Beware the Pretty People

Funny how the nerd stereotype is used in different contexts.

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech.

However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was actually part of the counterculture movement. The old guard of cyber-hippies need to stop the slide into corporate monotony.

LOL What an article. "Now that the tech industry is cool, the pretty people are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of the way." Good luck with that :) Don't judge the book by its cover! "While we do, though, we need the weirdos, the rebels, the counterculture, to be gathering together and founding companies." Not sure what misfits and weirdos they mean maybe "Pretty People"

There is an important thread connecting the two:

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side...

This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person directly ("creep", "racist", "nerd").

It's a fairly general purpose attack that can be targeted at almost anything. One of the more dangerous places is in hiring and evaluation; witness how objective and meritocratic nerd hiring practices (e.g. hire-by-github, death by brainteaser) are now attacked. Similarly, the idea of an individual contributor is also under attack ("you can't have a 10x programmer, you can only have a 10x team"). Once objective measures are eliminated, we'll just descend into petty politics of the sort that "pretty people" are very good at.

I find the overall attitude to be fascinating, and self-defeating. They refer to the pretty ivy league people elbowing in, basically; taking over.

Well what use do I have for those people exactly? They can't stop me from building what I want to. They have no say in the matter, no influence over me. They only become part of my equation if I allow it. For $30, or $50, or $200 per month I can build almost anything I care to in the software realm. Today my biggest limitation is time.

The tech industry is lacking in (or no longer dominated by) geeks, nerds, weirdos? Even if that's true: 1) who cares 2) it has no impact on me 3) that would be the fault of the geeks, nerds and weirdos that are allowing themselves to be told what to do.

I'm going to build whatever the hell I please. If I allow one of the so-called pretty ivy league type to stop me, then I have nobody to fault but myself.

I don't need venture capital. I don't need pretty ivy league types with freshly printed MBAs. I need sales, and a product worth paying for that makes sales possible.

Customers provide growth capital. Anything else - including allowing the types dreaded by this article to be on the playing field - is optional.

Eh, I feel like a lot of that is an overreaction. The sort that makes it hard to have an honest discussion about stuff like diversity from either side.

For instance, I've done a lot of interviewing with the Google-type whiteboard coding questions, and all it's really told me is that they don't show crap for how good they're going to be at their everyday job (e.g. will this person consistently submit un-tested code to code review, will they pay as much attention to detail in their job as they do in interview-mode...).

It make sure people all meet a minimum bar for a certain sort of smartness, but that smartness doesn't have a lot to do with most development tasks.

It works pretty well for identifying the superstars—there's always that tier that blows through whatever you give them way faster—but if you need to hire more people than you have superstars applying, it's kinda crappy. (Except for all the others that have been tried...)

In the meantime, when not stuck doing interviews, I'll continue to pay attention to details, deploy code that's been tested and handles its edge cases, get stuff done, and get my hair cut regularly, play basketball, and buy nice clothes even if others in the office are in flip flops. And sometimes I'll wear flip flops too, depending on how I feel that day, whatever.