5 ms·

The software engineer’s guide to asserting dominance in the workplace

134 points by numo16 10y ago

arcticbull 10y ago
Couldn't tell if joking after reading the bit about walking out when you see they don't use git ^_^
- tn13 10y ago
  Came here to say the exactly the same thing. :D I would replace the sentence with: "If your team does not use git force them to use it and give a condescending laughter if they ask for any will with git rebase."
- flying_kangaroo 10y ago
  It's the most helpful advice in the article.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  The post is tagged satire.
- overcast 10y ago
  The first two sentences should have been a dead giveaway.
- jwdunne 10y ago
  "Bro do u even use git?"
  - trump2016chalk 10y ago
    You should... Check it out
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  All joking aside make-or-break stuff like that might be good to cover during the interview.
  - pc86 10y ago
    All joking aside if the specific application used for source control is make-or-break for you, we need to have a talk.
ocb 10y ago
I thought this was very well done and hilarious. However, I'm not sure how I feel about the particular emphasis on mocking people who lift and take protein supplements. It's definitely obnoxious when people define themselves by the fact that they lift, but at the same time, almost everyone I know who exhibits some the "alpha" behaviors described in this article w/r/t working out (like showing up to work in gym clothes) is not doing so in a deliberately show-offy way. They just like working out. If anything, in my experience people who do things like that tend to have serious confidence issues and being "swole" helps them with that. I know it's just a joke, just seems like a stereotype that's very erroneous to me. And for the record, I do not lift and probably never will. I've always been a more run/bike/swim type of person, although I should probably exercise more in general.
- trose 10y ago
  Stop ruining our fun! Seriously though, there seems to be some portion of the programming community that like to shit on people for enjoying exercise and caring about how they look. Doesn't bother me a whole lot. I know I'll always get opportunities to beat those people in an interview if I am just better dressed and more sociable.
  - askafriend 10y ago
    I don't understand what's so bad about being healthy and fit? You'll feel better all around and be sharper mentally too.
    - pc86 10y ago
      My armchair psychology says that the stereotypical programmer is physically small/weak, and may be unable to do much physical activity (I have asthma and definitely used it as a crutch in junior high and HS to get out of most any physical activity). On the flip side, the jocks in HS were often the cool ones. Think of the stereotypical football QB in any HS movie. Pretty much the exact opposite of the stereotypical nerd student, except maybe the QB isn't a total idiot. I was told in HS that once I was out of college and had a job, it wouldn't matter how strong or popular someone was, but that how smart they were would determine their standing in life. Both turned out to be pretty blatantly wrong, but if you're told that, and if you're counting on that to be the case, it could be a pretty threatening thing to see that the jock who goes to Gold's Gym at 5 AM, tailors his clothes and pays a lot of money for a haircut actually knows what he's doing when it comes to programming or some other intellectual task. Since college I've lost fat, put on muscle, started caring about how I look, and gotten married. The change in how I am treated by your stereotypical programmer is like night and day (for the worse), and the change in how I am treated by everyone else is just as severe (for the better).
3327 10y ago
Gone is the day of the humble 90's engineer. A new era has started... The dawn of the Brogrammer. Software engineering culture is shifting. Nice article, sadly have seen it fairly often.
- threesixandnine 10y ago
  It's time we take over the world, no?
gaius 10y ago
I brought my Cherry MX to work...
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  Me too. Always a sad and shameful moment when you realize something you do is widely regarded as bad behavior. Now that I know I'm that guy I'm going to pick up some dampeners[1]. [1] http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keyboard-accessories/cherry-mx-rubber-o-ring-switch-dampeners-125pcs.html http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keyboard-acc...
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  I think it has to be a vintage Model M to claim alpha status. Nice try though. Clickety.
  - arcticbull 10y ago
    Give me buckling springs or give me death.
- joelg236 10y ago
  Reds are usually okay. Blue or green, you're pushing it (depends on your office environment though)
  - traverseda 10y ago
    >Reds >>Reds Why? Brown I get, but I honestly don't see any reason why you'd favour red over a membrane keyboard.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    One of the perks of remote work is I can have the clickiest keyboard in the land.
  - DKnoll 10y ago
    Reds are absolute garbage for actual typing. They're best for gaming or specialised keyboards like at a POS. Brown is best in my opinion, which is one I will vehemently defend by drowning out all opposition with furious typing.
alanwatts 10y ago
>Name-drop as many of the latest software frameworks and technologies as possible throughout your rant. Use words like big data, cloud, and scalability. Mention test-driven development at least three to four times. If we don't immediately adopt agile scrum kanban test-driven development processes there is no way we can scale to harness the power of big data analytics using our cloud-based deep machine learning artificial intelligence neural networks for quantum computing the internet of things. Furthermore, I'm rewriting the whole architecture in Vanilla JS on the front end, ReactJS on the back end, and using Docker containers to achieve a more scalable continuous integration work flow optimization process for our test-driven development integrations in the cloud using the legacy waterfall methodology. Any questions? No? Good, now get back to work.
- pjmorris 10y ago
  I think I've heard this at someone's office.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  TDD used to be cool, BDD or 'Behavior Driven Development' is way more hipster IMO. You must be old, like over 25 or something. Docker is also like sooooo 2015, it's all about Docker clusters now - Swarm or Kubernetes and the like. I'd go with Kubernetes cuz it sounds way cool.
pascalxus 10y ago
Great Satire! But, I don't see too many of this exact stereotype around, especially the weight lifting type. I mean I see little bits of these behaviors in other people, but not all wrapped in 1 person.
doug1001 10y ago
when i graduated from university, law was the coolest profession--there were tv shows about them and they got paid a lot. I don't know where cs grad/programmer was on this list but definitely not in the top 10 (maybe around 5,630 or so). In any event, during that time, if you were a senior at a top university with a 3.8 in Elizabethan Poetry but no definite career goal, people would reflexively say "you should go to law school" A decade or so later, it seemed to shift to investment bankers. (And again, pretty sure programmer was nowhere in the top 5,000) articles like this make me wonder whether in fact programmer is the new cool job?
k__ 10y ago
Somehow I interact with other people that they always have the feeling they owe me something. Sometimes this goes so far, that people even feel bad to ask me when I owe them something. Also, my GF told me, I always seem kinda bugged out when working. Both is kinda funny, because I'm mostly a chill guy. But it kept many people from bothering me at work...
aaronwidd 10y ago
The thing that's really changed in this business is that coding went from being about constantly solving things that had never been done before, to work where the solutions are about doing things the "right" way. For decades the field of technology was brand new. Nothing had been done before. Everything was about building something from nothing. It used to take a tremendous amount of creative brainpower and unique perspectives on problem solving to get things done. Now it's all about solved problems. People who thrive doing creative, complex problem solving have to look at the world with the eyes of an outsider. They need to see things differently to hit on the right solutions quickly. They're outsiders - geeks, on the fringes of society. So coding was a geek's world. But now tech has matured. The majority of the work is about ripping out the creative hacker madness of the previous generation and replacing it with things that are the "right" way. The work of coding (for the web at least) is not about solving for unknowns anymore. You take away the creative thinking, you don't need outsiders. The work becomes simpler and more accessible to the average Joe. People who just want a job that pays well, who are motivated by routine and doing things the "right" way. Who are happy to spend all day gutting a codebase to replace it with boring well trodden solutions. The new replacement coders aren't motivated by the creative satisfaction of building things from nothing. Their motivations are completely different. Things like money, like social status. These are the guys who are thriving in the business now. For those of us who like building things and creative problem solving, our time here is done. It's a bro's world now.

