and beyond that are as bright as anybody. The more people you meet, the more you realize how stupid it is to sequester yourself away in an ivory tower or a dank basement, to assume that you're somehow an elite being who other people simply cannot understand. Hell, that's why I became a writer. I learned that to understand others, I had to learn how others understood me.
  - gloob 17y ago
    I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I sequester myself away in a dark basement because I enjoy it, not out of some idiot notion that I'm smarter than other people. It's not that other people are stupider than me; it's that other people aren't me. I am under the obligation to act the way they act in the same way that I am under the obligation to have the same favourite colour as them. That is to say, I am under no such obligation. I happen to enjoy different things than they do; is it any surprise that I act differently, then? Otherwise, I largely agree with you, I think.
anonjon 17y ago
There is more than one potential conclusion to draw from this. The conclusion drawn here seems to be that geeks somehow exclude non-geeks from certain fields. Another conclusion would be that non-geeks self-select themselves out of certain fields. Another conclusion would be that being a geek is still looked down upon in our society, and there is an unconscious effort to maintain status by not becoming a geek. There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't shower. Another conclusion would be that the traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky fields. Geeks tend to be at very least obsessive about things. It follows that they might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...). Also, I love the pub.
- unalone 17y ago
  Can we try a thought experiment? Take the statements you just made and look for generalizations. "Nongeeks self-select themselves out of certain fields." "There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't shower." "[T]he traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky fields." "It follows that they might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...)." From reading these comments and knowing nothing about you, the attitude that I get from these comments is twofold: You think that being a geek is a good thing (or that geeks are inherently superior), and that there is somewhat of a persecution of geeks going on. The message I read here (which might not at all be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks are smarter." Now, regardless of whether or not that's the case, or even whether or not you believe that, that's the message that's coming out. It's somewhat off-putting and exclusive. In your writing, you yourself are excluding so-called non-geeks; the fact that you're willing to distinguish geeks as a distinct and special category says something in and of itself. That all agrees with the author's conclusion. I agree with the author's conclusion myself, not because I'm in the field or have done research about it but because it makes sense when you reason it out. The community that's formed around this field has certain peculiarities. The emphasis on comic books and graphic novels and Star Trek and energy drinks that's mentioned, for instance. These are each odd things that lack a distinguishing trait. It's not like the art in comic books is better than art in other media forms, or that the story is better. It's not like Star Trek was a geekier show than others; certainly it's not highbrow entertainment. And as far as drugs of choice go, energy drinks are such a specific sort of caffeinated beverage, designed to force a drug into the body rather than following a so-called natural food flow. If we were going to go from the assumption that the comp sci field had an even distribution of interests, we'd be hard pressed to explain those certain prominences. Why is there no vodka alongside the Red Bull, no cigarettes or cigars? Why aren't other art forms represented as much as comic books? What's the group fascination with Star Trek? When they're all presented together, they're no longer idiosyncrasies. They have certain traits in common that speak about the people who imbibe them. They're all things obtainable from younger ages, they all have a certain visceral immediacy to them, they're all to some degree static and unchanging. People who drink energy drinks tend to stick with a single favorite; they'll spend years with one drink, unchanging. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that there's a certain comfort in the repetition, in knowing what you're going to get every time. Furthermore, people with these specific interests tend to have other characteristics. Am I right in thinking you value what people think more than you do what they look like? Or even that you think people who judge others based on looks are acting in a shallow fashion? Studies suggest you like either classic or alternative rock or electronica. Perhaps I could place a bet on your liking Monty Python, or enjoying Firefly? (This isn't you, anonjon, this is the collective "you" of the geeks in the survey. I'm sure not all of this applies to you.) Along with that, so-called "geeks" favor muted colors and t-shirts. They have particular commonalities in fashion. And they certainly have similar personality traits, which include introversion, arrogance, and short tempers. Not every person has all these traits, but they're frequent enough that we can't just say they're common traits in all human beings. They're certainly specific to this social clique. The backlash against nerds is almost entirely one formed from individual opinions forming. Perhaps it's unfair that people have decided comp sci majors in black t-shirts who like Star Trek are less likely to be fun or friendly than a random person from another sampling of society, but that's how it's working, and that's the cause for a lot of "geek" bias. It also makes sense. When you spend your time reading anime rather than following sports, certain casual conversations become very difficult for both parties. I've got former friends who're very stereotypical geeks, and I've forced them into social gatherings, and when I listen to the conversations they get into it's cringe-worthy. Either they don't realize how awkward they are, or they do it deliberately in order to justify their social alienation. So that's what the study is saying. It says, girls who have been shown these standard set-ups see enough cues to make them think perhaps they'd be better off somewhere else. That's entirely logical, isn't it? And the solution would be for our culture to expand and embrace more things, to reflect "normal" society in its diversity and lack of a hive mind. Until then, it will continue to be treated like what it's perceived to be: A bright, socially retarded group that's content with being largely outsiders.
