7 ms·
Be nice to nerds
- johan_larson 10y agoAre these the ads by GE that the article is talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGoBlI_fdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGoBlI_fdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDIEJrog3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDIEJrog3s
- marsrover 10y agoThat first commercial made me seriously crack up when I saw it for the first time. Great commercial.
- kartD 10y agoOh god, those are hilarious
- LogicFailsMe 10y agoThird one is dead-on.
- tacon 10y agoDoes anyone know where to find those IBM commercials from the dotcom boom that made fun of nerdy IT people? One had someone run in saying "Server's down! It doesn't scale!" and the other guy goes to his keyboard and says "Lock. The. Door." The other one had a web designer asking a puzzled businessman "You can have a spinning logo, or a burning logo."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anonbanker 10y agoDoes anyone else think this is just nerd blackface, much like The Big Bang Theory? We're laughing at the nerd, not with him.
- gourou 10y ago> As the success of Pokémon Go, an augmented-reality game, shows (see article), there can be big profits in the avant-garde areas where nerds like to experiment The article doesn't point to the correct page but to a story about Theranos, strange. http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702208-theranoss-fortunes-worsen-again-red-alert http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702208-theranoss-fo...
- return0 10y agoChances are it was written by a bad bot
- estefan 10y ago> This year tuition fees at these boot-camps will reach around $200m in America alone. Jeez, I'm in the wrong business... > as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time See above. I thank you :-D
- bradleyjg 10y agoI don't care if it is supposed to have been reclaimed. To me 'nerd' is a nasty, derogatory word that I don't use myself and I take offense when other people use.
- gkilmain 10y agoAgreed, labels suck, though I have been called a bro-grammer and for some reason it doesn't bother me. Maybe because its the antithesis of nerd.
- danbolt 10y agoThat's interesting. I feel like brogrammer would bug me a lot more than nerd. It could just be preferences though.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoWell, back in the day, "nerd" meant "social misfit". Which a lot of us were (me included), because we were too busy trying to be smart to be worried about learning how to play the social game. (Paul Graham wrote an essay about this, "Why Nerds are Unpopular".) But in the real world, it turns out that social skills also matter, and I should have realized it earlier. But these days, "nerd" means more "socially awkward but really smart", which is neutral to positive from our perspective. "Brogrammer", on the other hand, to me at least means "male who thinks he's really smart (even if he isn't) and therefore that he can be an offensive jerk to others, especially females". It would bug me a lot if someone thought that was true of me.
- gkilmain 10y agoIts unfortunately that is your interpretation of the word because your definition is inflammatory
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoBy "word", I presume you mean "brogrammer". Do you have a less inflammatory definition? (I would claim that my definition is true to the current connotation of the word, even if not the current denotation.)
- eistrati 10y agoIt's strongly advised to be nice to people in general, but I agree that "Chances are you may end up working for them" :-)
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoUh, hasn't this been the case for quite some time now? What is this article saying that wasn't being said about computer whiz-kids in the 90s?
- panzagl 10y agoNerds have been poised to rule the world for about as long as Linux has been ready to break out onto the desktop.
- Eire_Banshee 10y ago> Andreessen Horowitz has invested in various gadgets and products that early adopters have embraced, including a nutrient-rich drinkable meal for engineers too busy to take a break from coding, called Soylent. What? Does nobody else think that is... messed up?
- mordocai 10y agoSoylent? I mean, it isn't really for "engineers too busy to take a break from coding". That's just the way the journalist chose to phrase it (and I found it hilarious as a soylent consumer). Its basically the same idea as the other "liquid meal replacements" out there. Cheaper than a real meal and nutrient rich with little to no preparation. I have it for lunch often just because I don't want to bother with making/buying lunch.
- mfoy_ 10y agoI assume he means the name... it's basically a reference to Soylent Green and cannibalism. "Soylent" is a portmanteau of "soy" and "lentil", but "Soylent" specifically is most commonly associated with the movie about a similar meal replacement where the secret ingredient was other humans. Because of that, I literally thought the "Soylent" thing was a joke, I didn't think someone would ACTUALLY try to sell a meal replacement called "Soylent"... it's just... a bit macabre.
- dragonwriter 10y agoTo be fair, the name seems to be based on the book Make Room! Make Room!, not the movie (extremely loosely based on the book) Soylent Green. Soylent in the book (also, the forms of soylent other than soylent green in the movie) was not made from people. On the other hand, the movie probably has more cultural currency than the novel, so its still probably fairly poor branding.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoOf course, if you're having Soylent for lunch, you're still buying lunch. You're just not having to go out to buy lunch.
- s_dev 10y agoI agreed with everything in the article and thats why I think it's a poor article. Hall mark of a good read is being doubtful of the posited headline premise but afterwards being utterly convinced of a new thought or stance. You could have written this 20 years ago and it would feel just as accurate. I mean the premise is that nerds are trendsetters. The article contains lots of a fun anecdotes but nothing convincing or more importantly new. Exactly what does this article say thats new? Since Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg emerged people have looked to nerds to be good candidates for captains of industry.
- biot 10y ago> Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front. Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that? It sounds a bit like someone who is a computer neophyte wearing (non-ironically) a t-shirt that says: CTRL+ALT+DEL I'm a computer expert
- dragonwriter 10y ago> > Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but > > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front. > Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that? A techie might. A geek would have something more like "ΓΙΚ".
