4 ms·

There is no such thing as a real-life brogrammer. NONE of the hundreds of developers I've seen are wild, drunken frat boy caricatures. What we are seeing is a g

There is no such thing as a real-life brogrammer. NONE of the hundreds of developers I've seen are wild, drunken frat boy caricatures. What we are seeing is a generation of programmers who are much younger and varied than ever before. We're seeing some changes because of that (e.g the startup hub in the Bay Area has moved from MV/PA to SF) The previous generation of developers had to go out of their way to be interested in computers. You had to order some computer kit by mail and put it together. This kind of selected for a certain personality that came to be known as "nerdy". My generation (currently in their 20s) has grown up with off-the-shelf PCs and the Internet. We built our first websites in middle school thanks to Geocities. We learned CSS and Javascript from MySpace themes. Programming became accessible to a LOT of people. Because of this democratization, there is a wider range of personalities among programmers of my age. There are athletic guys, girls who love to go clubbing and yes, guys who would fit in at a fraternity. I think the "brogrammer" label is a mischaracterization of this younger demographic of programmers who all of a sudden don't fit the stereotype that's existed for decades.

mst 14y ago
A friend of mine sent email saying that he'd characterise it as "migration of other types of smart people into fields historically dominated by nerds" which I think I agree with, and matches what you're saying. I just want to make sure that people recognise stereotypes for what they are, and maybe to steer a few people who might otherwise consider one of the stereotypes as something to aspire to towards that finding your own personal path among the varied possibilities. If anything, I think finding out in the long run that this article was entirely unnecessary would be my favourite possible outcome, but I suspect sadly that "mostly unnecessary eventually" is the best we're going to get.

mst 14y ago

A friend of mine sent email saying that he'd characterise it as "migration of other types of smart people into fields historically dominated by nerds" which I think I agree with, and matches what you're saying. I just want to make sure that people recognise stereotypes for what they are, and maybe to steer a few people who might otherwise consider one of the stereotypes as something to aspire to towards that finding your own personal path among the varied possibilities. If anything, I think finding out in the long run that this article was entirely unnecessary would be my favourite possible outcome, but I suspect sadly that "mostly unnecessary eventually" is the best we're going to get.