ax0n 17y ago
I found my wife on a local dial-up Bulletin Board System and she's a fully certified geek. She does WOW raids two nights per week, she digs Fringe, sci-fi and fantasy fiction. She dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7, and when I was stranded without connectivity and one of my clients munged their IPTables rules, she only needed to ask me the hostname, my username, my password, and if sudo was installed in order to flush the rules. I think maybe she's the one being discriminating, but she really doesn't want to do geek work for a living. She'd be okay doing data entry (not that it's geeky but it's the geekiest job she's had). She'd much rather do more traditional jobs such as taking care of animals or dispatching emergency responders.
- cschep 17y ago
  your wife sounds rad.
  - ax0n 17y ago
    Thanks, she is!
hugh_ 17y ago
"If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it." Plenty of fields have cultural barriers to entry. Frinstance, I wouldn't want to be a car mechanic, cuz all they talk about is sport. I wouldn't want to be a secretary, cuz all they talk about is American Idol. And I wouldn't want to be a Wall St trader cuz all they talk about is... I dunno, golf and hookers. Of course I'm exaggerating, but the point remains that these are three fields where I'd be turned off by the culture even if I were interested in the actual work.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Actually, My impression is that different fields of study are becoming more and more "culturalized". Aside from the example above, there's obviously a whole cultural barrier for any art related activity.
- jdminhbg 17y ago
  That was probably the most egregious line in the article, with the exception maybe of comparing work schedules with racism. To me, the challenge is finding a field without some sort of cultural barrier to entry.
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians, secretaries, administrators, managers, electricians, and so on as I do with "computer geeks". While I tend to find that people from most of those other sectors enjoy talking about a wide variety of subjects, "computer geeks" (those working in the field as technicians or programmers especially) are far more likely to conversationally hover around technical minutiae or other stereotypically geek interests, like sci-fi. Case in point: I recently attended a professionally-attired holiday dinner party with a corporate client, where most of the employees are scientists or engineers, and many of them are PhD'd in one subject or another. Conversation wandered from ice climbing to traveling to diesel engines to raising kids, and so on. Anything "tech" was strictly verboten. On the other hand, whenever I meet my geekier climbing buddies, it's usually only a matter of minutes before the conversation is about their latest gadget, toy, or other interesting thing in the field.
defen 17y ago
> If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it. I would consider the non-STEM academic fields to be prime examples of ones with massive cultural barriers to entry. However, this does not fit into the standard oppression script, so it tends to be systematically ignored.
- unalone 17y ago
  I'm curious: What are their cultural barriers? I'm a Communications major, so I'm non-STEM, and I'd like to know what you think the social barriers are. Sports? Fashion?
  - defen 17y ago
    I'm talking about the extreme left-wing bias in the academy - if you want to be a professor at an accredited university in the U.S., it's very difficult to do so if you have anything resembling a conservative slant to your beliefs. To be fair I also should have included professional schools such as law, medicine, business, etc with STEM. It's also not impossible for a right-wing person of exceptional ability to do well outside those fields - Robert George is a famous example. On the whole, though, professors in the U.S. tend to be on the far left of the political spectrum.
    - unalone 17y ago
      Hold on, now. Are we talking "far left" for American standards, or far left for the real world? Because I've come to realize that in America, supporting things like health care reform and gay marriage get me tagged as left-wing, when in reality I suppose I'm closer to the right than I am to the left. The right wing in America is batshit insane. I'm perfectly delighted to have them stay away from education. But regarding an actual conservative viewpoint, I find my professors tend to be pretty evenly mixed. I've got two or three this semester who're all for the free market and capitalism, and I've got two or three who'd prefer more government control over things. I don't think people from either side think gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, or that women shouldn't be permitted to abort, but again, I don't see that as left-wing. That's just common sense. Perhaps there's some left wing bias, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it extreme. Furthermore, you can be a right-wing student in any of those fields and face no enormous barrier whatsoever, and that's what this is a discussion of. So I'd still argue that the computer science division has a more extreme cultural gap. (Further: Have you tried being a right-wing computer science major? I was talking to a guy at UMaryland and told him I was taking an advertising class and he accused me of "raping and pillaging" America. That's way lefter than you'd find in any other field, except maybe English, and English majors are mild-mannered.)