- tamana 10y agoYou are confusing geek with Greek.
- nine_k 10y agoNo self-respecting geek would misuse a sigma where an epsilon belongs.
- dragonwriter 10y agoPhonetically, I'm think it should be an iota, not an epsilon, though either is far closer than sigma.
- catoc 10y agoNow that we can nitpick: "a iota", not "an iota" :)
- sevensor 10y agoIt's hard not to read gSSk there. I scratch my head.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- saosebastiao 10y ago> “Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them,” wrote Charles Sykes, author of the book “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School”, first published in 2007. I'm not sure why this guy is getting credit for a saying that was a common teacher's refrain when I was still in middle school in the early 90's. Regardless, nerd (still hate the word, but I'll use it here for the sake of brevity) triumphalism isn't going to help it happen. It feeds a superiority complex and an underdog mentality at the same time...the product of which can be quite cringy at times [0]. Nerds are becoming increasingly important as technology and science become more prevalent in our daily lives, but at the end of the day nerds still can't do it all by themselves. Even companies that are led by nerds still have people who aren't nerds that work for them and keep them alive: PR people, HR managers, financial analysts and accountants, etc. I would argue that the 99th percentile of financial and organizational managers are 1000x more valuable than the 99th percentile 10x engineer. Even the nerdiest of nerd-led ycombinator unicorns would consider themselves extremely lucky to be bought out by Bain Capital or Goldman Saks private equity, or to have 20% of their IPO value swindled from them by an investment bank. These organizations don't give a shit about how the world works, just about how well it makes them money. Middle managers that shit on nerds are never successful, but nerds that shit on middle managers aren't successful either. If you can't see your position as symbiotic, you are doomed to failure. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132
- Aelinsaar 10y agoHonestly, the amount of energy that a person can waste on something other than being mutually supportive is staggering. It's generally much better to consider people in more human terms, than "Nerd" or "Manager" in any case.
- sakopov 10y agoAfter living in the US for nearly 2 decades I am still amazed at the fact that Americans belittle and make fun of people who are experts in certain fields and go as far as calling them names. When I was a kid in USSR I participated in a club called "Юный радиолюбитель" (similar to amateur radio hobbyist) where kids from 9 to 16 made electronic gadgets, radios, games and etc from publicly available schematics. I remember how fascinated everyone in my class was when I talked about the stuff I worked on. When I came to the US, still as a teenager, I was mocked as a geek or nerd. It is the oddest thing and still makes no sense to me.
- az0xff 10y agoAnecdotally, I feel that it's mostly because of stereotypes that nerds are socially awkward. In American culture, there's a lot of emphasis on being popular.
- collyw 10y agoYes, just looking at the replies here, it seems that everyone wants to shoehorn themselves and other into categories. I am a nerd in many ways, but I am also plenty of other things.
- asimuvPR 10y agoCulturally there are two main groups: 1. Popular or "cool" people. Anyone who is not "book smart". 2. Nerds, geeks, etc. People considered to be smart. There are people who somehow manage to belong to both sides. But its very clear cut. Everything you do is defined by that. I don't know how it came about, but have noticed that it came to be during the early 20th century. If you look back at media from around after WW2 ended (late 40s and 50s) it starts to become used in movies and television. Popular people are into sports, cars, etc. Nerds are science types. I experienced both sides in high school. In my experience, the popular side was more concerned in having a good time than anything. They wanted the attention. The nerds were generally better people all around. Nicer when you got to know them. I was a nerd who did sports and somehow ended up in between. But then decided to go full "nerd". The right choice because those friendships have lasted.
- Kluny 10y agoI checked the date on this article assuming it was written in 1998. Nope, July 16, 2016. O-kay. Thought we had moved on, but I guess the Economist hasn't.
- btbuildem 10y ago“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them” Uhhh, no, chances are you're gonna be working for some MBA or other, alongside the other nerds.
- oconnor0 10y agoSo the argument is "be nice to nerds because they make and shape new things"? What happened to be kind to people because they are people?
- imh 10y ago>At the time [2011], the naysayers thought coding was a weird, fringe activity for computer-science geeks. Is this at all true?
- clifanatic 10y agoI was already pretty old five years ago and I can confirm that this was not at all true at that time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- serge2k 10y ago> presents the “brogrammer” startup culture in all its grit and glory Not one of the main characters could be described as a Brogrammer. > Each month at least 70m people play “League of Legends”, a complex multiplayer online game; that is more than play baseball, softball or tennis worldwide. ... soccer? > The “sharing economy”, exemplified by Lyft and Airbnb, also was originally a nerd thing: they prefer renting to buying stuff. or we prefer cheap/better. Uber and Lyft are cheaper than a taxi and better. AirBnB means I can rent an apartment instead of a sketchy motel. If anything Zipcar would be a better example, pay to rent a car short term so you don't need to buy one. The whole point seems odd though. > Brands like Mountain Dew and Doritos have sponsored video-game competitions and are mocked for it... Drink verification can. as a nerd I don't really like being lumped in with Dew chugging CoD players or anything to do with LoL. kinda /s > that feels as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time because engineers aren't funny right.