30 ms·

When Nerds Collide (2014)

328 points by forgottenpass 12y ago

PebblesHD 12y ago
This is a fascinating article! Fantastic
jdbernard 12y ago
I hate to post the "I agree" comment, but this article is too valuable in my opinion to just leave with no comment so here are a couple of quotes that put some of my feelings into words very accurately: Both groups [geek feminists and brogrammers] are latecomers barging in on a cultural space that was once a respite for us, and we don’t appreciate either group bringing its cultural conflicts into our space in a way that demands we choose one side or the other. That’s a false dichotomy, and false dichotomies make us want to tear our hair out. I’m not claiming that’s entirely rational, because fear isn’t rational, but it sure does explain the response to being told that our culture is broken and must be adapted to accommodate the very people who rallied it into being by shunning us from theirs. Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet. leading with “there are more of us than there are of you, so you have to change to accommodate us” is, hands down, the best way to ensure that your carefully constructed appeal will fall on deaf ears. We made these communities to escape the people that tried to force their norms and values on us, who tried to pass judgement on us and ostracise us because of our differences. So it should be obvious why we circle the wagons when someone comes with accusations, demanding access to our group and insinuating that our reluctance to accept them is due to something wrong with us, something bad that we have done. They are acting exactly like the kind of people we're trying to keep out. I'm not saying we're perfect and have no biases of our own, but trying to force your way via moral or social might is not going to work.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  Another good passage - Humans are social animals, and part of what makes a social species social is that its members place a high priority on signaling their commitment to other members of their species. Weirdoes’ priorities are different; our primary commitment is to an idea or a project or a field of inquiry. Species-membership commitment doesn’t just take a back seat, it’s in the trunk with a bag over its head.
- Kalium 12y ago
  Unfortunately, it seems that respecting other subcultures and believing you have the one true just culture are incompatible beliefs.
  - jdbernard 12y ago
    I don't think most hackers believe they have the one true culture. I think it's more like, this is the culture we chose. Other cultures are great. They aren't for me, but more power to them. Just please don't come and try and change hacker culture just because we're popular now.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      I wasn't referring to hackers as believing we have the one true just culture.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    "Respecting" a belief or believer is not the same thing as "agreeing" with that belief, even if they do tend to correlate.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      Very true! That said, I tend to think that respecting a culture means understanding that it exists and not attempting to invade its spaces.
Terr_ 12y ago
> When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter, we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school. [...] “corporate culture” that’s as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the “school spirit” These bits resonated with me more than I had expected. The declaration "life is not like high school" is only partially true. College offers a temporary respite since are significantly more likely to be around people with a distinct interest in building things and learning things, in an environment where the "politics" are somewhat restrained. ... But afterwards, back in the "Real World", some of the same high-school factors return, as you see an increase in the social and financial predators, parasites, and empire-builders. > We don’t always live up to this value as well as we should[...] In our ideal world, though, your identity and personal history are orthogonal to your commit history. To use an analogy, this is like the ideals of "rule of law" or "freedom of speech" in various countries. Even when there are chronic violations in practice, it's still hugely important and valuable that the culture still holds it up as a goal. Even among two nations equally authoritarian in practice, the one where the population all knows and recites the social-mores of democracy is much much better-off and more likely to achieve them. The creation and maintenance of a widely-believed idea (especially one which is sometimes inconvenient to individuals and institutions) represents an enormous and ongoing investment in collective effort and willpower. The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.
- Kalium 12y ago
  It's not just an eloquent defense of hacker culture. It's a pointed assertion that there is such a thing as hacker culture. Both groups the piece concerns itself with don't seem to really be aware that they're invading someone else's cultural safe space.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    (I've edited my post for clarity, sorry if my "TLDR" implied I was trying to summarize the whole article rather than just my own rambling.) I agree with respect to the overall piece, what I meant was that the "code is no respecter of persons" section is mainly reacting to "nerds in their boys-only treehouse"-type accusations. It's not a defense of the behavior, of course, but a defense of the culture occurs in: "Yes, people do bad things, but it's despite the unifying cultural ideals, not because of them." Even if a bad actor finds rationalizations or excuses for a common-behavior, on the whole you have the option of making an appeal to the common-ideals.
noonespecial 12y ago
I’m thrilled to bits that every day the power to translate pure thought into actions that ripple across the world merely by the virtue of being phrased correctly draws nearer and nearer to the hands of every person alive. Whatever else this article brings, that was just beautiful. I'm shamelessly borrowing that for daily use.
- mynameishere 12y ago
  I know, right? You could launch that armada of prepositional phrases into just about any conversation.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  This is the sentiment that gets me out of bed and into work every day.
Yhippa 12y ago
The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.
- fr0styMatt2 12y ago
  How does calling people 'brogrammers' in a derogatory sense make us any different than the supposed 'cool kids' that rejected us? Shouldn't we strive to be better than that? (not saying that you are using the term 'brogrammer' like that, just posing a more general question).
  - mistermann 12y ago
    Brogrammer is perhaps used for efficiency, so you don't have to write a 10 page screed as we just read (which was excellent by the way). I don't think there's any way to say it in a non-derogatory way if the central message is derogatory. The article seemed to be saying, we have a culture, and if you people infiltrate it, there is a good chance you will ruin it. I happen to agree with him.
    - djcapelis 12y ago
      > I happen to agree with him. Her, for whatever it's worth.
      - Kalium 12y ago
        For an interesting experiment, show this article to the sort of people it's about. Don't tell them the author is an autistic woman. Observe their reactions. Then provide them that background and repeat observations.
        Buge 12y ago
        I realized she was a woman from this line: >There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers, just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers who aren’t hackers. The sentence only really makes sense if the final 4 traits are describing the author.
cinquemb 12y ago
>"At a company the size of Google or even GitHub, you can expect to find as many varieties of cliques…" >"Some hackers even argue for greater exclusivity, and curiously enough, many of those who do are also members of minority-by-birth groups. (I’d link to examples, but being caught between a minority-by-choice group and a minority-by-birth group means being extra careful about expressing unpopular opinions where anyone unsympathetic can hear you.)" This reminded me recently when I was contacted by a Facebook engineering manager for some "Black Engineers in Tech" BS for some less than marginally interesting projects in the scheme of things. Do companies really have to resort to this type of pandering to attract "talent"? I mean, after from C&D'ing a "hacker-esque" project I was working on (mining public urls on "open" graph and crowd-sourcing info about everyone, no log-in for engagement, public by default [opposite of facebook walled garden "connect the world" mantra]), suspending my account indefinitely, yet digging through their treasure trove of info to boost "Diversity" apparently so I can have the opportunity to become apart of the "Black" clique at FB NYC? Yeah… fuck that.