Tichy 17y ago
I really don't get it - for signing up for a computer science degree, you first have to pass through a geek room? Or a picture of Spock will be staring down on you from the wall while you make the check mark for CS? Or what is the problem? I don't think many universities are decorated like that, so I don't see the barrier. One thing to complain about: maths and CS buildings are typically the most ugly ones of a university (the ones I have seen anyway). Just like in later jobs, where IT is often put into the basement... It's as if architects figure that geeks don't care about their environment anyway, so they can just be caged into concrete monstrosities. However, men like that just as little as women.
- blasdel 17y ago
  We had a stand-up cardboard Jean-Luc Picard
- aidenn0 17y ago
  You missed the point of the study. The things they put in the geek room are things that college students associated with CS students. Therefore, thinking about the "stereotypical geek" is virtually guaranteed when being put in the geek room. The study doesn't say "are geeks really like this or not" it is more about what an outsiders perception of geeks is.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    But then I am not sure what useful conclusion to draw from that research. Is it even useful research? Without the study I could also have told you that few women like Star Wars figurines. That is why they are associated with geeks... Should there now be an ad campaign displaying normal looking geeks?
- Psyonic 17y ago
  You've clearly never been to the philosophy building. If they're lucky, it's in the unfinished attic of the English building.
btilly 17y ago
I can't believe the negative comments about this article. It seems to me to make a rather obvious point fairly well. People tend to migrate towards comfortable social environments, and creating a mess associated with a particular stereotype will tend to attract people who fit that stereotype, and repel people who don't. Computer science stereotypes revolve around geek culture. That culture is very male dominated, so will repel women a lot more strongly than it repels men. So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments. This seems to me to be obviously correct. But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek? Do you look around you and get upset at the thought that someone might want you to clean up? What is it? Let me go farther. I've noticed that many geeks don't want non-geeks around because they think non-geeks are less intelligent and would water down programming. Well certainly there are a lot of dumb people out there. But I've known lots of dumb geeks and smart non-geeks. In fact I'd guess that that geeks are smarter on average than non-geeks, but geeks make up only a small fraction of the really smart people out there. And furthermore I find the average smart non-geek more interesting than the average geek. So from my perspective broadening the base of people in CS would be a good thing.
- hugh_ 17y ago
  Actually I think the focus on gender is misleading. Excessively geeky environments repel non-geeks, whether male or female. The fact that this particularly results in repulsion of women is just due to geekiness being rarer among women. Those who say "who cares if non-geeks are repelled" seem to be assuming geekiness and programming ability are strongly correlated, but in my experience they seem to be pretty orthogonal, at least for the type of geekiness which leads to putting up Star Trek posters.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments... But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek? The implicit "we should cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS" is where the article gets some blowback. The original article said that women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks. The "solution" is to make computing less geeky, rather than to make women more tolerant. Huh? If white people avoided basketball because they don't like black culture, we'd tell them (rightly) to suck it up. Yet somehow, the author of this article is comparing geeks to racists.
coffeemug 17y ago
From my highly anecdotal experience, I think the proportion of interesting to uninteresting people is equally low in any given profession. Most computer people focus on crappy sci-fi, most medical people focus on crappy drama, and most women tend to prefer crappy drama to crappy sci-fi. I love computers, mathematics, and technology. I think I'm pretty good at it. If I stumble on an interesting problem, I prefer to stay home and work on it than to go out. But I can't stand being around most computer people. They drive me nuts with their ridiculously limited interests and a moral pedestal glorying their severely limited subculture. In most other professions people are on average equally boring, but at least they're not on a high horse.
hugh_ 17y ago
The best way to be an interesting person is to have a broad range of interests -- that way you can find an interest in common with just about anyone you might talk to. The best way to be an extremely boring person is to have only one interest and obsess over it non-stop. I once worked next to a guy who only ever talked about rock climbing; no matter what you tried to talk to him about he'd find a way to bring the conversation back to his rock climbing hobby. To a fellow climber he might have been at least slightly interesting, but to me he was so memorably dull that here I am, five years later, using him as an example of dullness. If you put up a bust of Spock in your office, you're basically saying to the world "Hey world! You know that TV show which maybe you used to like a bit when you were a kid? I think that's one of the most interesting things in the world!" This is generally a pretty good indicator of a fairly narrow range of interests which will make you pretty boring to others. Anyone who really thinks that a long-defunct TV show is interesting enough to make it a significant part of their identity really needs to start developing a few new interests.

