Developers are not neccessarily nerds | Hacker News Reader

Developers are not neccessarily nerds

0xff.nu

27 pointshxii33 comments

I have definitely been "the nerdy guy" at pretty much every software job I have ever had. I get needlessly obsessed with the cool mathey parts of software and formal methods, and consistently people get extremely turned off by the idea that anyone in software actually does math. They took the job because it pays well and it beats working outside, not because of some dogmatic obsession with all the tech that powers everything. Obviously I'm not going to begrudge someone for doing a job for the paycheck, that's what we all do and you don't have to be obsessed with every aspect of your job to be decent at it, but it was definitely a wake-up call when I first started as a software engineer.

My first job after dropping out of college was working on billing and management software for Martial Arts studios. When I first got the job I assumed everyone there was going to be as geeky as I was, and be obsessed with trying out new programming languages or editors or the newest flavor of Linux/FreeBSD I was installing on my laptop. Instead everyone was not interested at all; they were fine just having the pre-installed Eclipse IDE (this is before IntelliJ had pretty thoroughly consumed the market), running Microsoft Windows everywhere, and would go home and watch some form of sportsball. I didn't dislike my coworkers, they were perfectly decent humans and always nice to me, but it was a little disappointing, because there was a realization that I would never really "fit in" at my jobs in the traditional sense.

As I've had a million different jobs at different companies, I've more or less learned that it's kind of alright if I'm forever the "weird guy", and I don't have to be "normal" to be respected and liked at a job, and I've become less disappointed in my coworkers as a result. Your job doesn't have to be your identity, programming isn't a religion, and it's ok if I'm the geekiest guy in the room.

I can’t quite pin down what it is, but something about this feels… bitter? There’s definitely something lost with having more people invade your community, no doubt. But casting a wide net where “doesn’t know what nvim is” and “being a typing monkey that doesn’t give a fuck” are directly correlated feels like you’re picking a radius of hobbies around yours and setting up a fence.

I know a ton of people who are into development as a design medium. They aren’t really into the nitty-gritty of the tools, but they will talk your ear off about colour theory, interaction UX models and their favourite eras of icon design. Seeing a lot more designer-developers lately, which makes me happy. :)

There’s of course lots of dull people, of which some percentage will become developers because it’s a career. But I just don’t like making nvim and YOUR nerdiness the barrier eh?

Nvim was given as an example because I was interested in it for ages, and only recently gave it a whirl and loved it, but the situation, from my personal experience, is even more dire, where for example people are not aware of how to fix the virtual environment they are working in, or how it works so they can ask the proper questions.

I'm in my early 40s. When I first learned programming it felt like I was breaking into some kind of cool subculture, with its own counterculture folklore and customs. 'Programming culture' seems to have shifted from 'Hack The Planet' to MacBooks and the Ivy League. I work with a lot of people half my age, and I have a lot of trouble relating to them. It seems like there's fewer SWEs who love tinkering with technology for its own sake, and more people who would be just as happy paving roads if it paid as much.

Just got a new job. The guys I work with are twenty-something jocks, straight laced, professional, powerlifting, disciplined, knowledgeable jocks. If anyone is still hanging onto the nerd stereotype, it wouldn't last long here. Some went to prep school and played polo. Some look like Calvin Klein commercials.

The professional class is thoroughly embedded in programming circles.

But still, about half of us are keyboard-programming stereotypical nerds and I love them too.

Some of us are powerlifting board game players ;)

Some of the most skilled programmers I've worked with don't care much about tools. And this was ~20 years ago -- it doesn't have anything to do with "lower barriers to entry".

They just get the job done. They definitely are not futzing around with changing terminals and color schemes

In certain domains you have to use the tools you're given, e.g. programming game consoles (at least 20 years ago), embedded systems, nVidia chips, etc.

Or just moving to a new company where they do things a different way

I'm definitely more on the "cares about tools" side, but I recognize that it's an anti-pattern when you spend too much time on that.

Sometimes it's more efficient to adapt yourself to the problem being solved

Developers are not nerds *anymore*.

Some years ago (10-15 i think) computer science and computer programming became mainstream, and a lot of things changed (some for the better, some for the worse).

I’m not sure how i feel about this.

That's why I hypothesized that this is due to barrier of entry. Interesting to see how the increase in LLMs is going to affect this going forward. Perhaps it's just going to be a different crop of developers altogether.

I don't think devs need to be nerds -- after all, it's just a job.

FAANG devs I meet are rarely nerds -- they studied CS in college and got into tech because it fit their aptitudes and paid well. They work in sprints, clear out backlogs, are on-call sometimes, and generally get the job done.

But on the flip side, as a nerd myself, I miss the passion that tinkerers bring and the hunger for learning new things and figuring things out. The kinds that know how cuckoo filters work, how to use /dev/shm, etc.