misuba 12y ago
But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome. The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Definitely the case over here.
  - misuba 12y ago
    And, I should be clear, for me as well. I happen not to have bad reactions to expressions of feminism - if I knew how I avoided that, believe me, I'd tell the world - but I carry those wounds from my childhood and they fuck up my life every day.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  It's not always about just being wounded. Many became "weird nerds" because they don't like the tons of bullshit, politics and signalling games mainstream society lives and breathes. You can't "fix" them without destroying who they really are. I say them, but I myself am a part of this group.
  - misuba 12y ago
    If, by your own admission, you just don't like something, you can't claim that "who [you] really are" is being "destroyed" if you're taught how to avoid injury in dealing with it. Your pet peeves are not a part of you.
bootload 12y ago
"The idea of anathematising all of a person’s good works because of something else they said or did is just as alien and repellent to us as our reaction is to someone who wishes Hacker News would die because Paul Graham is kind of a dick sometimes." Ha, love this bit, bit wordy though. If you squint while you read, it sort of reads like a pg essay.
hyperion2010 12y ago
This article is so spot on and covers many of the things that have bothered me for years about people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing). Yes, there are cases where there is real inappropriate behavior surrounding positions of power in corporate or workplace settings, but in the community at large and in the communal and public spaces that we now interact no one individual should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate (much less attack people for their supposed transgressions). We all left the world of "appropriate" because we found it a) useless and b) oppressive. The fact that our conversations are now public means that, if someone goes looking for something to be offended by they are going to find it, and then they play the primate power game and we're back to Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me 6 lines written in the hand of the most honest man and I will see him hanged." That said, this does paint reality for those who do honestly want to see more women involved in tech etc. My take home is that if you keep trying to push on people who intentionally leave "appropriate" communities behind because they don't care about those things and find them oppressive, then you are simply going to drive them to leave again and you will have to start all over again. edit: Actual take home. The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context.
- arrrg 12y ago
  Uhm, I’m real confused. Why do you talk about “try to join nerd communities” with regard to the dongle thing? Do you know something we don’t? That seems more like a policy of exclusion from your side – ala obviously a real nerd wouldn’t ever find something inappropriate or be clumsy in how they complain about something. This whole thing is a way of cordoning yourself off, isolating yourself from criticism, shunning others, excluding others. It’s so, so weird. And hateful.
  - moonshinefe 12y ago
    Speak for yourself, it was clear to me what he meant and you're putting words in his mouth.
  - amirmc 12y ago
A_COMPUTER 12y ago
One of the biggest frustrations to me, and I do believe this is a new thing, is people with evangelistic universalist worldviews joining these groups and expecting everybody to conform to it. I feel like "nerd culture" was partially defined by being made up of the parts left out of mainstream, inherent heterogeneity, rather than a positive set of things, so arguing you're right and I'm wrong and that's that, is highly alien. There is a lot of talk about how as nerd interests have become mainstream, the disdain many nerds have for this is a sign of their elitism or desire to just be different. But I think also it is because before it was mainstream, you only got viciously judged by the outgroup, so you could at least go "fuck them, they didn't like me anyway" and keep doing your own thing. Now you have people who consider themselves part of that ingroup telling you you're doing it wrong and bringing all their social jostling into the group with them trying to make it act the way they want. I don't think people are exaggerating when they feel like their groups are being "taken over."
- bad_user 12y ago
  My disdain has always been for social rules that never made sense - i.e. in order to be liked, you have to look good, dress in a certain way, talk in a certain way, belong to certain groups. I don't want to be different, it isn't my desire to be seen as a geek, however it pisses me off that people judge books by their covers and in order for me to follow rules, well, those rules have to make sense. For the project I'm working on, I often go in dressed with jeans and teeshirts or hoodies in rooms filled with black suits and ties. I do not have fashion preferences, all that I desire is for the clothes I wear to be comfortable. And I don't give a fuck about the company's dress code, because in the grand scheme of things, they hired me to produce value and not to look good. To me your comment, the article and these trends with cool/weird geeks, nerds, hipsters or what have you, do not make sense. It's because if there are two things that define me is (1) that I have an obsession with building software and (2) that I don't really give a fuck about anything else, to the point that it actively hurts my personal life. Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did.
  - jnbiche 12y ago
    > Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did. Thank you. Personally, I find this desire to put everyone into neat categories depressing.
RKoutnik 12y ago
I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird. In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far. I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?
- bronson 12y ago
  Yeah, that's SF. It's 80% posers, especially at meetups. The minority that are doing interesting things are, of course, not so easy to find. Work hard on your passions and eventually you'll meet likeminded people. (that's true no matter where you're located) Just be glad you're there now, and not being forced by management to go to glitzy web parties in 1999. Those were insufferable.
  - Animats 12y ago
    SF has been 80% posers for decades. That's why the art and music scenes in SF are so bad. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, if you suck they don't call you back. In SF, there's no judgment or criticism, and you can suck forever.
    - hueving 12y ago
      Nobody cares about the art scene in SF vs NYC and LA. Take that discussion elsewhere.
      - CmonDev 12y ago
        That's not even art. HN appreciates art.
Jim_brown 12y ago
rubbish
icelancer 12y ago
I am loathe to post an "I agree" comment here... but damn. This is a very well-said article and one I have tried to express many times but have failed over and over. The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature, completely hypocritical by pushing so-called "tolerance" on those who received none by society's "normal." Just a powerful essay.
- Animats 12y ago
  The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature... That's been true from the days of the Third International[1] to the Mozilla Foundation.[2] [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/apr/15.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/apr/15.htm [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing-safer-experience/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...
paul 12y ago
This article is delightfully thoughtful. Her other post is also worth reading: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a-talk-about-empathy-bd6321c66b37 https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a... It makes me wonder though how much nerd culture is driven by forms of autism. Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people. A valid concern, but I think it's worth being careful not to lump all well-intentioned dissent onto the spectrum. I'd hate it if autism became a go to label for dismissal of social analysis that doesn't fit into someone's preconceived notions and narratives. I have seen it a bit, and it's usually when people are locked into their ideological turf wars and get confronted with ideas that don't easily fit within that existing framework. It's ugly and presumes that non-complacence to norms that would prevent the idea from occurring is a sign of a neurological disorder and an excuse to dismiss the idea without giving it any thought.
- misuba 12y ago
