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For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty
by naner 12y ago
For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other.
In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups.
I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional.
I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself.
This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way.
I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :)
EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.
- lallysingh 12y agoDo you ever wonder if the act of programming causes movement on the scale? Especially if done for a long time, especially if started when young?
- cdr 12y ago> fall somewhere on the aspergers scale That's really insulting to people that actually have autism. Don't do that. (And you mean autism scale, asperger's was eliminated as a separate diagnosis.)
- naner 12y agoI removed that part. Was unnecessary anyways, not sure why I felt the need to make such a comparison.
- tomp 12y ago> This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other. Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a person's personality to a few mean things he's said. Nice sexist remark, btw.
- UK-AL 12y agoIt because programming can very x vs y way of doing things. Where as most other professions theres a gray area in the middle that can be reached.
- enraged_camel 12y agoThis is precisely why I did not study computer science in college, despite meeting the rather high requirements for the major. I was part of a group tour of the Paul G. Allen Center at UW, and the people I met there were just so incredibly awkward socially that I could not picture myself interacting with them for 3+ years. I ended up majoring in Informatics [1] instead, which is still technical but also interdisciplinary. [1]: https://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics/curriculum https://ischool.uw.edu/academics/informatics/curriculum
- Dewie 12y ago> I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself. Unfortunately I was brought up with a terminal as my foster parent, takeaway pizza as my mother's milk and snarky technical email lists as my social milieu. So I haven't quite had that experience. :-/