When the Nerds Go Marching In | Hacker News Reader

When the Nerds Go Marching In

theatlantic.com

176 pointsboh64 comments

I'm sure it's just me.

But the more news articles read that write about "nerds" the more I can't help but feel increasingly offended. There's often times an undertone of ridicule in the writing that I cannot overhear any more. Please tell me I'm overreacting and should just relax a little more, because I sometimes feel that mainstream newspaper articles are borderline bullying. To a point where I've actually started thinking about forming a lobbying group to fight for more respect in the portrayal of technically inclined people like us.

Just a thought experiment: next time you come across an article that talks about "nerds" try replacing every instance of that word with "gays". Not that the result would make much sense but I think the gay community, despite their ongoing struggle, has at least managed to make it almost impossible to receive a similar kind of media report that consists of nothing but stereotypes.

If you do the above experiment, I'm sure you'll the offensive subtext in some articles, the self-content righteousness in making fun of those people who created everything modern society cannot be without: facebook, twitter, the internet, apps, you name it.

Maybe it's because technical people seem harmless that they think they can get away with their bullying. But I think it's about time to stand up against it and make our voices heard.

P.S.: I'm not saying that this particular article is worse than the rest. As a matter of fact, it's quite okay, compared to some others I've read. So maybe this comment is misplaced in this thread in which case I apologize.

I think this article is using the term "nerd" in high regard. "smart" as opposed to "glasses and giant backpack". The article paints these people as colorful characters and rock stars. If anything, I thought it was a little too fawning.

The Social Network. Nate Silver. TED. Nerds are actually doing pretty well in the popular culture right now. I don't mind seeing the word "nerd" in the title of an article. It's usually not a bad thing, and at least I know they're talking about me.

If replacing the word 'nerd' with women, black, or gay in each sentence isn't acceptable, then 'nerd' isn't acceptable.

I think this depends on the question whether nerds actively choose to be nerds, or whether they are born into their fate. Generalisations about people who willingly do/become something are different IMHO.

You're right that the classes of people named by your parent are all categories one gets born into. But is this really the defining difference?

I believe it may seem that "nerds" differ because after all, you're not born with technical knowledge, you get into it by interest and learn it through studying and practicing.

But it is not the technical know-how that nerds get ridiculed for. That's actually about the only part that gets us at least some respect, unless it's downplayed as "just technology".

No, it is the inability to comply to some social norms. For instance, most of us don't care about the latest fashion trends (because we think that fashion is ridiculous). Or, we don't easily pick up on certain subtext signals. It is this non-acceptance that perhaps drives us toward technology in the first place. Because computers don't judge us. Because we understand them, and they understand us.

We are not nerds because we like technology. We like technology because we are nerds.

I agree with all of that, but sadly the word 'nerd' is not clearly defined. To many it is a lifestyle choice, including some people who label themselves as nerds. If you compare, "When the Goths go marching in" (another lifestyle choice) would seem much more acceptable than "When the Aspergers go marching in" (which is closer to what you described as nerd).

Yes, I think you are right about this particular article, and maybe also about the other examples you list.

But I am not sure I agree with your conclusion that "nerds are actually doign pretty well in popular culture right now." To me it seems like your examples are the exception rather than the norm. Too many times I find myself reading the exact same stereotypes repeated over and over again: yes, a lot of technically inclined people are shy and their discomfort around other people shows in non-standard behavior.

But instead of showing empathy toward otherness, this and other cliches are too often used as an easy to hit target for laughs and ridicule.

Not so much in this example. Perhaps not in some of the others you name. But as long as "the nerd" is presented as some kind of peculiarity of society, as long as we get described with the same stereotypes again and again, as long as we're not accepted the way we are, I think it's worth pointing out that we don't like to be stared at, we don't like to be laughed at, and we don't like to be labeled. We deserve better than being looked down on as "just the tech guy" who's just good enough to help set up the new wireless router.

Again, I agree that this article is for the most part actually pretty good. We need more articles that portray us fairly. But even this one still yields to the temptation every now and then, for instance with the choice of the photo, an allusion to table-top RPGs ("Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master") and the n-th iteration of certain cliches ("He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out.")

Totally agree. You should go ahead with the lobby group.