  Please, please, please do not help every nerd who experiences discomfort at being called out on sexism to believe they have some undiagnosed shadow syndrome and are being oppressed because of it. Please don't do that. If only because it would be profoundly disrespectful to people with real diagnoses.
- leereeves 12y ago
  I agree, her other post is also excellent. I wonder if we could ever create a culture that doesn't oppress anyone (with the obvious exception of murderers, rapists, cannibals, etc). I hope so. But in light of our vast differences and the ease with which we hurt one another, I suspect we'll have to settle for a culture that doesn't oppress anyone too much.
  - deleted 12y ago
LordHumungous 12y ago
>Programming is an inherently constructivist discipline. A constructivist is like the archetypal Missourian: “Show me!” Many "hackers" are unable to apply this principle to the field of business. They don't understand business, they aren't good at it, and therefore they see it as nothing more than empty headed self-promoters jockeying for social status, just like those "cool kids" who picked on them in high school. They do not understand that the prime directive of a business is to make money, and that doing so is always more important than quality engineering. Given that most hackers work for businesses, I think this is a large blind spot that leads to a lot of bitterness and feelings of exclusion.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive. It's true that if a company is publicly traded, widely held, or principally owned by investors who choose it based on potential financial returns, the shared interests of its owners are likely to be limited to making money, but that isn't true of all businesses.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    > The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive. And this is certainly true of some businesses. A few businesses. And they're fantastic to work for. But they're very rare in my (admittedly) limited experience.
- whybroke 12y ago
  If it seem the coding practices are inappropriately heaping on technical debt then there are two disagreements: 1. It looks like it will loose money in the long term and is therefore a poor decision even from a money stand point. This would create an impression empty-headed-ness. 2. Creating technical debt looks like at way to make a company appear superficially more valuable than it is by delivering a nonviable product whose real cost won't be realized until later (when the technical debt has to be paid). If this corresponds with funding raising, it creates an impression of dishonesty. Likely as not these are miss-impressions. But they are deeper problems than "I didn't know companies were supposed to make money".
jkot 12y ago
There will always be bullies, it does not end at high school. Only thing nerd can do is to keep his cool, and not feed any trolls :-)
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  Or, you know, quick, reflexive, and measured (no overkill) retribution. Stick a kitten's nose in their pee a few times and they'll learn to use the litter box. That doesn't mean you hate or disrespect the kitten, it means you're applying a bit of punishment now to avoid bigger problems later. This is true regardless of who's in charge for the simple reason that the carpet doesn't care who's in charge, if something pees on it, it will smell.
whybroke 12y ago
Where physically will weirdos live? The bay area was certainly a haven of which only a subset were technologist. And from that culture and thinking came many of the technical miracles of our age, many ideologically driven. My concern is really painfully mundane: uncontrolled cost of living increase means there could never be a mass migration of free thinkers to the bay area today. So individual programmers being gradually displaced in a technologist's social setting today is just a sliver of that larger displacement with its very basic cause.
bsdpython 12y ago
It's an interesting and complex subject but ultimately defining what makes a "true" nerd is a never ending debate. My professor in college was incredulous when he found out that I, a CS major, never watched Star Trek. The nerve!
MollyR 12y ago
I found the part of the article where it talks about the what if situation about Japan getting rid of work visa to be really interesting. Honestly it shocked me, and has changed the way I think. Also I never thought of it this way, but feminism/brogrammers are super similar in the way they try to colonize nerd culture. A lot of unskilled people are trying to get a career in tech for its perks. They are not good at it or as good as they should be for the industry standard. When they get called on it, they hide behind something like feminism. Essentially it's all about grabbing power in our community via subversion rather than skill. And This is a problem because computer programming is intensely logical problem. It requires a lot of skill. I'm glad I read this article, I feel like I understand people like Linus Torvald a little bit more.
- gretful 12y ago
  Before all those late-night commercials in the late '90's ("Make $70K a year!!!") only people that were interested in computers chose a career in them. We make, on average, twice the national average (for U.S.) salary of our peers: people that want the bucks will move in, whether they enjoy bits and bytes or not.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    TBF, software development itself is only a relatively small part of the whole tech industry - marketing, communications, recruitment, even food supply and whatnot are all part of it. Just because there's more people that want to work for one of the cool companies, doesn't mean they're actually infringing on the domain of the weird nerd hacker/programmer.
wcummings 12y ago
I didn't go to public school, is it really as 80's-teen-movie-tropes as pieces like this make it sound? It's just really hard for me to take seriously.
- ejk314 12y ago
  To an outside observer, no. The tropes are exaggerations. But to someone in public school at the time, it can certainly feel that way.
- thret 12y ago
  I can really only speak for the guys, but certainly at my school it was very much like that. Broadly speaking, sports, smokes, geeks, money. They each had their own click and hung around well defined areas during lunch and recess for obvious reasons.
ZeroGravitas 12y ago
That opening analogy only really works if you assume the Japanese have more right to live and work in Japan than anyone else. I'm not sure I could defend that from first principles, but I'll give them a pass as it feels kind of right. It looks very different if it's instead "Males have given Women the vote and allowed them to adopt any profession, but why should they be allowed to change the culture", or "White Americans have freed their African-American slaves, but why should they change their culture to accommodate them?" or "Poorer people now have access to computers, but why should they change the culture to accommodate them?". More worrying for me personally, I can't tell if I'm an invader or a native in her view. I'm a white, male, middle-class, bookish computer programmer like most of the people who got an early exposure to computing. But I recognize that the people poorer or less male than me didn't get the opportunities I did. I may have beaten some of my classmates who came from similar backgrounds fair and square, but I'm not going to kid myself on that life is a meritocracy and the only thing holding back Romanian orphans is a lack of stick-to-it-ivness. Because that would be self-delusion on a grand scale. But because I don't buy into the popular delusion that being a geek is a pure meritocracy, apparently that makes me a feminazi invader, ruining geekdom for all the real geeks who all share some other monolithic political view?
john_butts 12y ago
Am I misreading the Japan thing? Like, it's not hard to imagine that there would be candidates that would be immediately excluded based on surname alone without even getting into race or gender - is this "fair" or "unfair", or is it just the way things are? Is the latter(est) the analogy we're supposed to take from this?
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  The Japan analogy is more a reference to people of a completely different culture (like the US) going to Japan and making the Japanese adhere to their culture, instead of the other way around. It may not be a very accurate comparison though, and to extend on the analogy, if Japan was to open up its borders, they would have to adjust themselves. Compare getting employees from India over to the US; there are some cultural differences that may be hard to work with / around, but both parties (employee/existing co-workers and the new foreign workers) will both have to adjust.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
felipeerias 12y ago