Maybe it's just my limited sampling, but the majority of devs these days aren't very passionate about their job. Part of it might be a function of them being a very tiny cog in a very big wheel where they have little autonomy to invent new things. There's also the long work hours and TC-maximizing mentality that leaves them no room to engage their interests, if they had any to begin with.

I don't love the connotation that the term "nerd" has for various people. In my country of birth, you know everything about soccer, you are "a person", maybe a "soccer team x fan". if you know everything about computers, or videogames, you are a nerd. The normalization of the term (good), did not change the connotation: "guy who likes computers/videogames/even board games".

Maybe it's me, but it feels offensive, unless you start calling the soccer fan "nerd" too (which would make sense).

When I was a kid, nerds were bookish and into math and the arts and liked seeing how different ideas and disciplines worked together. Auto mechanic who's into 18th century literature and likes to explain how the cars are "just like" those books? That's a nerd.

Geeks were more monomaniacal. There were Star Trek geeks (two opposing groups of them!), computer geeks (clustered around their chosen systems), gamer geeks, etc. Geeks did not accept the nerds. I wonder if part of the reason for that is that the geeks tended to be tribal and conflict-seeking and nerds were typically not "joiners" and tended to avoid conflict.

I'm a bit offended by calling computer geeks "nerds" because it robs nerds of identity.

this is so confusing, I like my "I like computers" thing, lol

I've definitely heard the term "soccer nerd" before ;)

I thing the negative nerd stigma was mostly with the millennials during our teenage years, and now that some of them that weren't "nerds" back then are developers now, it begins to soften up.

I was shocked when I ran across a relatively decent “full stack” developer who ran Linux but had almost no working knowledge of the command line. All they knew was copying commands from Google and pasting them into a terminal.

I never thought I’d have check for basic command line proficiency in job interviews.

Linux is mostly mainstream nowadays.

The barrier to entrance has largely been demolished (canonical/ubuntu are the main entities to be credited for this) and hardware support is incredibly and increasingly good.

This is all too common where I work, people just "run" the terminal through PyCharm without knowing what iTerm2 or MacOS terminal exist on their machines, not being able to read git errors (or most errors for that matter), not understanding that "man" exists and more.

Programming is easy. Perhaps too easy.

> not being able to read git errors (or most errors for that matter),

It would be interesting to add an interview question to the tune of "here's an error message; what's wrong?" (Where the message spells out the problem.)

Maybe normal people are nerdified.

Spending large amounts of time focusing your attention on programming stuff can do that.

This is the best scene : https://youtu.be/cjyqWsrpQAA?si=mCzW_05uF_udToyA

>Maybe normal people are nerdified.

Being a nerd became pop. The Big Bang Theory was the best indicator of that (and that's came out in 2007)

Hip to be square, as they say

And I think it merged with goth at some point

The Big Bang Theory was incredibly offensive anti-intellectualism.

Laughing at nerds does not make one a nerd.

To be fair, the intellect is worshipped to an absurd degree in our society. Some mockery is entirely appropriate.

Even worse, it just wasn't funny.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240525133858/https://0xff.nu/d...

As the world is eaten by software, we need more "developers", and that need only gets met by opening the gates wider. (until of course developers get eaten by AI and we once again only need the experts and gatekeepers)

Yet, with the current climate of the job market it keeps getting harder and harder to find a job nowadays, especially for entry-level positions. Doesn't that strike you as odd that instead of having more demand there's less even as technology exponentially becomes a huge part of modern civilization? There seems to be already a filter for those who are not "nerds" with the current situation.

There has to be a matchup of demand and supply, and I feel our industry has optimized for the types of jobs that are in higher demand during boom times and cheap capital. I've been in the industry since the late 90s and have seen the cycle repeat itself. The entry-level jobs always dry up and breadth becomes more valuable than depth.

This is a huge spectrum too. I've been on teams where I'm the need, sharing cool tricks and playing around with emerging tech. I've also been on teams where I'm on the opposite end.

I applaud the people that spend time away from their computer instead of fucking around with vim in their free time as well as spend 40 hours a week working behind a compute.r

There are healthy ways of combining both, but a lot of us do have trouble with either or both of those it seems.

One quibble: some aspects of being a nerd are likely innate, but many are a choice, and being the stereotypical nerd isn't necessarily a lifelong condition.

In my teens I was very into computers, ham radio, fantasy books, and pretty well typified being a nerd.

I became obese and took an unhealthy pleasure in hating the outdoors and thinking anyone who enjoyed exercise was shallow and probably dumb.

Then in my late 20s my parents died young, and I snapped out of being so foolish.

Maybe if the industry has become less nerdy, part of the cause is some individuals becoming less nerdy as they age?

Yes, I know far more athletic nerds in my 30s vs 20s.

The basement dweller pizza types tend to age out of it IMO, you can't do that forever.

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