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Comment by fr0styMatt2 | Hacker News Reader

How does calling people 'brogrammers' in a derogatory sense make us any different than the supposed 'cool kids' that rejected us? Shouldn't we strive to be better than that?

(not saying that you are using the term 'brogrammer' like that, just posing a more general question).

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Brogrammer is perhaps used for efficiency, so you don't have to write a 10 page screed as we just read (which was excellent by the way).

I don't think there's any way to say it in a non-derogatory way if the central message is derogatory. The article seemed to be saying, we have a culture, and if you people infiltrate it, there is a good chance you will ruin it. I happen to agree with him.

> I happen to agree with him.

Her, for whatever it's worth.

For an interesting experiment, show this article to the sort of people it's about. Don't tell them the author is an autistic woman. Observe their reactions. Then provide them that background and repeat observations.

I realized she was a woman from this line:

>There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers, just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers who aren’t hackers.

The sentence only really makes sense if the final 4 traits are describing the author.

Meredith is a hacker under any definition. So that trait definitely is not descriptive of her.

I meant the 4 in the list (women, bisexuals, Texans, engineers).

The last item is "engineers who aren't hackers".

I have no idea if Meredith is bisexual or Texan.

It's probably most accurate to say that gender isn't a significant factor in my calculus of attraction. I was born in Houston, though, and lived there for 23 years.

For what it's worth, I don't recall intending anything in particular with that list of adjectives, but you never really know about authorial intent.

Here's what the sentence is saying:

There are people who aren't like me who are hackers. Also there are people who are like me who aren't hackers.

The list of people who aren't like her is: progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary.

The list of people who are like her is: women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers.

Why else would she come up with 4 random traits? They obviously have something in common: they describe her.

The "who aren't hackers" part doesn't apply directly to engineers. It applies to the entire list. So if you were to parenthesize it to show precedence it would be "(women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers) who aren’t hackers." Not "women, bisexuals, Texans, or (engineers who aren’t hackers)."

Oh, that makes more sense when it's parsed that way! English is often ambiguous. If you're familiar with Meredith's work, the fact that this thread is all basically because of a parsing error is all very funny.

That's a GREAT experiment. A hacker will not change his opinions on the article, either good or bad. He might even ask "so?". A non-hacker hating the article will mutate opinion, and now regard the piece as an inspiring essay from a challenged minority.

Exactly. I've conducted this experiment myself. One self-proclaimed geek feminist went from a very hostile reaction to what was perceived as something aimed at economic exclusion to a sympathetic reaction to a woman bemoaning assaults on the culture she values.

I had to do a double-take when the author was referred to as 'her' in the comments thread to be honest. I'm just used to articles like this, describing nerd culture and whatnot, to be written by men - the traditional nerd. That's probably part of the problem, really, expectations and stereotyping about gender (and race, and sexual orientation, and gender, and personality, etc etc etc)

Well that's a nice surprise.

It's not efficient. The word "Brogrammer" means "something something men I don't like for reasons I believe are their fault". It doesn't communicate anything, it just invites the reader to invent their own meaning, which has little to do with what the write was thinking.

The actual word was invented as a joke in a parody video, as a portmonteau of "bro" and "programmer". It then got picked up as an slur for "disliked man in the tech world".

I don't really use this word or feel the need to participate in discussions about people it represent, but for me, when I see it somewhere, "brogrammer" means an equivalent of "cool people" from high school. Existence of them became possible due to programming becoming lucrative, with plenty of easy learning material, and therefore, beneficial for people you wouldn't at all consider a nerd to learn. It's a programmer who comes from outside of nerd culture, who looks at it like a cool kid from high school looks at school nerds.

It has also a bit "hipsterish" connotation - brogrammer is someone who's "not really into it". "The true nerds" were programmers before it was cool.

At least that's how I understand this term. "disliked man in the tech world" is much too broad, as so called "brogrammers" are supposed to dislike "true nerds".

If we are interested in certain things that are not mainstream, and then other people who aren't really interested in those things come in and screw things up for interested people by acting in a selfish and conceited and exclusionary way, and we call those people jackasses or brogrammers or whatever, that doesn't make us the same as them. It's just an observation. And any culture worth its salt rejects forces actively trying to tear it down.

Really? I thought brogrammers were programmers that exercise and aren't introverted. Never really considered brogrammers to be a 'force trying to tear down programming'. At least that describes everyone I've ever met described that way, including some very talented, welcoming people.

Likewise, some of the most technically talented people in node identify as feminists.

Thinking about it (which I'm forced to because my Twitter timeline is full of this), I don't think anyone really is trying to tear down programming. I think the problem is the false narratives we tell ourselves about the other side.

"I thought brogrammers were programmers that exercise and aren't introverted."

I don't know how on earth you reached that bizarre conclusion. For starters, if that's what it means, then how would it be derogatory and then why would people be complaining about the word?

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