Once upon a time, in a very small part of the developed world, there were a set of activities which provided identity and sense of belonging for introverted people who didn't otherwise fit with mainstream society. That ended up being called "nerd culture". That "culture" is now prevalent in fields (like computing) that have moved from the fringe to the mainstream in the past decades. Many seem to find it worth preserving, even if that means perpetuating an abrasive and hostile environment. I've always thought that I had ticked all the checkboxes to be considered a nerd and a hacker. Yet I don't recognise myself at all in the picture that the article paints, and I would not want to live and work in the environment that many here are advocating for. The author outlines a description of a "hacker" that, to be honest, sounds more like "mildly autistic" to me: "That guy in the group who stares at you without saying anything? He could be undressing you with his eyes, but I’d lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you." The proportion of introverts (like myself) in the computing field is higher than in society as a whole. Some patience and understanding is therefore needed. But this does not justify treating people poorly because "those are our values and you are a foreigner". I fear that her arguments, well-intentioned as they may be, will do more harm than good.
jenkstom 12y ago
I'm happy to see somebody discuss this on a deeper level. When one underprivileged group meets another underprivileged group we should be able to discuss what oppression is, how to relate these experiences to each other and how to reduce oppression for everybody. Current social trends allow and encourage women to raise their oppression above any other form of oppression, as if no man ever got beat up after school or ridiculed for "playing with computers". It's the same excuse that marginalizes male rape victims if the perpetrator was male - or even if the perpetrator was female because "men". So it has turned into a war of privilege, rather than a discussion of oppression. It's become "Feminist privilege" versus "Nerd privilege" versus "Male privilege". The fact that most nerds are men is just a distraction from the real discussion. The problem isn't the privilege - we're privileged to be alive, and that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. The problem is the oppression, and "donglegate" and "gamergate" have oppression on both sides. Until we stop trying to raise any particular type of oppression onto a pedestal we aren't going to make any real progress. Let's stop talking about "privilege" and start talking about barriers to personal fulfillment.
normloman 12y ago
Since when is there such a thing as "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" ? I've never heard people identify as such. Methinks it an arbitrary distinction invented by the author, to support his argument. I'm still not sure what the argument is. Also, since when do you have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer? Since when is being a nerd and being a feminist mutually exclusive? I don't get this article. And I don't get nerds.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  As a "weird nerd", let me explain. "Weird nerds" are the people who not so long ago were ostracized by society for their interest in science and technology. They weren't "cool", they weren't doing things that "cool" people do, so they were bullied. Many of them indeed became programmers and laid foundation of what is now the IT industry. Then, tech became mainstream and seen as a very good career path. It started being "cool", so it attracted the "cool" people. As the nerd-type interests, like sci-fi, became less shunned by society, the industry started to fill with "cool nerds" - people who are nerdish, but not to the level of not being "cool". You don't have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer. On the contrary, majority of programmers employed today are not nerds or hackers. What has once been mostly a hobby, became a profession. -- Or look at it in another way - "weird nerds" are usually the ones in real love with science and technology. "Cool nerds" are usually the ones for whom science and technology is just an occupation, a job.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    I don't agree that the "cool nerds" are impostors and only do it for the attention. I think the difference is more a personality one - extroverts vs introverts. The former in the 'nerd' subculture is the type that goes to ALL the meetups, that likes networking, is highly active on social networking, etc etc etc, while the latter prefers to be left alone with his (literal) devices.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I didn't mean to say that "cool nerds" are impostors - they have every right and reason to be interested in technology, but the kind of deep love for technical interests seem to correlate more with "weird nerd" character traits. I might be wrong about the actual causation though. Introvert/extrovert seem to be correlated too, but not perfectly.
mindslight 12y ago
I think this article is fantastic in its framework, but it's ultimately aimed at the wrong people. The writer is assuming a powerful left-brain empathy that is characteristic of hackers ("I'd lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you."), yet is lacking in the invaders. The invaders are running a much simpler hardwired social strategy that assumes everyone is like them (even in response, there are plenty of comments insisting that hackers still unconsciously judge people by race in spite of most of our judgments being formed before we ever see someone. it's simple projection), and are not setup to understand those who are different. They cannot change, and consequently we will lose the social game of chicken every time. What I'd really like to see/find/create/sustain is a community of people that are able to resist being distracted by the narrow trap of the social hierarchy - VC money, PR articles from companies, status-quo politics, proprietary Appoogle product/tech announcements, mass media human interest stories, etc. More similar to the Internet I grew up with, where objective technical merit was the ideal to strive towards, and being told to RTFM resulted in someone learning how to self-learn and ask intelligent questions rather than getting attention from writing clickbait on how they were offended. Maybe this is impossible because we've gotten too big/connected, or I personally could just be pitifully stuck in the rut that is HN and myopic from falling out of more specific technical tribes. Maybe this is impossible and any such community is ultimately doomed to entryism. But articles such as this that take a stab at reifying the qualities of true hackerdom are necessary for us to reflect and understand exactly what is being lost and perhaps come up with ways to defend it in the large, rather than it surviving solely in narrow highly-technical communities. (PS - a point i wanted to make elsewhere in the thread about the general article, but I will do here instead because it applies to my comment as well: It is easy to phrase this issue in in binary us-vs-them hacker or not-a-hacker terms but the reality is continuous. So while it is nice to think in simpler terms, the topic is actually graver because any of us can be corrupted by social influences as well. The lure of wider acceptance, attention, fame, and/or money can lead us down the path of behavior that we despise - outrage fanning, user-disempowering platforms, working on surveillance tech, etc. The status quo's siren's song is becoming quite apparent right now as the (de)centralization pendulum starts to swing back and the trajectories of companies further diverge from those of free people.)
questerzen 12y ago
Not everyone has had the same negative social experiences. I was very lucky to go to a school where being an outsider with nerdy interests was respected so long as you did it with passion, aspired to excellence, and were not afraid to show others what you found cool; and we were expected to have the same respect for the sportsmen, musicians, artists etc. In a sense we were all doing the same thing through different outlets. It's a culture I'm very proud to have been a part of and it produced some great people in many different fields. In contrast, in my programming niche, I frequently feel uncomfortable with the level of aggression and exclusion on display - every comment on a forum seems like you are exposing yourself to ridicule and judgement. Conversely, in pure maths forums, which I also participate in, the atmosphere is far more welcoming, open, patient and respectful of good work. I think the problem is that in computing it is far easier to be a dilettante and much harder to tell the difference. Yes, all communities will have their dicks, but responding with aggression and elitism pollutes the community for everyone and encourages hostile and collective responses from others: be sure that the dicks are a lot better at playing hardball and ganging up together than we are. Let's take some responsibility for creating communities we're proud to be a part of. Please.

