Rise of the Popped Collar Programmer

Hipsters ≠ popped collars. Not to take away from your point too much, everything you've said seems reasonable, but popped collars are indicative of frat boy douche bags. They don't grow ironic moustaches... they pretty much aren't supposed to understand irony. Think the winkelvoss twins in the facebook movie.

The blindness and self-absorbance in this post is so infuriating I find myself constantly removing personal attacks on you from this comment.

It's safe to say I feel offended by this, I consider myself to be a 'brogrammer' or 'popped collar programmer'. I work in coffee-shops and co-working spaces for a non-venture backed profitable startup. I wear sunglasses in my profile picture, and I love a bunch of awesome technologies people have created in recent years.

The assumptions you make about popped collar programmers are ridiculous. Yes we pick out cool t-shirts and wear huge rubber watches. We don't wear fedoras, that makes no sense at all. But spending money on our appearance because we actually feel good about ourselves has nothing to do with our commitment to robust software as you so childishly remark.

Ofcourse feeling good about yourself and having fun using new technologies is something you must not do as a programmer. God forbid you actually use a technology that's brings you out of your comfort zone.

Have fun nailing the nails to your NIH-syndrome coffin with your Microsoft branded hammer. You make it seem like these popped collar programmers get hyped for no good reason about some technology and then use it for the rest of their lives for every problem they encounter, but this is where we differ from you. You see while you think it's pragmatic to use the technology you already randomly acquired for everything you see (like it's a good idea to build a blog engine in friggin' .net), these brogrammers actually work on accumulating a diverse toolset from a plethora of sources other programmers are passionate about.

While you are busy vomiting over some guys 'Hadoop + Riak + Redis + Clojure-powered blog platform' that same guy has attained the skill and knowledge to build robust scalable websites. And he will be able to host it on open platforms and leverage the knowledge of passionate user communities. I bet he'll do it in the time it takes you to boot up a single Azure instance too.

I'll tell anyone. Be that guy. Be. That. Guy. The guy who has fun, the guy who loves his technologies, loves learning new stuff and doesn't give a rats ass if his blog that has 2 monthly visitors runs inefficiently because he had a blast developing it and felt totally awesome when he told his buddies and they thought it was cool too.

Oh, and you look totally rad in that picture with the sunglasses, the moustache and the big watch so good for you.

p.s.: I develop in Ruby (on Rails) and Javascript (on Node) for a living. I develop in Haskell and C for academic purposes and I use C# (with XNA and mono) for my current hobby project.

>> [New Technology X] is released and offers a new and interesting view of how to perform [programming chore Y];

X is released, but offers only regressions and there was obviously never any need for it. Who could possibly want such a thing?

>> Reddit / Hacker News announces the release of [New Technology X] and is greeted with tons of enthusiasm and applause;

Reddit / Hacker News should become a Luddite haven. These people should stop their interest in what other people are hacking together.

>> Curious developers check [New Technology X] out – it’s an early release and thus they discover [New Technology X] is missing [Critical Features 1….N] and has [Stability Issues 1…N]; most of the early adopters utilize the technology sparingly in production and only where it’s the right solution for the problems they’re trying to solve.

Real developers should stick to time-proven technologies like mainframes and ABAB. Nothing that hasn't been tested at Facebook scale should ever see any production use.

>> [Group of early adopters A] can’t get enough of [New Technology X] – they create lots of blog content on how to couple it alongside other popular technologies and receive front-page treatment on Reddit / Hacker News.

No technology should ever be documented. This code was hard to write. It should be hard to read.

>> [New Technology X], despite lacking [Critical Features 1….N]; having [Stability Issues 1…N]; and often not being the best business case match is now used in 100% of production projects by [fanboys of early adopters A].

No response to this one. That's just irresponsible.

>> [Fanboys of early adopters A] declare the death of [Established Competitive Technology with Massive Following X]; [fanboys of early adopters A] have now become popped-collar programmers.

Once again, real programmers stick with time proven languages like PHP, Borland Delphi/Pascal and COBOL.

>> [Popped Collar Programmers] begin purchase of ironic / retro t-shirts; growing porn star mustaches; writing blog entries about the challenges of scaling [New Technology X] despite having a trivial number of users on their service; blog entries make front page of Hacker News.

No response to this one. Porn star mustaches are just plain irresponsible.

HN, please tell me, am I half way down the lifecycle of a Popped Collar Programmer :).

For what it's worth, I see what the OP is saying in terms of personality types. I share his annoyance at people who jump on the latest tech for no reason other than someone else told them it was cool. However, what the OP seems to be annoyed with, is essentially the lack of ability on part of some number of developers to evaluate technology before adopting it. That is a skill that takes a long time to learn, but ironically is built fastest upon mistakes being made. Thus your popped collar programmers of today might turn into architecture gurus of tomorrow (unless there is a correlation between the personality type and the preference for cargo cult adoption of technology).

Really, who programs like this in reality? Seems to be a very minor issue - aren't most of us too busy making stuff work? I enjoy reading about all the new tools but I'm not going to drop in something new into a full-production site for the the hell of it.

Totally agree. This is tools for the sake of tools and it's detrimental to shipping actual products. Excuse me while I tab back to Emacs and continue editing this Go code...

You have to hope that this is just a stage that new programmers go through, rather than a specific type of programmer. As they're challenged to iterate and scale with these undeveloped tools, they'll have to learn from their mistakes, and will hopefully grow from that. Still, as programming becomes more accessible (through tools like CodeAcademy) the sensationalism surrounding new technologies/frameworks will probably increase.

This already has a name, it's called brogramming.

Please see the following: http://www.facebook.com/getwiththebrogram http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi_AAqi0RZM

Anyway, cool story bro.

Yes! Programmers should immediately stop having fun with new technologies and sharing their love and passion for the tools they love.

Go back to work you inefficient popped collar programmers!

"I'm So Meta Even This Acronym"

why is this relevant?

The less time wasted thinking about this sort of silliness, the better.

As someone who went to a new england prep school, I take offense to this characterization of popped collars.

Bomb post by the big dawg, Aaron Stannard