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Comment by x5315 | Hacker News Reader

"Meet the Nerds"

That made me cringe a little. Especially when the rest of the page seemed pretty professional (save for the now industry-standard cartoon icons everywhere).

The "nerds" make 120-200k a year. The 25 year olds that went to Arizona State and studied drinking, getting laid, and "business" make up to 300k a year doing enterprise sales for startups.

The current culture is, "hey thanks NERD for geeking out on that distributed systems BS, really helped me out on my last sales call/commission."

Then the "NERD" gets to wonder what the F to do with their life come their mid 30s, while said sales person is set.

But yeah, let's keep calling ourselves nerds and allowing this to happen.

We also call ourselves "geeks," which is also quite bad, and we've done little to stop the media and industry rebranding us as "coders," a job title with little prestige or connotations of authority and professionalism, over our previous titles like "software engineer/developer/architect" or even just "programmer." Collectively, we're really pretty socially inept, aren't we?

"Look how diverse our company is"

Nerds seems to be a well used term there [0,1]. I agree that I'd prefer something else. Maybe they got the same guys that did the new logo to come up with it?

[0] http://nerds.airbnb.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/AirbnbNerds

We've called ourselves "nerds" since the very early days, at least 5 years.

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