328 points by forgottenpass 12y ago

This is a fascinating article! Fantastic

I hate to post the "I agree" comment, but this article is too valuable in my opinion to just leave with no comment so here are a couple of quotes that put some of my feelings into words very accurately: Both groups [geek feminists and brogrammers] are latecomers barging in on a cultural space that was once a respite for us, and we don’t appreciate either group bringing its cultural conflicts into our space in a way that demands we choose one side or the other. That’s a false dichotomy, and false dichotomies make us want to tear our hair out. I’m not claiming that’s entirely rational, because fear isn’t rational, but it sure does explain the response to being told that our culture is broken and must be adapted to accommodate the very people who rallied it into being by shunning us from theirs. Trying to convince hacker culture to change its norms by appealing to progressive values alone won’t work. You’re going to have to appeal to hacker values, and nobody’s done that yet. leading with “there are more of us than there are of you, so you have to change to accommodate us” is, hands down, the best way to ensure that your carefully constructed appeal will fall on deaf ears. We made these communities to escape the people that tried to force their norms and values on us, who tried to pass judgement on us and ostracise us because of our differences. So it should be obvious why we circle the wagons when someone comes with accusations, demanding access to our group and insinuating that our reluctance to accept them is due to something wrong with us, something bad that we have done. They are acting exactly like the kind of people we're trying to keep out. I'm not saying we're perfect and have no biases of our own, but trying to force your way via moral or social might is not going to work.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
Another good passage - Humans are social animals, and part of what makes a social species social is that its members place a high priority on signaling their commitment to other members of their species. Weirdoes’ priorities are different; our primary commitment is to an idea or a project or a field of inquiry. Species-membership commitment doesn’t just take a back seat, it’s in the trunk with a bag over its head.
Kalium 12y ago
Unfortunately, it seems that respecting other subcultures and believing you have the one true just culture are incompatible beliefs.
- jdbernard 12y ago
  I don't think most hackers believe they have the one true culture. I think it's more like, this is the culture we chose. Other cultures are great. They aren't for me, but more power to them. Just please don't come and try and change hacker culture just because we're popular now.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    I wasn't referring to hackers as believing we have the one true just culture.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  "Respecting" a belief or believer is not the same thing as "agreeing" with that belief, even if they do tend to correlate.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    Very true! That said, I tend to think that respecting a culture means understanding that it exists and not attempting to invade its spaces.

Terr_ 12y ago

> When weird nerds watch the cool kids jockeying for social position on Twitter, we see no difference between these status games and the ones we opted out of in high school. [...] “corporate culture” that’s as loudly promoted and roughly as genuine as the “school spirit” These bits resonated with me more than I had expected. The declaration "life is not like high school" is only partially true. College offers a temporary respite since are significantly more likely to be around people with a distinct interest in building things and learning things, in an environment where the "politics" are somewhat restrained. ... But afterwards, back in the "Real World", some of the same high-school factors return, as you see an increase in the social and financial predators, parasites, and empire-builders. > We don’t always live up to this value as well as we should[...] In our ideal world, though, your identity and personal history are orthogonal to your commit history. To use an analogy, this is like the ideals of "rule of law" or "freedom of speech" in various countries. Even when there are chronic violations in practice, it's still hugely important and valuable that the culture still holds it up as a goal. Even among two nations equally authoritarian in practice, the one where the population all knows and recites the social-mores of democracy is much much better-off and more likely to achieve them. The creation and maintenance of a widely-believed idea (especially one which is sometimes inconvenient to individuals and institutions) represents an enormous and ongoing investment in collective effort and willpower. The fact that we even have a collective shared-ideal of "we judge you by your work" is an achievement worth celebrating and continuing, even if we individually fail at it, or even fail at it a lot.

Kalium 12y ago
It's not just an eloquent defense of hacker culture. It's a pointed assertion that there is such a thing as hacker culture. Both groups the piece concerns itself with don't seem to really be aware that they're invading someone else's cultural safe space.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  (I've edited my post for clarity, sorry if my "TLDR" implied I was trying to summarize the whole article rather than just my own rambling.) I agree with respect to the overall piece, what I meant was that the "code is no respecter of persons" section is mainly reacting to "nerds in their boys-only treehouse"-type accusations. It's not a defense of the behavior, of course, but a defense of the culture occurs in: "Yes, people do bad things, but it's despite the unifying cultural ideals, not because of them." Even if a bad actor finds rationalizations or excuses for a common-behavior, on the whole you have the option of making an appeal to the common-ideals.

noonespecial 12y ago

I’m thrilled to bits that every day the power to translate pure thought into actions that ripple across the world merely by the virtue of being phrased correctly draws nearer and nearer to the hands of every person alive. Whatever else this article brings, that was just beautiful. I'm shamelessly borrowing that for daily use.

mynameishere 12y ago
I know, right? You could launch that armada of prepositional phrases into just about any conversation.
jschwartzi 12y ago
This is the sentiment that gets me out of bed and into work every day.

Yhippa 12y ago

The brogrammers and geek feminists won. There's no turning back.

fr0styMatt2 12y ago
How does calling people 'brogrammers' in a derogatory sense make us any different than the supposed 'cool kids' that rejected us? Shouldn't we strive to be better than that? (not saying that you are using the term 'brogrammer' like that, just posing a more general question).
- mistermann 12y ago
  Brogrammer is perhaps used for efficiency, so you don't have to write a 10 page screed as we just read (which was excellent by the way). I don't think there's any way to say it in a non-derogatory way if the central message is derogatory. The article seemed to be saying, we have a culture, and if you people infiltrate it, there is a good chance you will ruin it. I happen to agree with him.
  - djcapelis 12y ago
    > I happen to agree with him. Her, for whatever it's worth.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      For an interesting experiment, show this article to the sort of people it's about. Don't tell them the author is an autistic woman. Observe their reactions. Then provide them that background and repeat observations.
      - Buge 12y ago
        I realized she was a woman from this line: >There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers, just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers who aren’t hackers. The sentence only really makes sense if the final 4 traits are describing the author.

cinquemb 12y ago

>"At a company the size of Google or even GitHub, you can expect to find as many varieties of cliques…" >"Some hackers even argue for greater exclusivity, and curiously enough, many of those who do are also members of minority-by-birth groups. (I’d link to examples, but being caught between a minority-by-choice group and a minority-by-birth group means being extra careful about expressing unpopular opinions where anyone unsympathetic can hear you.)" This reminded me recently when I was contacted by a Facebook engineering manager for some "Black Engineers in Tech" BS for some less than marginally interesting projects in the scheme of things. Do companies really have to resort to this type of pandering to attract "talent"? I mean, after from C&D'ing a "hacker-esque" project I was working on (mining public urls on "open" graph and crowd-sourcing info about everyone, no log-in for engagement, public by default [opposite of facebook walled garden "connect the world" mantra]), suspending my account indefinitely, yet digging through their treasure trove of info to boost "Diversity" apparently so I can have the opportunity to become apart of the "Black" clique at FB NYC? Yeah… fuck that.

misuba 12y ago

But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome. The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.

spiritplumber 12y ago
Definitely the case over here.
- misuba 12y ago
  And, I should be clear, for me as well. I happen not to have bad reactions to expressions of feminism - if I knew how I avoided that, believe me, I'd tell the world - but I carry those wounds from my childhood and they fuck up my life every day.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
It's not always about just being wounded. Many became "weird nerds" because they don't like the tons of bullshit, politics and signalling games mainstream society lives and breathes. You can't "fix" them without destroying who they really are. I say them, but I myself am a part of this group.
- misuba 12y ago
  If, by your own admission, you just don't like something, you can't claim that "who [you] really are" is being "destroyed" if you're taught how to avoid injury in dealing with it. Your pet peeves are not a part of you.