32 points by araneae 17y ago

Apparently one of the comments that the author took umbrage to: "Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what 'normal' people do." When do "real" developers drink their beer?!

notauser 17y ago
When I worked in software Engineering (big E, giant processes) the developers left at 4:30pm every day except Fridays, when they left at 12:30. (Thanks to flex-time and a 7:30 start.) That environment was remarkably un-geeky. A median engineer was about 45, university qualified, with a house, husband or wife and kids. They had very little interest in programming but a quiet pride in Engineering. If you want to write software in that kind of environment you don't even need to mix with the comp sci geeks at university - you can get a masters in maths, physics or any engineering field instead.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Oddly enough or not, It seems that this environment has had a mix of women whereas the "three-guys-and-a-dog-startup" generally hasn't. Make of it what you will.
  - notauser 17y ago
    But this isn't limited to software start ups, and I have a pretty big sample set to look at. The angel firm I'm advising is involved in or funding about 20 ventures, of which only two are software related. Only one of those has a woman involved in any capacity. Overall there are an insignificant number of people of either sex who are willing to take on the very real risk of bankruptcy however - to me the male/female split seems much less remarkable than the 99.9%-0.1% split with the general population.
weaksauce 17y ago
While coding apparently: http://www.xkcd.org/323/ http://www.xkcd.org/323/
djcapelis 17y ago
Before, during and after work. Sometimes especially during.
- unalone 17y ago
  Perhaps this is just me being youthful and naive, but I'm astonished here at how many people drink and get stoned before every class. I don't think I'd have ever fully believed that idea, of people just vastly abusing substances and still getting their work done, had I not met people who took shots and smoked a blunt in between every class.

pyre 17y ago

> the study singles out Star Trek memorabilia, comic books and energy drinks as examples Really? Women are repelled by energy drinks? I've known plenty of women that are/where addicted to energy drinks... Or is it just that drinks like Bawls isn't as 'mainstream' as something like Red Bull or Mountain Dew's AMP drinks. If that's the case, then it's women that are being too discriminating. "He's drinking something that isn't a name brand! I totally wouldn't fit in here!"

substack 17y ago
As a male, computer science major, and avid coffee drinker, I too am repelled by energy drinks. That aside, in my experience I see two mostly-exclusive classes of "geek": people who are much more fascinated with producing technology and people who are much more interested in consuming it. Departments should be targeting producers irrespective of gender issues because they make better computer scientists. Increased diversity is a bonus.
- javert 17y ago
  The notion of "people who are much more fascinated with producing technology" vs. "people who are much more interested in consuming it" really strikes a chord with me. I'm in grad school for CS and I've never really been a "geek" except that I've always loved programming and the like. I've always felt "different" from what is normally called a "geek". This is a start at explaining it.
- blasdel 17y ago
  Bingo! The evaporation of the dot-com boom got a lot of status/wealth seeking drones out of CS departments, but left a lot of the geek-culture asshats that come in thinking that their meager IT helpdesk skills have something to do with CS. It's the worst with video games: there's the standard "I like playing games, so obviously I'm a CS genius" type that my college friends called 'gamer scum'. At least with the way the big-budget games industry is going a lot of these people are now headed into Art Production where they fit in.
  - 17y ago

trominos 17y ago

"'Socially mainstream means leaving work at 5pm and going to the pub, that’s what “normal” people do,' says one commenter. Honestly, I fail to see how this sort of argument differs from asserting that black people are lazy or Latinos are stupid." It's different because, as far as I know, it's not actually true that black people are lazy or that Latinos are stupid (on average). Whereas that comment as quoted is technically (more-or-less) correct.

