gregp4

>Prestige and respect? Earn it

I and countless other programmers have put in thousands of hours unpaid labor to produce public goods in the form of open source software. For that alone I and my profession deserve respect (compare us to dentists, most in the US won't even take medicaid, let alone perform free dental work), and especially respect from these same media outlets that rely on the fruits of our unpaid labor.

> That seems unfair. Shkreli made the news for doing things that would have a tangible effect on peoples lives, and doing those things with a smile.

As I said in my post in this thread, journalists (keypressers) have it in for us. That's why we're "coders," "techies," and now "tech bros" in their articles. They probably resent the fact that low social status geeks are making more money than them, even if few us are actually rich.

To hell with these keypressers. Never, ever lift a finger to help them. They are our enemy.

The second article from a major media outlet about this guy? Yes, he's inconsiderate, but so what? If it were a blog post from a lawyer or school teacher, would the Post or the Guardian have cared? Would we see articles about a "Law Bro?"

The media, collectively, has it in for us. They keep using borderline derogatory labels for us in their articles like "coder" and "techie," and they publish hit pieces like the linked article smearing us as if we were some evil 1%, despite almost none of us making as much as the average dentist.

They are stripping us of what little prestige and respect we once had, and we are just letting them do it. And there's no shortage of programmers willing to argue with you that it's not even happening, and that there's nothing wrong non-technical English majors with an ax to grind attempting to re-brand us "coders" and our profession "coding."

This article (and the comments) are relevant:

http://chickenwing.software/scratches/programming/on-coders-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/45wzup/on_code...