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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Male suicides are up in the US, too. The US has about 40,000 suicides a year. "Suicide is concentrated among those whom our society values least."[1]. The big jump is among white, middle-aged men and women.

"The states with the highest suicide rates tend to be clustered in the South and the Mountain West... This suicide belt is also defined by what psychologists have dubbed a “culture of honor.” ... That means higher murder rates but even more-exaggerated suicide rates, a fact he attributes to millennia of old masculine codes meeting a disappearance of blue-collar jobs unlikely to reverse itself. Give me honor, or give me death was a safer personal motto when honor could still be readily found." - Newsweek

Will this be the fate of today's "brogrammers" in their 40s?

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/2013/05/22/why-suicide-has-become-ep...

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> Will this be the fate of today's "brogrammers" in their 40s?

Even if software eats software development, today's "brogrammers" will still be in good shape, having a working knowledge of technology.

The people who are currently in good shape who are more at risk, in my opinion, are the millions of Accounting and Finance professionals who use Excel all day.

the millions of Accounting and Finance professionals who use Excel all day.

Just like they did 20 years ago? The trend doesn't seem to be that those jobs are going anywhere.

If you depend on current trends for you thinking, you'll never predict the future.

> If you depend on current trends for you thinking, you'll never predict the future.

Yes you will, and quite well. You'll miss the fundamental shifts though, but there is no way to predict them anyway.

Sorry to be a smartass, but isn't this post self-refuting?

I don't think so. For example, newspaper profits were near their all time high in 2008[1]. Following trends of newspaper profitability would not have lead an observer to predict the massive collapse of that industry in the subsequent years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers

What I'm saying is that

> If you depend on current trends for you thinking, you'll never predict the future.

is itself an observation about current trends in the efficacy of predicting the future, and therefore, if it's true, must be false.

The statement is unconditional and timeless. It says something about the concept of "current trends", but it does not reference current trends to bolster its argument. E.g., examining current trends now isn't held to be less useful than examining them fifty years ago would have been.

The statement could still be wrong, but not for the reason you cite.

But the only way to justify such a statement would be to point to... current trends. As the OP did.

That eerily echoes the culture in Japan, where male suicides are similarly high.

Tragic on both sides.

Do you have any demeaning nicknames for those who work in female dominated professions too?

The term "brogrammer" has always sounded like sour grapes to me. It smacks of "oh, they're just letting ANYBODY be a programmer these days, all you have to do is go to school and be good at it, you don't have to be borderline socially awkward to do it anymore," and, if anything seems to be more judgemental and exclusionary than anybody in the "brogrammer" camp would be.

Whatever. Zeitgeist labor force. It doesn't need to be bound to sex to be meaningful.

In this case, however, it is bound to sex.

Yea, and that's a problem in itself.

Well after 40, whether bro or not they certainly won't be hired as programmers anymore.

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