jacoblyles 17y ago
Former investment banker here. I got the feeling that my ex-coworkers were at the center of the social mainstream. But when I was at the office late on a Sunday night, I could see that they were hard workers with a focus on getting things done when it mattered. The biggest difference between a banker and a computer geek is that the banker drinks more and has a better looking girlfriend. Both of them work hard when the success of a project depends on it.
- unalone 17y ago
  Past a certain point it becomes "live and let live". I'm sure the things you like are things that other banker might not be able to stand; similarly, if you tried walking in his shoes you'd find how uncomfortable you found them. So from just what you wrote it sounds like you and the other guy found an equilibrium, where you were both happy with what you had.
- trominos 17y ago
  Based on the stereotypes I've heard, I'd say that investment bankers are also outside the "social mainstream" of workers. EDIT: Okay, I sort of see your point. My feeling is that if you consistently work long hours you definitionally put yourself outside of the "social mainstream," because I was thinking of "social mainstream" as "the set of people whose non-work lives are fairly similar to the median". Whereas I think you're using a definition closer to "people who aren't 'weird'/'losers'". I don't think that's what the original commenter meant, but it's possible. And if that's what he meant, I think you could be right. [/EDIT] For the record, I don't (necessarily) agree that geeky people are more likely to do good computer work than non-geeky people. I just think that it's a valid point of discussion, and that in particular comparing the quoted comment to racism instead of addressing it is both incorrect and incredibly obnoxious.

mattmanser 17y ago

> The entrance fee to a computer science career is membership in geek culture, and that’s way too restrictive. If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it. I find this almost bigoted and hateful. Like the author wants geeks to change their behaviour, to enforce some sort of thought police. For us all to become bland, souless replicas of average joe. So we've no place to fit in anymore. No thanks. I wonder if they'll ever do the same study of why there are so few male hairdressers or nurses. Or perhaps so few female plumbers. Same conclusions I imagine. And will the suggest forcing hairdressers to stop reading magazines and talking makeup too?

unalone 17y ago
Dude, have you talked to hairdressers? I have. When I was younger I'd be surprised at how much they were comfortable talking about. We'd talk about cinema and literature and politics and they'd have an opinion about everything. It struck me how these people, who I'd once thought were emptyheaded, were actually smart, well-balanced people who just happened to love their occupation. Then it made me realize that perhaps I was the emptyheaded one for believing in the idea of the "average joe". Now I am a little bit older — not much older, mind you — and I've learned how stupid it is to believe that anybody could be at all considered average. In various positions I've talked to a slew of people I'd once have dismissed for their commonality. I don't think I've ever met somebody who I'd call stupid. A lot of them you'd think are stupid until you talk to them and realize they've just got a few stupid beliefs ingrained in them and beyond that are as bright as anybody. The more people you meet, the more you realize how stupid it is to sequester yourself away in an ivory tower or a dank basement, to assume that you're somehow an elite being who other people simply cannot understand. Hell, that's why I became a writer. I learned that to understand others, I had to learn how others understood me.
- gloob 17y ago
  I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I sequester myself away in a dark basement because I enjoy it, not out of some idiot notion that I'm smarter than other people. It's not that other people are stupider than me; it's that other people aren't me. I am under the obligation to act the way they act in the same way that I am under the obligation to have the same favourite colour as them. That is to say, I am under no such obligation. I happen to enjoy different things than they do; is it any surprise that I act differently, then? Otherwise, I largely agree with you, I think.

anonjon 17y ago

There is more than one potential conclusion to draw from this. The conclusion drawn here seems to be that geeks somehow exclude non-geeks from certain fields. Another conclusion would be that non-geeks self-select themselves out of certain fields. Another conclusion would be that being a geek is still looked down upon in our society, and there is an unconscious effort to maintain status by not becoming a geek. There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't shower. Another conclusion would be that the traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky fields. Geeks tend to be at very least obsessive about things. It follows that they might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...). Also, I love the pub.

