In most white-collar professions, people are respected through their communication skills, their demeanor, and appearance. These are the things that many progra

In most white-collar professions, people are respected through their communication skills, their demeanor, and appearance. These are the things that many programmers vehemently reject, because of course, "elite" coding skills are the only thing that matters. We have tech figureheads like Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, or Linus Stallman who are all smart and successful people but have trouble getting the general public to relate with them. In my workplace (large SV tech company), there are people walking around barefoot and with extremely bad BO because they don't want to take a shower. I never saw this when I worked in real-estate and mechanical engineering offices. Obviously this isn't representative of the entire tech industry but there are enough people like this in this industry to perpetuate this impression about tech "nerds" to the general public.