I think the word nerd is like that other n-word. It's fine when it's used inside the nerd-dom, but it is offensive when used by someone who is not a nerd themselves. At least it is for me. Maybe it's just because I grew up in the 80's when being a nerd was not nearly as cool as it is today. Being obsessed about computers and science was a very negative thing socially for me.

> I think the gay community, despite their ongoing struggle, has at least managed to make it almost impossible to receive a similar kind of media report that consists of nothing but stereotypes.

Are you kidding?

Yeah, I get where you're coming from on the offensive tone in some articles, but I think it's absolutely ridiculous to compare the portrayal of nerds in the media to the struggle for gay rights and equality.

And on that offensive tone - I don't think it's really present, here. I felt flattered as this article hammered home the importance of being up to date on tech, and employing the kinds of people that'll get great work done.

I've noticed a tendency, not just amongst others but also something I catch myself doing, for people like you and me to be a little over-sensitive. I spent a big period of my life being ridiculed over what I liked, and what I did, and what I looked like. I got used to confusing insults being thrown at me veiled under sarcasm, and felt like the whole world was laughing at me and I didn't even hear the joke.

So I got mean. I stopped trusting people, and I always assumed the worst. If someone (particularly someone matching the profile of former tormentors - bigger than me, cooler than me, better hair than me, plays sports better than me) said something that was maybe sincere, but possibly a sarcastic insult, I took it as the latter. These people were out to get me and if I gave them the benefit of the doubt, they would set me up for a fall!

Of course, the real world isn't high school, and more than that, the world has changed and attitudes have moved on. But any geek who is still carrying around a defensive attitude has turned the tables: now they are the ones judging others, being exclusionist (see: people crying about "fake" nerd girls), judging people on their appearances (many of us are anti-suit) or what they do (and many of us are anti-sports).

> self-content righteousness in making fun of those people who created everything modern society cannot be without: facebook, twitter, the internet, apps, you name it

On the one hand this sounds arrogant; I think as a developer I'd be remiss in not including many other people in the credits (product managers, finance, legal, designers, ux experts - many of these people are not nerds). On the other, whenever I speak to people about what I do ("What's a software engineer?" "I uh.. make websites") the reception is generally positive and enthusiastic - most people acknowledge that they enjoy the fruits of technological development, appreciate the people that bring it to them, and often aspire to learn more of the inner workings.

Of course, there are some bad articles - but they aren't representative of people's opinions in the wider world, in my experience, and the number I read that are flattering versus insulting is improving all the time.

Yeah, this article isn't discriminatory, it's just lazy.

"We saw a bunch of stories about the Romney ORCA meltdown, we need something about the success on the Obama side. What's the human angle? Nerds! Great, print it!"

Thanks a lot for your thorough reply.

You certainly have a point that the kind of discrimination that nerds receive is in no way comparative to what homosexuals have to put up with. Gay people get killed just for their sexual orientation alone, and that is certainly not comparable to the bullying nerds receive.

But it was not my intention to claim that these two are the same, and if you got that from the "thought experiment" I described you misunderstood me. Still, I hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings, yours or some other reader's, with what I wrote. My point was not so much to say "both groups are exactly equal in the discrimination they experience", but rather to raise awareness that there is, in fact, discrimination happening against nerds. People today are more sensitive to gay rights, and imagining that an article was about gays rather than nerds might help illustrate potential problems in that article.

That said, let me point out one more time that I do not think that this particular article is especially bad. I've written it before that for the most part it is a fair depecition, yet it cannot resist the temptation to throw in some of the same old cliches that are well-suited to manifest a certain discriminatory picture of nerds.

If you are right and the number of flattering articles is improving all the time, that would be a very welcome development. I certainly hope for it. But that doesn't mean we should accept anything less than that. I am not sure I agree with your assessment of people's opinions in the wider world, but even if it was a minority that discriminated it would not be acceptable.

So am I the only person seeing a Democrats (Big Goverment services) way of doing things vs a Republicans (multiple layers of crony capitalists contractors) in the comparison of the efficacy of Narwhal Vs Orca?

I can't be the only one?

You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.

It was also fault tolerant. In 2008, at least, Democrats had paper backup for things that went wrong with the tech, and did end up using it at times.

In 2012, Republicans hadn't done any due diligence and assumed their tech would work. So sure they were that their tech would work is that they only released it to users on Election Day itself...