134 points by numo16 10y ago

arcticbull 10y ago

Couldn't tell if joking after reading the bit about walking out when you see they don't use git ^_^

tn13 10y ago
Came here to say the exactly the same thing. :D I would replace the sentence with: "If your team does not use git force them to use it and give a condescending laughter if they ask for any will with git rebase."
flying_kangaroo 10y ago
It's the most helpful advice in the article.
jsprogrammer 10y ago
The post is tagged satire.
overcast 10y ago
The first two sentences should have been a dead giveaway.
jwdunne 10y ago
"Bro do u even use git?"
- trump2016chalk 10y ago
  You should... Check it out
brazzledazzle 10y ago
All joking aside make-or-break stuff like that might be good to cover during the interview.
- pc86 10y ago
  All joking aside if the specific application used for source control is make-or-break for you, we need to have a talk.

ocb 10y ago

I thought this was very well done and hilarious. However, I'm not sure how I feel about the particular emphasis on mocking people who lift and take protein supplements. It's definitely obnoxious when people define themselves by the fact that they lift, but at the same time, almost everyone I know who exhibits some the "alpha" behaviors described in this article w/r/t working out (like showing up to work in gym clothes) is not doing so in a deliberately show-offy way. They just like working out. If anything, in my experience people who do things like that tend to have serious confidence issues and being "swole" helps them with that. I know it's just a joke, just seems like a stereotype that's very erroneous to me. And for the record, I do not lift and probably never will. I've always been a more run/bike/swim type of person, although I should probably exercise more in general.

trose 10y ago
Stop ruining our fun! Seriously though, there seems to be some portion of the programming community that like to shit on people for enjoying exercise and caring about how they look. Doesn't bother me a whole lot. I know I'll always get opportunities to beat those people in an interview if I am just better dressed and more sociable.
- askafriend 10y ago
  I don't understand what's so bad about being healthy and fit? You'll feel better all around and be sharper mentally too.
  - pc86 10y ago
    My armchair psychology says that the stereotypical programmer is physically small/weak, and may be unable to do much physical activity (I have asthma and definitely used it as a crutch in junior high and HS to get out of most any physical activity). On the flip side, the jocks in HS were often the cool ones. Think of the stereotypical football QB in any HS movie. Pretty much the exact opposite of the stereotypical nerd student, except maybe the QB isn't a total idiot. I was told in HS that once I was out of college and had a job, it wouldn't matter how strong or popular someone was, but that how smart they were would determine their standing in life. Both turned out to be pretty blatantly wrong, but if you're told that, and if you're counting on that to be the case, it could be a pretty threatening thing to see that the jock who goes to Gold's Gym at 5 AM, tailors his clothes and pays a lot of money for a haircut actually knows what he's doing when it comes to programming or some other intellectual task. Since college I've lost fat, put on muscle, started caring about how I look, and gotten married. The change in how I am treated by your stereotypical programmer is like night and day (for the worse), and the change in how I am treated by everyone else is just as severe (for the better).