bootload 12y ago

"The idea of anathematising all of a person’s good works because of something else they said or did is just as alien and repellent to us as our reaction is to someone who wishes Hacker News would die because Paul Graham is kind of a dick sometimes." Ha, love this bit, bit wordy though. If you squint while you read, it sort of reads like a pg essay.

hyperion2010 12y ago

This article is so spot on and covers many of the things that have bothered me for years about people who try to join nerd communities and then immediately start complaining about "inappropriate behavior" (eg the dongle thing). Yes, there are cases where there is real inappropriate behavior surrounding positions of power in corporate or workplace settings, but in the community at large and in the communal and public spaces that we now interact no one individual should ever be allowed to determine what is appropriate (much less attack people for their supposed transgressions). We all left the world of "appropriate" because we found it a) useless and b) oppressive. The fact that our conversations are now public means that, if someone goes looking for something to be offended by they are going to find it, and then they play the primate power game and we're back to Cardinal Richelieu: "Give me 6 lines written in the hand of the most honest man and I will see him hanged." That said, this does paint reality for those who do honestly want to see more women involved in tech etc. My take home is that if you keep trying to push on people who intentionally leave "appropriate" communities behind because they don't care about those things and find them oppressive, then you are simply going to drive them to leave again and you will have to start all over again. edit: Actual take home. The only way forward is REAL tolerance for all kinds of behavior and a good faith attempt to see people in context.

arrrg 12y ago
Uhm, I’m real confused. Why do you talk about “try to join nerd communities” with regard to the dongle thing? Do you know something we don’t? That seems more like a policy of exclusion from your side – ala obviously a real nerd wouldn’t ever find something inappropriate or be clumsy in how they complain about something. This whole thing is a way of cordoning yourself off, isolating yourself from criticism, shunning others, excluding others. It’s so, so weird. And hateful.
- moonshinefe 12y ago
  Speak for yourself, it was clear to me what he meant and you're putting words in his mouth.
- amirmc 12y ago

A_COMPUTER 12y ago

One of the biggest frustrations to me, and I do believe this is a new thing, is people with evangelistic universalist worldviews joining these groups and expecting everybody to conform to it. I feel like "nerd culture" was partially defined by being made up of the parts left out of mainstream, inherent heterogeneity, rather than a positive set of things, so arguing you're right and I'm wrong and that's that, is highly alien. There is a lot of talk about how as nerd interests have become mainstream, the disdain many nerds have for this is a sign of their elitism or desire to just be different. But I think also it is because before it was mainstream, you only got viciously judged by the outgroup, so you could at least go "fuck them, they didn't like me anyway" and keep doing your own thing. Now you have people who consider themselves part of that ingroup telling you you're doing it wrong and bringing all their social jostling into the group with them trying to make it act the way they want. I don't think people are exaggerating when they feel like their groups are being "taken over."

bad_user 12y ago
My disdain has always been for social rules that never made sense - i.e. in order to be liked, you have to look good, dress in a certain way, talk in a certain way, belong to certain groups. I don't want to be different, it isn't my desire to be seen as a geek, however it pisses me off that people judge books by their covers and in order for me to follow rules, well, those rules have to make sense. For the project I'm working on, I often go in dressed with jeans and teeshirts or hoodies in rooms filled with black suits and ties. I do not have fashion preferences, all that I desire is for the clothes I wear to be comfortable. And I don't give a fuck about the company's dress code, because in the grand scheme of things, they hired me to produce value and not to look good. To me your comment, the article and these trends with cool/weird geeks, nerds, hipsters or what have you, do not make sense. It's because if there are two things that define me is (1) that I have an obsession with building software and (2) that I don't really give a fuck about anything else, to the point that it actively hurts my personal life. Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  > Am I a cool geek, a weirdo, a nerd? Point is, I don't really care, never did. Thank you. Personally, I find this desire to put everyone into neat categories depressing.

RKoutnik 12y ago

I was shocked, visibly, when I found out that no one at the first startup I worked at played tabletop RPGs. I was shocked again when they looked down on me because I did. In a city that prides itself on "weirdos", I was the wrong kind of weird. In college I poured over Steven Levy's Hackers, hoping one day I would be able to meet the tech elite. I jumped at the first chance I got to work out here, hoping I'd finally find "my people" (substitute whatever pithy phrase you like). Hasn't worked out so far. I'm in SF now and have been for a while. Where are you guys? All the meetups I've been to were fun (hard to turn down free pizza) but it seemed like everyone was more interested in collecting business cards than talking hacker-speak. Maybe I'm going to the wrong ones?

bronson 12y ago
Yeah, that's SF. It's 80% posers, especially at meetups. The minority that are doing interesting things are, of course, not so easy to find. Work hard on your passions and eventually you'll meet likeminded people. (that's true no matter where you're located) Just be glad you're there now, and not being forced by management to go to glitzy web parties in 1999. Those were insufferable.
- Animats 12y ago
  SF has been 80% posers for decades. That's why the art and music scenes in SF are so bad. In NYC, they tell you if you suck. In LA, if you suck they don't call you back. In SF, there's no judgment or criticism, and you can suck forever.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Nobody cares about the art scene in SF vs NYC and LA. Take that discussion elsewhere.
    - CmonDev 12y ago
      That's not even art. HN appreciates art.

Jim_brown 12y ago

rubbish

icelancer 12y ago

I am loathe to post an "I agree" comment here... but damn. This is a very well-said article and one I have tried to express many times but have failed over and over. The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature, completely hypocritical by pushing so-called "tolerance" on those who received none by society's "normal." Just a powerful essay.

Animats 12y ago
The "invaders" who claim to be socially liberal are actually authoritarian in nature... That's been true from the days of the Third International[1] to the Mozilla Foundation.[2] [1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/apr/15.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/apr/15.htm [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing-safer-experience/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...

paul 12y ago

This article is delightfully thoughtful. Her other post is also worth reading: https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a-talk-about-empathy-bd6321c66b37 https://medium.com/@maradydd/okay-feminism-its-time-we-had-a... It makes me wonder though how much nerd culture is driven by forms of autism. Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people.