Indeed, and frankly I think the US dodged a bullet in that respect. I've always been interested in politics and have a belief that there's a strong correlation between the way the campaign goes and the way governance would go if the candidate is elected.

Decentralization is really the key thing, not whether the work is done by the government versus contractors. The government can be very efficient doing things in-house as long as the efforts are decentralized. The US Attorneys Offices handle tremendous caseloads for their staffing levels relative to private law firms. The Army Corps of Engineers is also quite effective because it's decentralized.

Things that are a mess are often centralized and involve too many contractors. Defense, the VA, etc.

I lol'd that Romney got his Orca app from Best Buy.

"Most of the Romney organization's core IT operations, such as desktop support and back-office systems, were outsourced to Best Buy subsidiary MindShift Technologies"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

That is not necessarily bad though, MindShift properly has a lot more experience in that area and the tech support is likely the same as what they normally sell. Orca (and Narwhale) on the other hand -- they are more of a once in a lifetime app.

Orca wasn't built by contractors, it was written in-house by Romney staffers and volunteers.

See: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

Orca and systems like it are also not particularly relevant to electoral outcomes, compared to all of the other things that campaigns use/build.

No kidding - ORCA should've been miles down the priority queue. That tens of thousands of election-day volunteers were wasted on it when they could've been doing more essential things is infuriating.

The Romney campaign didn't build the right thing wrong - instead, they built the completely wrong thing, which is doubly damning.

Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1]

I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience and no primary campaign distractions.

The Obama campaign had a v1 in 2008 and were merely updating it for 2012. Yes, they had to figure in mobile and the enhanced scale of the problem, but they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008.

The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008

Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?

But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....

I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have)

e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts.

Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates.

And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates.

There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.

As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party.

For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating.

The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped.

They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.

"Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?"

The GOP probably leveraged a Orca-like system, sold the hardware and outsourced the software for a short term profit gain.

That doesn't explain nor excuse the fact that Orca was launched the day of the election when the Narwhal team was practicing with severe outage scenarios a month before that, preparing for the worst.

I think there's a deeper story here.... Politics -good or bad - tends to attract people with strong political views.

I mean how many brilliant (ex.)far-right, feminist vegans would work on a campaign for a left-of-center, sexist-"I love to eat nearly-extinct Northern Finnish deer" candidate?

The bigger question is why the Obama campaign was able to attract this level of engineering/technical talent.

I'm sure these individuals were not in want of a job.

I'm not sure how persuasive the argument "any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development" is.

According to the GOP and the Fox News machine, the only people who supported Mssr. Obama were maxists-femi-nazi-pro-baby-killers and/or illegals who were offered free, student-loan forgiveness (not that they could ever get into Swarthmore or Reed or MIT without affirmative action)....or free cheese.

Either that or marvelously agile illegals who took a pass on self-deportation (the New Black Panther Party let them vote anyway).

But alas, I digress here....

I'm by no means unbiased myself. I think the 2 party political hegemony in the USA is a relic of the past.

This makes a case for a small government. A small team, in house, tightly managed worked very well. Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about.

You're conflating multiple different things. You can have big government without multiple layers of contractors. E.g. the federal court/prosecutors offices are a pretty huge operation in the aggregate, but it's all distributed so each office or court individually is small and lean.

At the same time, one of the ways to get "small government" has historically been to outsource as much as possible to contractors. That's why the military industrial complex looks the way it does.

Or it makes the case that the goverment should do things inhouse instead of outsourcing everything and having hordes of contractors.

> Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about. That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.

I think that this is a stretch since 2012 was the first time they brought the technologists in-house.

Nice discussion. Thanks folks.

  The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent from
  Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some
  of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and
  Threadless

21st century SWAT team.

More like 21st century P.R./Campaign team; the equivalent of the urban canvassers that put up posters and such.

"21st century SWAT team" is a title I pray some secret division in the NSA is currently earning.

"Also, a lawyer from Apple quietly checked that all the rectangles in the room were just as rectangular as they could be allowed, but not more."

> Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, "Welcome to the team. Don't fuck it up."

Jim Messina is a complete boss and I highly recommend that fellow hners read into him to get a good understanding about how things operate in DC. My favourite Jim line is the one he uses when he meets new political people. As he shakes their hands, the first thing out of his mouth is:

> How are you fucking me?

Silicon valley entrepreneurs should take note.