unalone 17y ago
Can we try a thought experiment? Take the statements you just made and look for generalizations. "Nongeeks self-select themselves out of certain fields." "There is a certain air of superiority (and ignorance) conveyed in saying that geeks don't shower." "[T]he traits exhibited by people who are interested in geeky things are related to the traits exhibited by people who want to go into geeky fields." "It follows that they might be better about doing things which require obsessive traits, like writing code. (Or maybe geeks are just better at everything...)." From reading these comments and knowing nothing about you, the attitude that I get from these comments is twofold: You think that being a geek is a good thing (or that geeks are inherently superior), and that there is somewhat of a persecution of geeks going on. The message I read here (which might not at all be what you wanted to say, mind you!) is: "Nongeeks don't want to be geeks because geeks are smarter." Now, regardless of whether or not that's the case, or even whether or not you believe that, that's the message that's coming out. It's somewhat off-putting and exclusive. In your writing, you yourself are excluding so-called non-geeks; the fact that you're willing to distinguish geeks as a distinct and special category says something in and of itself. That all agrees with the author's conclusion. I agree with the author's conclusion myself, not because I'm in the field or have done research about it but because it makes sense when you reason it out. The community that's formed around this field has certain peculiarities. The emphasis on comic books and graphic novels and Star Trek and energy drinks that's mentioned, for instance. These are each odd things that lack a distinguishing trait. It's not like the art in comic books is better than art in other media forms, or that the story is better. It's not like Star Trek was a geekier show than others; certainly it's not highbrow entertainment. And as far as drugs of choice go, energy drinks are such a specific sort of caffeinated beverage, designed to force a drug into the body rather than following a so-called natural food flow. If we were going to go from the assumption that the comp sci field had an even distribution of interests, we'd be hard pressed to explain those certain prominences. Why is there no vodka alongside the Red Bull, no cigarettes or cigars? Why aren't other art forms represented as much as comic books? What's the group fascination with Star Trek? When they're all presented together, they're no longer idiosyncrasies. They have certain traits in common that speak about the people who imbibe them. They're all things obtainable from younger ages, they all have a certain visceral immediacy to them, they're all to some degree static and unchanging. People who drink energy drinks tend to stick with a single favorite; they'll spend years with one drink, unchanging. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that there's a certain comfort in the repetition, in knowing what you're going to get every time. Furthermore, people with these specific interests tend to have other characteristics. Am I right in thinking you value what people think more than you do what they look like? Or even that you think people who judge others based on looks are acting in a shallow fashion? Studies suggest you like either classic or alternative rock or electronica. Perhaps I could place a bet on your liking Monty Python, or enjoying Firefly? (This isn't you, anonjon, this is the collective "you" of the geeks in the survey. I'm sure not all of this applies to you.) Along with that, so-called "geeks" favor muted colors and t-shirts. They have particular commonalities in fashion. And they certainly have similar personality traits, which include introversion, arrogance, and short tempers. Not every person has all these traits, but they're frequent enough that we can't just say they're common traits in all human beings. They're certainly specific to this social clique. The backlash against nerds is almost entirely one formed from individual opinions forming. Perhaps it's unfair that people have decided comp sci majors in black t-shirts who like Star Trek are less likely to be fun or friendly than a random person from another sampling of society, but that's how it's working, and that's the cause for a lot of "geek" bias. It also makes sense. When you spend your time reading anime rather than following sports, certain casual conversations become very difficult for both parties. I've got former friends who're very stereotypical geeks, and I've forced them into social gatherings, and when I listen to the conversations they get into it's cringe-worthy. Either they don't realize how awkward they are, or they do it deliberately in order to justify their social alienation. So that's what the study is saying. It says, girls who have been shown these standard set-ups see enough cues to make them think perhaps they'd be better off somewhere else. That's entirely logical, isn't it? And the solution would be for our culture to expand and embrace more things, to reflect "normal" society in its diversity and lack of a hive mind. Until then, it will continue to be treated like what it's perceived to be: A bright, socially retarded group that's content with being largely outsiders.

ax0n 17y ago

I found my wife on a local dial-up Bulletin Board System and she's a fully certified geek. She does WOW raids two nights per week, she digs Fringe, sci-fi and fantasy fiction. She dual boots Ubuntu and Windows 7, and when I was stranded without connectivity and one of my clients munged their IPTables rules, she only needed to ask me the hostname, my username, my password, and if sudo was installed in order to flush the rules. I think maybe she's the one being discriminating, but she really doesn't want to do geek work for a living. She'd be okay doing data entry (not that it's geeky but it's the geekiest job she's had). She'd much rather do more traditional jobs such as taking care of animals or dispatching emergency responders.