forgottenpass 12y ago
Those wishing to end oppression women should be careful that they are not instead perpetuating the oppression of autistic people. A valid concern, but I think it's worth being careful not to lump all well-intentioned dissent onto the spectrum. I'd hate it if autism became a go to label for dismissal of social analysis that doesn't fit into someone's preconceived notions and narratives. I have seen it a bit, and it's usually when people are locked into their ideological turf wars and get confronted with ideas that don't easily fit within that existing framework. It's ugly and presumes that non-complacence to norms that would prevent the idea from occurring is a sign of a neurological disorder and an excuse to dismiss the idea without giving it any thought.
misuba 12y ago
Please, please, please do not help every nerd who experiences discomfort at being called out on sexism to believe they have some undiagnosed shadow syndrome and are being oppressed because of it. Please don't do that. If only because it would be profoundly disrespectful to people with real diagnoses.
leereeves 12y ago
I agree, her other post is also excellent. I wonder if we could ever create a culture that doesn't oppress anyone (with the obvious exception of murderers, rapists, cannibals, etc). I hope so. But in light of our vast differences and the ease with which we hurt one another, I suspect we'll have to settle for a culture that doesn't oppress anyone too much.
- deleted 12y ago

LordHumungous 12y ago

>Programming is an inherently constructivist discipline. A constructivist is like the archetypal Missourian: “Show me!” Many "hackers" are unable to apply this principle to the field of business. They don't understand business, they aren't good at it, and therefore they see it as nothing more than empty headed self-promoters jockeying for social status, just like those "cool kids" who picked on them in high school. They do not understand that the prime directive of a business is to make money, and that doing so is always more important than quality engineering. Given that most hackers work for businesses, I think this is a large blind spot that leads to a lot of bitterness and feelings of exclusion.

dragonwriter 12y ago
The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive. It's true that if a company is publicly traded, widely held, or principally owned by investors who choose it based on potential financial returns, the shared interests of its owners are likely to be limited to making money, but that isn't true of all businesses.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  > The prime directive of a business is to serve the interests of its owners. That usually requires making money at some level, but making money itself may not be the prime directive. And this is certainly true of some businesses. A few businesses. And they're fantastic to work for. But they're very rare in my (admittedly) limited experience.
whybroke 12y ago
If it seem the coding practices are inappropriately heaping on technical debt then there are two disagreements: 1. It looks like it will loose money in the long term and is therefore a poor decision even from a money stand point. This would create an impression empty-headed-ness. 2. Creating technical debt looks like at way to make a company appear superficially more valuable than it is by delivering a nonviable product whose real cost won't be realized until later (when the technical debt has to be paid). If this corresponds with funding raising, it creates an impression of dishonesty. Likely as not these are miss-impressions. But they are deeper problems than "I didn't know companies were supposed to make money".

jkot 12y ago

There will always be bullies, it does not end at high school. Only thing nerd can do is to keep his cool, and not feed any trolls :-)

spiritplumber 12y ago
Or, you know, quick, reflexive, and measured (no overkill) retribution. Stick a kitten's nose in their pee a few times and they'll learn to use the litter box. That doesn't mean you hate or disrespect the kitten, it means you're applying a bit of punishment now to avoid bigger problems later. This is true regardless of who's in charge for the simple reason that the carpet doesn't care who's in charge, if something pees on it, it will smell.

whybroke 12y ago

Where physically will weirdos live? The bay area was certainly a haven of which only a subset were technologist. And from that culture and thinking came many of the technical miracles of our age, many ideologically driven. My concern is really painfully mundane: uncontrolled cost of living increase means there could never be a mass migration of free thinkers to the bay area today. So individual programmers being gradually displaced in a technologist's social setting today is just a sliver of that larger displacement with its very basic cause.

bsdpython 12y ago

It's an interesting and complex subject but ultimately defining what makes a "true" nerd is a never ending debate. My professor in college was incredulous when he found out that I, a CS major, never watched Star Trek. The nerve!

MollyR 12y ago

I found the part of the article where it talks about the what if situation about Japan getting rid of work visa to be really interesting. Honestly it shocked me, and has changed the way I think. Also I never thought of it this way, but feminism/brogrammers are super similar in the way they try to colonize nerd culture. A lot of unskilled people are trying to get a career in tech for its perks. They are not good at it or as good as they should be for the industry standard. When they get called on it, they hide behind something like feminism. Essentially it's all about grabbing power in our community via subversion rather than skill. And This is a problem because computer programming is intensely logical problem. It requires a lot of skill. I'm glad I read this article, I feel like I understand people like Linus Torvald a little bit more.

gretful 12y ago
Before all those late-night commercials in the late '90's ("Make $70K a year!!!") only people that were interested in computers chose a career in them. We make, on average, twice the national average (for U.S.) salary of our peers: people that want the bucks will move in, whether they enjoy bits and bytes or not.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  TBF, software development itself is only a relatively small part of the whole tech industry - marketing, communications, recruitment, even food supply and whatnot are all part of it. Just because there's more people that want to work for one of the cool companies, doesn't mean they're actually infringing on the domain of the weird nerd hacker/programmer.

wcummings 12y ago

I didn't go to public school, is it really as 80's-teen-movie-tropes as pieces like this make it sound? It's just really hard for me to take seriously.

ejk314 12y ago
To an outside observer, no. The tropes are exaggerations. But to someone in public school at the time, it can certainly feel that way.
thret 12y ago
I can really only speak for the guys, but certainly at my school it was very much like that. Broadly speaking, sports, smokes, geeks, money. They each had their own click and hung around well defined areas during lunch and recess for obvious reasons.

ZeroGravitas 12y ago

That opening analogy only really works if you assume the Japanese have more right to live and work in Japan than anyone else. I'm not sure I could defend that from first principles, but I'll give them a pass as it feels kind of right. It looks very different if it's instead "Males have given Women the vote and allowed them to adopt any profession, but why should they be allowed to change the culture", or "White Americans have freed their African-American slaves, but why should they change their culture to accommodate them?" or "Poorer people now have access to computers, but why should they change the culture to accommodate them?". More worrying for me personally, I can't tell if I'm an invader or a native in her view. I'm a white, male, middle-class, bookish computer programmer like most of the people who got an early exposure to computing. But I recognize that the people poorer or less male than me didn't get the opportunities I did. I may have beaten some of my classmates who came from similar backgrounds fair and square, but I'm not going to kid myself on that life is a meritocracy and the only thing holding back Romanian orphans is a lack of stick-to-it-ivness. Because that would be self-delusion on a grand scale. But because I don't buy into the popular delusion that being a geek is a pure meritocracy, apparently that makes me a feminazi invader, ruining geekdom for all the real geeks who all share some other monolithic political view?

john_butts 12y ago

Am I misreading the Japan thing? Like, it's not hard to imagine that there would be candidates that would be immediately excluded based on surname alone without even getting into race or gender - is this "fair" or "unfair", or is it just the way things are? Is the latter(est) the analogy we're supposed to take from this?

