In war for talent, 'brogrammers' will be losers
cnn.com
cnn.com
What? Who would say that, ever?
> San Francisco-based Klout
Oh. Carry on then.
"Brogrammers" are pretty hilarious though. I mean, aside from the utility of being a "warning, we're a company of homophobes and sexists" alert, I think that it started as a joke? Then, there were people that didn't realize it was a joke and started actually using it. I think that's pretty funny.
I guess it goes with the territory, Klout is a company built around false-ego, why not have employees suffer from the same ailment?
Er, did you read the article? They acknowledge it started as a joke, and then go on to say:
"But the rise of the brogrammer joke and its ensuing backlash has some benefits: It helps talented women choose worthy employers, it gives a name and face to a problem that plagues the industry and it publicly shames some of the most sexist offenders."
He pretty much sums up the entire team I worked with at my last job.
http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom...
This is one of the thing that attracts me to Clojure. Rich Hickey is the exact opposite of a brogrammer. He doesn't care about trends, or social mobile appification, he just cares about getting shit done.
Hm. Makes sense. COBOL, here I come!!
Note: I rather much agree with you, Hickey rocks, and the attitude he's broadcasting is very refreshing in today's code ninja heat.
I don't tolerate sexism, racism, or bigotry. Period. Whether it has a catchy name or not.
I have noticed that many of the attributes associated to "brogrammer" are attributes I associate with immature males.
Here's the thing: I do not believe that shaming immature males is going to make them more mature. In fact, I think it's going to drive the entire subculture underground and make it much, much worse. The stories we read about "brogrammers" in 10-years time will truly be horrific, instead of just frat-house idiocy.
I have no problem at all with making workplaces more women-friendly, or in having a zero-tolerance policy. I also expect employees to have natural personality flaws, like most humans. As long as I don't see it in the workplace I think accepting people for who they are is a much better life strategy than giving them labels and sticking them in little boxes for us to assault en masse. And don't even get me started in the "business of outrage" where a new syndrome is kicked up and dozens of writers generate millions of pageviews all clamoring over each other to tell us how bad it is.
To put this in a direct business context, I desperately want diversity in tech teams. That's diversity in thinking, not in external attributes. That means the more eccentric the wordviews of those present, as long as they can get along? It's better for everybody. I'd take violent anarchists, Buddhists, and Nazis in a team if I could make it work. Just keep the bad behavior offsite. I do not want to live in your homogenized world.
Maybe it wouldn't work on a technology team, but it's an excellent set up for a "...walk into a bar" joke.
The do get shit done, though.
I'll have to investigate the other coworker for any swastika tattoos. He does speak some German...
I mean it is a nice political correct speech speech, but feelings have no place in business (except, possibly, to woe over employees or customers). Businesses exists to make money.
Have a gander: http://j.mp/J3RwfG
If you'd do that, good luck keeping your bad behaviour of knowingly hiring Nazis off-site.
Or "violent <anything>". What level of violence are we talking about btw, that this employee that you hired for your team actually bombs things outside the workplace, or that s/he merely stabs or beats up people outside the workplace?
Or do you mean as long as they're able to keep the bad behaviour outside the workplace well enough so you can plausibly claim you couldn't have known about it when you hired them.
> I do not want to live in your homogenized world.
LOL tell that to the Nazis you'd have no problems hiring despite their "natural personality flaws"!
It's a bizarre reversal of high school, where people want to be mad at "bros" for invading the sanctity of the programming world. It's now cool to be un-cool.
Creating groups to direct your ire towards for the imagined problems of the tech industry isn't going to help anyone. Solving problems is about being inclusive, not exclusive.
On a similar note the lynch mob mentality when somebody steps over the line just means that everyone is going to be scared of going anywhere near that line. In the long term just this trends towards a boring politically correct future.
Are you really making the case that there aren't any real problems in the tech industry? That's a pretty extreme stance.
Didn't the whole brogrammer thing start at Facebook? (hint: yes).
500 karma is when you get the ability to down-vote.
The problem with the brogrammer caricature, is that it exaggerates a few overt features of regular geek culture in a way that overshadows underlying pathologies in programming shops.
There are forms of intolerance and aggression that have nothing to do with homophobia or sexism (or any other readily vilifying -ism) but which are still capable of interfering with vital flows of information. Brogrammers are nothing more than guys who program and are still operating with much of the same belief structure they had in high school. They've failed to "make their beliefs pay rent" with ideas like "hot chicks in bikinis make the world a better place," "boys will be boys," and the idea that offensive language "keeps it real."
However there's plenty of that sort of failure to go around in the mainstream of programmer culture at large, in groups that look nothing like brogrammers -- in ways that even affect technical decisions.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_antici...