Look at those beards! Obama was destined to win, flown to victory on the billowing gray beards of ... something. Justice? The internet?

Beards got Obama re-elected, that's all I need to know.

Indeed:

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/bearded_geeks_for_ob...

Did anyone else get bored of the author picking out details to show that these guys met the nerd stereotype?

i think the point was to emphasize the contrast these people made against the typical political campaign culture

Two key quotes:

It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

and

...with technical people, it's one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers

Test.Test.Test.Test.

Don't be a dick, no matter how smart you are or how much you know. Playing nice is more important.

Brilliant - A.B.T. (always be testing)

  And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign
  went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They 
  started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices
  while they coded.

Is it too naive to think that Reed and his team are able to influence the Administration's policies? Their ability to raise Billions of dollars and increase voter participation must trump 'regular' moneyed interests.

Because they would gladly go work for republicans if Obama did not listen to their opinions?

But this glosses over the undertones of the article - that is, the Obama campaign was able to attract these people precisely because the Democrats were more forward-thinking, more progressive, younger, and more open-minded. Are the Republicans capable of building this thing? Sure - but probably not with a lot of the same talent that has traditionally shared the same progressive views that the Democrats support.

There is plenty of top-grade politically-conservative technical talent in America.

Yes, Silicon Valley leans left in some ways, and politically conservative developers are outnumbered. The Democrats could probably pull together enough people for fifty top-quality campaign teams, while the Republicans could probably only manage five.

That said, the Democrats put together one top-quality campaign team while the Republicans put together zero - and those are the numbers that matter.

There's a large percentage of Silicon Valley that is at least fiscally conservative - if the Republicans would just soften up on social issues I imagine many of them would jump ship.

Just for the record they didn't raise billions of dollars. They raised 100s of millions.

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance

Hopefully this team can use their brownie points with the Obama administration to encourage some more tech-friendly policies (immigration, patents, etc).

Also, we should be clear, that Orca was not going to change the outcome or make even a dent.

Was monitoring election fraud part of this project?

In 2004, Bush had ties to Diebold's CEO Walden W. O'Dell, and there was evidence of voting fraud in Ohio -- the exit polls weren't matching the results (http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud_ohio...). Later it was confirmed that Diebold voting machines could be hacked remotely (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3045086). A programmer even admitted to being directed to create a software "prototype" that could rig the machines (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEzY2tnwExs).

This time around one of Romney's companies had ties to the company that owns the Hart Intercivic voting machines used in Ohio and Colorado, and there were reports of potential fraud from installing uncertified software patches on the machines (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/mia-in-voting-machi...).

Eric Schmidt is on the Obama technology team, and Google Ideas creates software for monitoring election fraud (http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/03/the-20-most-innovative-peop...). I'd be curious to know how the campaign monitored election fraud and what type of countermeasures were put in place.

Karl Rove's election-night meltdown shows he was clearly shocked Romney didn't win Ohio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSiVhJq4tos).

What was the app written in?

we used python, ruby and php. a bit of java and what not sprinkled around for fun.

first off... a big hats off to you, fine sir. thank you very much.

i'd love to know more about the stack, it sounds interesting. if you ever get a chance to talk about the project in technical detail, that would be awesome. i'm sure there was a lot to it and a lot of fun stories. let me know if you ever get around to it!

"He'd told me earlier in the day that he'd never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him."

So many people get stressed out about the dumbest things that don't matter. Especially in IT, people like to tell war stories about their stressful job and all the hours they put in and how they don't sleep because there is too many fires to put out. Yuk. Harper Reed has it right. Do what you enjoy, have fun. Go nerds!

Is there anything beside the 'nerds are cool now' message? Which I really appreciate - but you know - it's kind of long.

That is not the point of the article. The article is an in-depth exposition of the Obama campaign's tech team, along with how they faced difficulties, how they transformed their own culture to mesh with the traditional political world (and vice versa), as well as the products they ended up building.

OK - let me reformulate my question: why should I read it? Is there any new insight, any ideas that transcend the then and there? I understand that an in-depth exposition would be interested to the guys that are interested specifically in the Obama campaign, or perhaps people that are friends with the guys described there - but what is there for the bigger geek audience?

Now THAT sounds like a successfully managed web project!

Blue State Digital

BSD

I got it...

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