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
The Japan analogy is more a reference to people of a completely different culture (like the US) going to Japan and making the Japanese adhere to their culture, instead of the other way around. It may not be a very accurate comparison though, and to extend on the analogy, if Japan was to open up its borders, they would have to adjust themselves. Compare getting employees from India over to the US; there are some cultural differences that may be hard to work with / around, but both parties (employee/existing co-workers and the new foreign workers) will both have to adjust.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

felipeerias 12y ago

Once upon a time, in a very small part of the developed world, there were a set of activities which provided identity and sense of belonging for introverted people who didn't otherwise fit with mainstream society. That ended up being called "nerd culture". That "culture" is now prevalent in fields (like computing) that have moved from the fringe to the mainstream in the past decades. Many seem to find it worth preserving, even if that means perpetuating an abrasive and hostile environment. I've always thought that I had ticked all the checkboxes to be considered a nerd and a hacker. Yet I don't recognise myself at all in the picture that the article paints, and I would not want to live and work in the environment that many here are advocating for. The author outlines a description of a "hacker" that, to be honest, sounds more like "mildly autistic" to me: "That guy in the group who stares at you without saying anything? He could be undressing you with his eyes, but I’d lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you." The proportion of introverts (like myself) in the computing field is higher than in society as a whole. Some patience and understanding is therefore needed. But this does not justify treating people poorly because "those are our values and you are a foreigner". I fear that her arguments, well-intentioned as they may be, will do more harm than good.

jenkstom 12y ago

I'm happy to see somebody discuss this on a deeper level. When one underprivileged group meets another underprivileged group we should be able to discuss what oppression is, how to relate these experiences to each other and how to reduce oppression for everybody. Current social trends allow and encourage women to raise their oppression above any other form of oppression, as if no man ever got beat up after school or ridiculed for "playing with computers". It's the same excuse that marginalizes male rape victims if the perpetrator was male - or even if the perpetrator was female because "men". So it has turned into a war of privilege, rather than a discussion of oppression. It's become "Feminist privilege" versus "Nerd privilege" versus "Male privilege". The fact that most nerds are men is just a distraction from the real discussion. The problem isn't the privilege - we're privileged to be alive, and that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. The problem is the oppression, and "donglegate" and "gamergate" have oppression on both sides. Until we stop trying to raise any particular type of oppression onto a pedestal we aren't going to make any real progress. Let's stop talking about "privilege" and start talking about barriers to personal fulfillment.

normloman 12y ago

Since when is there such a thing as "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" ? I've never heard people identify as such. Methinks it an arbitrary distinction invented by the author, to support his argument. I'm still not sure what the argument is. Also, since when do you have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer? Since when is being a nerd and being a feminist mutually exclusive? I don't get this article. And I don't get nerds.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
As a "weird nerd", let me explain. "Weird nerds" are the people who not so long ago were ostracized by society for their interest in science and technology. They weren't "cool", they weren't doing things that "cool" people do, so they were bullied. Many of them indeed became programmers and laid foundation of what is now the IT industry. Then, tech became mainstream and seen as a very good career path. It started being "cool", so it attracted the "cool" people. As the nerd-type interests, like sci-fi, became less shunned by society, the industry started to fill with "cool nerds" - people who are nerdish, but not to the level of not being "cool". You don't have to join a nerd subculture to be accepted as a programmer. On the contrary, majority of programmers employed today are not nerds or hackers. What has once been mostly a hobby, became a profession. -- Or look at it in another way - "weird nerds" are usually the ones in real love with science and technology. "Cool nerds" are usually the ones for whom science and technology is just an occupation, a job.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I don't agree that the "cool nerds" are impostors and only do it for the attention. I think the difference is more a personality one - extroverts vs introverts. The former in the 'nerd' subculture is the type that goes to ALL the meetups, that likes networking, is highly active on social networking, etc etc etc, while the latter prefers to be left alone with his (literal) devices.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I didn't mean to say that "cool nerds" are impostors - they have every right and reason to be interested in technology, but the kind of deep love for technical interests seem to correlate more with "weird nerd" character traits. I might be wrong about the actual causation though. Introvert/extrovert seem to be correlated too, but not perfectly.

mindslight 12y ago

I think this article is fantastic in its framework, but it's ultimately aimed at the wrong people. The writer is assuming a powerful left-brain empathy that is characteristic of hackers ("I'd lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you."), yet is lacking in the invaders. The invaders are running a much simpler hardwired social strategy that assumes everyone is like them (even in response, there are plenty of comments insisting that hackers still unconsciously judge people by race in spite of most of our judgments being formed before we ever see someone. it's simple projection), and are not setup to understand those who are different. They cannot change, and consequently we will lose the social game of chicken every time. What I'd really like to see/find/create/sustain is a community of people that are able to resist being distracted by the narrow trap of the social hierarchy - VC money, PR articles from companies, status-quo politics, proprietary Appoogle product/tech announcements, mass media human interest stories, etc. More similar to the Internet I grew up with, where objective technical merit was the ideal to strive towards, and being told to RTFM resulted in someone learning how to self-learn and ask intelligent questions rather than getting attention from writing clickbait on how they were offended. Maybe this is impossible because we've gotten too big/connected, or I personally could just be pitifully stuck in the rut that is HN and myopic from falling out of more specific technical tribes. Maybe this is impossible and any such community is ultimately doomed to entryism. But articles such as this that take a stab at reifying the qualities of true hackerdom are necessary for us to reflect and understand exactly what is being lost and perhaps come up with ways to defend it in the large, rather than it surviving solely in narrow highly-technical communities. (PS - a point i wanted to make elsewhere in the thread about the general article, but I will do here instead because it applies to my comment as well: It is easy to phrase this issue in in binary us-vs-them hacker or not-a-hacker terms but the reality is continuous. So while it is nice to think in simpler terms, the topic is actually graver because any of us can be corrupted by social influences as well. The lure of wider acceptance, attention, fame, and/or money can lead us down the path of behavior that we despise - outrage fanning, user-disempowering platforms, working on surveillance tech, etc. The status quo's siren's song is becoming quite apparent right now as the (de)centralization pendulum starts to swing back and the trajectories of companies further diverge from those of free people.)

questerzen 12y ago

Not everyone has had the same negative social experiences. I was very lucky to go to a school where being an outsider with nerdy interests was respected so long as you did it with passion, aspired to excellence, and were not afraid to show others what you found cool; and we were expected to have the same respect for the sportsmen, musicians, artists etc. In a sense we were all doing the same thing through different outlets. It's a culture I'm very proud to have been a part of and it produced some great people in many different fields. In contrast, in my programming niche, I frequently feel uncomfortable with the level of aggression and exclusion on display - every comment on a forum seems like you are exposing yourself to ridicule and judgement. Conversely, in pure maths forums, which I also participate in, the atmosphere is far more welcoming, open, patient and respectful of good work. I think the problem is that in computing it is far easier to be a dilettante and much harder to tell the difference. Yes, all communities will have their dicks, but responding with aggression and elitism pollutes the community for everyone and encourages hostile and collective responses from others: be sure that the dicks are a lot better at playing hardball and ganging up together than we are. Let's take some responsibility for creating communities we're proud to be a part of. Please.