cschep 17y ago
your wife sounds rad.
- ax0n 17y ago
  Thanks, she is!

hugh_ 17y ago

"If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it." Plenty of fields have cultural barriers to entry. Frinstance, I wouldn't want to be a car mechanic, cuz all they talk about is sport. I wouldn't want to be a secretary, cuz all they talk about is American Idol. And I wouldn't want to be a Wall St trader cuz all they talk about is... I dunno, golf and hookers. Of course I'm exaggerating, but the point remains that these are three fields where I'd be turned off by the culture even if I were interested in the actual work.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Actually, My impression is that different fields of study are becoming more and more "culturalized". Aside from the example above, there's obviously a whole cultural barrier for any art related activity.
jdminhbg 17y ago
That was probably the most egregious line in the article, with the exception maybe of comparing work schedules with racism. To me, the challenge is finding a field without some sort of cultural barrier to entry.
thaumaturgy 17y ago
I'm a little surprised by all your upvotes for this comment. I spend at least as much -- and maybe more -- time with car mechanics, natural gas technicians, secretaries, administrators, managers, electricians, and so on as I do with "computer geeks". While I tend to find that people from most of those other sectors enjoy talking about a wide variety of subjects, "computer geeks" (those working in the field as technicians or programmers especially) are far more likely to conversationally hover around technical minutiae or other stereotypically geek interests, like sci-fi. Case in point: I recently attended a professionally-attired holiday dinner party with a corporate client, where most of the employees are scientists or engineers, and many of them are PhD'd in one subject or another. Conversation wandered from ice climbing to traveling to diesel engines to raising kids, and so on. Anything "tech" was strictly verboten. On the other hand, whenever I meet my geekier climbing buddies, it's usually only a matter of minutes before the conversation is about their latest gadget, toy, or other interesting thing in the field.

defen 17y ago

> If any other field had a cultural barrier to entry like that, no one would stand for it. I would consider the non-STEM academic fields to be prime examples of ones with massive cultural barriers to entry. However, this does not fit into the standard oppression script, so it tends to be systematically ignored.

unalone 17y ago
I'm curious: What are their cultural barriers? I'm a Communications major, so I'm non-STEM, and I'd like to know what you think the social barriers are. Sports? Fashion?
- defen 17y ago
  I'm talking about the extreme left-wing bias in the academy - if you want to be a professor at an accredited university in the U.S., it's very difficult to do so if you have anything resembling a conservative slant to your beliefs. To be fair I also should have included professional schools such as law, medicine, business, etc with STEM. It's also not impossible for a right-wing person of exceptional ability to do well outside those fields - Robert George is a famous example. On the whole, though, professors in the U.S. tend to be on the far left of the political spectrum.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Hold on, now. Are we talking "far left" for American standards, or far left for the real world? Because I've come to realize that in America, supporting things like health care reform and gay marriage get me tagged as left-wing, when in reality I suppose I'm closer to the right than I am to the left. The right wing in America is batshit insane. I'm perfectly delighted to have them stay away from education. But regarding an actual conservative viewpoint, I find my professors tend to be pretty evenly mixed. I've got two or three this semester who're all for the free market and capitalism, and I've got two or three who'd prefer more government control over things. I don't think people from either side think gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, or that women shouldn't be permitted to abort, but again, I don't see that as left-wing. That's just common sense. Perhaps there's some left wing bias, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it extreme. Furthermore, you can be a right-wing student in any of those fields and face no enormous barrier whatsoever, and that's what this is a discussion of. So I'd still argue that the computer science division has a more extreme cultural gap. (Further: Have you tried being a right-wing computer science major? I was talking to a guy at UMaryland and told him I was taking an advertising class and he accused me of "raping and pillaging" America. That's way lefter than you'd find in any other field, except maybe English, and English majors are mild-mannered.)