3327 10y ago

Gone is the day of the humble 90's engineer. A new era has started... The dawn of the Brogrammer. Software engineering culture is shifting. Nice article, sadly have seen it fairly often.

threesixandnine 10y ago
It's time we take over the world, no?

gaius 10y ago

I brought my Cherry MX to work...

brazzledazzle 10y ago
Me too. Always a sad and shameful moment when you realize something you do is widely regarded as bad behavior. Now that I know I'm that guy I'm going to pick up some dampeners[1]. [1] http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keyboard-accessories/cherry-mx-rubber-o-ring-switch-dampeners-125pcs.html http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keyboard-acc...
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
I think it has to be a vintage Model M to claim alpha status. Nice try though. Clickety.
- arcticbull 10y ago
  Give me buckling springs or give me death.
joelg236 10y ago
Reds are usually okay. Blue or green, you're pushing it (depends on your office environment though)
- traverseda 10y ago
  >Reds >>Reds Why? Brown I get, but I honestly don't see any reason why you'd favour red over a membrane keyboard.
- vvanders 10y ago
  One of the perks of remote work is I can have the clickiest keyboard in the land.
- DKnoll 10y ago
  Reds are absolute garbage for actual typing. They're best for gaming or specialised keyboards like at a POS. Brown is best in my opinion, which is one I will vehemently defend by drowning out all opposition with furious typing.

alanwatts 10y ago

>Name-drop as many of the latest software frameworks and technologies as possible throughout your rant. Use words like big data, cloud, and scalability. Mention test-driven development at least three to four times. If we don't immediately adopt agile scrum kanban test-driven development processes there is no way we can scale to harness the power of big data analytics using our cloud-based deep machine learning artificial intelligence neural networks for quantum computing the internet of things. Furthermore, I'm rewriting the whole architecture in Vanilla JS on the front end, ReactJS on the back end, and using Docker containers to achieve a more scalable continuous integration work flow optimization process for our test-driven development integrations in the cloud using the legacy waterfall methodology. Any questions? No? Good, now get back to work.

pjmorris 10y ago
I think I've heard this at someone's office.
ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
TDD used to be cool, BDD or 'Behavior Driven Development' is way more hipster IMO. You must be old, like over 25 or something. Docker is also like sooooo 2015, it's all about Docker clusters now - Swarm or Kubernetes and the like. I'd go with Kubernetes cuz it sounds way cool.

pascalxus 10y ago

Great Satire! But, I don't see too many of this exact stereotype around, especially the weight lifting type. I mean I see little bits of these behaviors in other people, but not all wrapped in 1 person.

doug1001 10y ago

when i graduated from university, law was the coolest profession--there were tv shows about them and they got paid a lot. I don't know where cs grad/programmer was on this list but definitely not in the top 10 (maybe around 5,630 or so). In any event, during that time, if you were a senior at a top university with a 3.8 in Elizabethan Poetry but no definite career goal, people would reflexively say "you should go to law school" A decade or so later, it seemed to shift to investment bankers. (And again, pretty sure programmer was nowhere in the top 5,000) articles like this make me wonder whether in fact programmer is the new cool job?

k__ 10y ago

Somehow I interact with other people that they always have the feeling they owe me something. Sometimes this goes so far, that people even feel bad to ask me when I owe them something. Also, my GF told me, I always seem kinda bugged out when working. Both is kinda funny, because I'm mostly a chill guy. But it kept many people from bothering me at work...

aaronwidd 10y ago

The thing that's really changed in this business is that coding went from being about constantly solving things that had never been done before, to work where the solutions are about doing things the "right" way. For decades the field of technology was brand new. Nothing had been done before. Everything was about building something from nothing. It used to take a tremendous amount of creative brainpower and unique perspectives on problem solving to get things done. Now it's all about solved problems. People who thrive doing creative, complex problem solving have to look at the world with the eyes of an outsider. They need to see things differently to hit on the right solutions quickly. They're outsiders - geeks, on the fringes of society. So coding was a geek's world. But now tech has matured. The majority of the work is about ripping out the creative hacker madness of the previous generation and replacing it with things that are the "right" way. The work of coding (for the web at least) is not about solving for unknowns anymore. You take away the creative thinking, you don't need outsiders. The work becomes simpler and more accessible to the average Joe. People who just want a job that pays well, who are motivated by routine and doing things the "right" way. Who are happy to spend all day gutting a codebase to replace it with boring well trodden solutions. The new replacement coders aren't motivated by the creative satisfaction of building things from nothing. Their motivations are completely different. Things like money, like social status. These are the guys who are thriving in the business now. For those of us who like building things and creative problem solving, our time here is done. It's a bro's world now.