All of these articles that discuss brogramming are helping to shed light on the issues of sexism in the programming community. However, too often they read as though this is a new problem. The programmer stereotype used to be that we didn't know how to interact with women. Now we have a programmers objectifying women. I agree with you, the issue is larger than brogramming.
I suspect that the issue could be helped by having more female programmers. It's much more difficult to be bigoted (be it gender, sexuality, culture, etc) toward a group when you work with and respect a member of that group. Of course, it'll be difficult to get more women involved in programming given the current culture.
As for the entire objectifying thing -- when I see something beautiful, being a statue, a painting or, yes, a girl -- it makes my day better. And what is wrong with enjoying the beautiful things in life? It would be awfully dull if we were to go through life as if it was a Catholic sunday school.
Anyway there is nothing wrong with beautiful girls, there is nothing wrong with smart girls and there is nothing that prevent a girl from being both.
They do indeed make the world a better place in some way. That doesn't mean that they make the workplace a better place.
Tech start-ups founded by women are few and far between,
but they're highly attractive to female and male
candidates who don't want to join a boys' club.
I stumbled on these companies purely accidentally tho. I wish there was a list of companies that have a better-than-SV-average rate of women.
Companies with better-balanced workforces deserve to be recognized.
If anyone's serious about setting something up, my contact info is in my profile.
My take was that the 'brogrammer' joke was supposed to be a humorous way to conflate sexist geek boys-club culture with sexist frat boys-club culture. Relying on the stereotypical geek instinctive dislike of stereotypical bros to make them feel shame for being sexist jerks.
In that sense, 'brogrammers' don't really exist, but the undesirable behaviors absolutely do and absolutely are a problem.
I think the problem is that the joke was really immature and stirred up a lot of the "us vs them" social nonsense that isn't true and wasn't really necessary.
Plenty of geeks work out and do physical activities. Plenty of geeks were in fraternities. Plenty of geeks enjoy the socializing that gets lampooned as stereotypical frat-boy-stuff. And they may well not be 'brogrammers' in the sense of being discriminatory dicks - but we're on our way to making them an out-group and excusing stereotype reinforcement.
I could see how this could be true for female candidates (since gender is a focal point for them in a male-dominated industry), but as I guy I'm not sure the CEO's gender is going to make their company a "highly attractive" workplace to me - I'd be a lot more concerned about their track record and experience.
My feeling is that much of it is unintentional from men who haven't thought very deeply about the impact their actions have on women. The negative comments highlight the cognitive dissonance people go through when they're presented with facts that conflict with their beliefs or actions.
I do not live in Silicon valley, and have not actually seen of these "brogrammer" startups, but I imagine it more as a fun joke than a serious, misogynistic club.
All of this outrage over a joke is ridiculous. Yes, some people have made some stupid flyers (saying girls are going to serve you beer as you code? dumb) but most of the time it's just a joke poking fun at the stereotype that programmers are lame awkward nerds.
[1] http://www.facebook.com/getwiththebrogram (defunct)
[2] http://www.facebook.com/Engineering/posts/128074377271161 [1] http://www.quora.com/Facebook-Engineering/Who-are-the-people-behind-the-Brogramming-page-on-Facebook/answer/Don-Otvos/comment/416437Says who?
And that's pernicious for a whole pile of reasons.
In the case of Tasneem Raja, she was actually in Matt Van Horn's talk at SxSW, and was one of the folks pissed off enough to walk out of his talk (and explicitly says as much here: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/04/silicon-valley-brog... ).
Tasneem also talked with several of the badass developer folk who build FOSS tools for the news world at SxSW, who encouraged her to write about the phenomenon.
From that point, having been published in Mother Jones and gotten a good deal of traffic, other news outlets are going to pick up and start commenting on it.
This isn't a conspiracy, this is traction.
A few years back I had a female coworker who flirted with me endlessly. I stopped staying in the office late because she would always do the same.
"New trend -- shegrammers and the troubles they cause".
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sociologist-considers-own-b...
Give me a break.
If you read the mother jones piece, you'll notice that Matt Van Horn isn't the only data point cited. Just the exemplar that set the author off on writing about the subject. Just in the past 6 months there have been a number of instances of casual and blasé instances of chauvinism and/or sexism and then efforts to downplay the reaction.
Read the pieces and you'll see!
(that’s maybe 5%, tops, of actual incidents that happen)
Worse, it takes the expression of subjective personal opinion and turns even that into some sort of offensive assault. That site offends me as a man, thus I will add it to my masculism site.
It is getting really frustrating that people took the joke (that really wasn't ever that funny) and took it for truth.
This article would have had a larger impact had she instead focused on what DOES make a tech team work well; if she had focused on the qualities that make a tech team thrive, and how "brogrammer" culture cuts into that advantage. By writing a piece on a made-up controversy, she just loses credibility.