Tichy 17y ago

I really don't get it - for signing up for a computer science degree, you first have to pass through a geek room? Or a picture of Spock will be staring down on you from the wall while you make the check mark for CS? Or what is the problem? I don't think many universities are decorated like that, so I don't see the barrier. One thing to complain about: maths and CS buildings are typically the most ugly ones of a university (the ones I have seen anyway). Just like in later jobs, where IT is often put into the basement... It's as if architects figure that geeks don't care about their environment anyway, so they can just be caged into concrete monstrosities. However, men like that just as little as women.

blasdel 17y ago
We had a stand-up cardboard Jean-Luc Picard
aidenn0 17y ago
You missed the point of the study. The things they put in the geek room are things that college students associated with CS students. Therefore, thinking about the "stereotypical geek" is virtually guaranteed when being put in the geek room. The study doesn't say "are geeks really like this or not" it is more about what an outsiders perception of geeks is.
- Tichy 17y ago
  But then I am not sure what useful conclusion to draw from that research. Is it even useful research? Without the study I could also have told you that few women like Star Wars figurines. That is why they are associated with geeks... Should there now be an ad campaign displaying normal looking geeks?
Psyonic 17y ago
You've clearly never been to the philosophy building. If they're lucky, it's in the unfinished attic of the English building.

btilly 17y ago

I can't believe the negative comments about this article. It seems to me to make a rather obvious point fairly well. People tend to migrate towards comfortable social environments, and creating a mess associated with a particular stereotype will tend to attract people who fit that stereotype, and repel people who don't. Computer science stereotypes revolve around geek culture. That culture is very male dominated, so will repel women a lot more strongly than it repels men. So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments. This seems to me to be obviously correct. But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek? Do you look around you and get upset at the thought that someone might want you to clean up? What is it? Let me go farther. I've noticed that many geeks don't want non-geeks around because they think non-geeks are less intelligent and would water down programming. Well certainly there are a lot of dumb people out there. But I've known lots of dumb geeks and smart non-geeks. In fact I'd guess that that geeks are smarter on average than non-geeks, but geeks make up only a small fraction of the really smart people out there. And furthermore I find the average smart non-geek more interesting than the average geek. So from my perspective broadening the base of people in CS would be a good thing.

hugh_ 17y ago
Actually I think the focus on gender is misleading. Excessively geeky environments repel non-geeks, whether male or female. The fact that this particularly results in repulsion of women is just due to geekiness being rarer among women. Those who say "who cares if non-geeks are repelled" seem to be assuming geekiness and programming ability are strongly correlated, but in my experience they seem to be pretty orthogonal, at least for the type of geekiness which leads to putting up Star Trek posters.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
So if you want to increase the number of women, you need to cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS environments... But it seems that saying it makes a lot of people upset. Why? Are you afraid that you won't be allowed to be a geek? The implicit "we should cut back on the amount of geek culture in CS" is where the article gets some blowback. The original article said that women avoid computing because they are intolerant of geeks. The "solution" is to make computing less geeky, rather than to make women more tolerant. Huh? If white people avoided basketball because they don't like black culture, we'd tell them (rightly) to suck it up. Yet somehow, the author of this article is comparing geeks to racists.

coffeemug 17y ago

From my highly anecdotal experience, I think the proportion of interesting to uninteresting people is equally low in any given profession. Most computer people focus on crappy sci-fi, most medical people focus on crappy drama, and most women tend to prefer crappy drama to crappy sci-fi. I love computers, mathematics, and technology. I think I'm pretty good at it. If I stumble on an interesting problem, I prefer to stay home and work on it than to go out. But I can't stand being around most computer people. They drive me nuts with their ridiculously limited interests and a moral pedestal glorying their severely limited subculture. In most other professions people are on average equally boring, but at least they're not on a high horse.

hugh_ 17y ago

The best way to be an interesting person is to have a broad range of interests -- that way you can find an interest in common with just about anyone you might talk to. The best way to be an extremely boring person is to have only one interest and obsess over it non-stop. I once worked next to a guy who only ever talked about rock climbing; no matter what you tried to talk to him about he'd find a way to bring the conversation back to his rock climbing hobby. To a fellow climber he might have been at least slightly interesting, but to me he was so memorably dull that here I am, five years later, using him as an example of dullness. If you put up a bust of Spock in your office, you're basically saying to the world "Hey world! You know that TV show which maybe you used to like a bit when you were a kid? I think that's one of the most interesting things in the world!" This is generally a pretty good indicator of a fairly narrow range of interests which will make you pretty boring to others. Anyone who really thinks that a long-defunct TV show is interesting enough to make it a significant part of their identity really needs to start developing a few new interests.