However, I'm not sure how I feel about the particular emphasis on mocking people who lift and take protein supplements. It's definitely obnoxious when people define themselves by the fact that they lift, but at the same time, almost everyone I know who exhibits some the "alpha" behaviors described in this article w/r/t working out (like showing up to work in gym clothes) is not doing so in a deliberately show-offy way. They just like working out. If anything, in my experience people who do things like that tend to have serious confidence issues and being "swole" helps them with that.
I know it's just a joke, just seems like a stereotype that's very erroneous to me. And for the record, I do not lift and probably never will. I've always been a more run/bike/swim type of person, although I should probably exercise more in general.
As a developer who lifts, it's pretty obvious the author does as well and is only mocking us in jest as opposed to being critical or derogatory. The idea for the article probably came from the lifting community where asserting dominance in your gym is a popular joke/meme.
This kind of stereotyping is an inevitable result of the worlds of "weird nerds" and "cool nerds" colliding in the workplace. There were no cool nerds in high school. Instead of working out or partying, we played games or fiddled with computers in sullen, slightly embarrassed solitude or with a cadre of other misfit rejects. The idea of someone writing code after a morning of pumping iron is strange and threatening to someone who's been marginalized or just excluded by the cool kids all of their life.
> the process of unlearning lessons ingrained from childhood takes a lot more than a cap and gown or even a $10 million VC check
Shedding these prejudices is just part of growing up, and a lot of engineers are awfully young.
And if you have an eighty gallon drum of protein by your desk, it's probably worth reading pg's essay on high school to get some insight into where the hostility is coming from:
> There were no cool nerds in high school. Instead of working out or partying, we played games or fiddled with computers in sullen, slightly embarrassed solitude or with a cadre of other misfit rejects.
The perfect example of taking your own anecdotal experience and assuming that it must be true for everyone.
This was not at all my experience (even though I didn't work out in HS or party like in college), and I'm sure many people here did not have this experience either.
I'm sure you're right, but from what I gather from reading and from consuming media my post still reflects the reality of secondary school in most of America.
Stop ruining our fun! Seriously though, there seems to be some portion of the programming community that like to shit on people for enjoying exercise and caring about how they look. Doesn't bother me a whole lot. I know I'll always get opportunities to beat those people in an interview if I am just better dressed and more sociable.
My armchair psychology says that the stereotypical programmer is physically small/weak, and may be unable to do much physical activity (I have asthma and definitely used it as a crutch in junior high and HS to get out of most any physical activity). On the flip side, the jocks in HS were often the cool ones. Think of the stereotypical football QB in any HS movie. Pretty much the exact opposite of the stereotypical nerd student, except maybe the QB isn't a total idiot.
I was told in HS that once I was out of college and had a job, it wouldn't matter how strong or popular someone was, but that how smart they were would determine their standing in life. Both turned out to be pretty blatantly wrong, but if you're told that, and if you're counting on that to be the case, it could be a pretty threatening thing to see that the jock who goes to Gold's Gym at 5 AM, tailors his clothes and pays a lot of money for a haircut actually knows what he's doing when it comes to programming or some other intellectual task.
Since college I've lost fat, put on muscle, started caring about how I look, and gotten married. The change in how I am treated by your stereotypical programmer is like night and day (for the worse), and the change in how I am treated by everyone else is just as severe (for the better).
>Name-drop as many of the latest software frameworks and technologies as possible throughout your rant. Use words like big data, cloud, and scalability. Mention test-driven development at least three to four times.
If we don't immediately adopt agile scrum kanban test-driven development processes there is no way we can scale to harness the power of big data analytics using our cloud-based deep machine learning artificial intelligence neural networks for quantum computing the internet of things. Furthermore, I'm rewriting the whole architecture in Vanilla JS on the front end, ReactJS on the back end, and using Docker containers to achieve a more scalable continuous integration work flow optimization process for our test-driven development integrations in the cloud using the legacy waterfall methodology.
The thing that's really changed in this business is that coding went from being about constantly solving things that had never been done before, to work where the solutions are about doing things the "right" way.
For decades the field of technology was brand new. Nothing had been done before. Everything was about building something from nothing. It used to take a tremendous amount of creative brainpower and unique perspectives on problem solving to get things done.
Now it's all about solved problems.
People who thrive doing creative, complex problem solving have to look at the world with the eyes of an outsider. They need to see things differently to hit on the right solutions quickly. They're outsiders - geeks, on the fringes of society. So coding was a geek's world.
But now tech has matured. The majority of the work is about ripping out the creative hacker madness of the previous generation and replacing it with things that are the "right" way. The work of coding (for the web at least) is not about solving for unknowns anymore.
You take away the creative thinking, you don't need outsiders. The work becomes simpler and more accessible to the average Joe. People who just want a job that pays well, who are motivated by routine and doing things the "right" way. Who are happy to spend all day gutting a codebase to replace it with boring well trodden solutions.
The new replacement coders aren't motivated by the creative satisfaction of building things from nothing. Their motivations are completely different. Things like money, like social status. These are the guys who are thriving in the business now. For those of us who like building things and creative problem solving, our time here is done. It's a bro's world now.
when i graduated from university, law was the coolest profession--there were tv shows about them and they got paid a lot. I don't know where cs grad/programmer was on this list but definitely not in the top 10 (maybe around 5,630 or so). In any event, during that time, if you were a senior at a top university with a 3.8 in Elizabethan Poetry but no definite career goal, people would reflexively say "you should go to law school"
A decade or so later, it seemed to shift to investment bankers. (And again, pretty sure programmer was nowhere in the top 5,000)
articles like this make me wonder whether in fact programmer is the new cool job?
Somehow I interact with other people that they always have the feeling they owe me something. Sometimes this goes so far, that people even feel bad to ask me when I owe them something. Also, my GF told me, I always seem kinda bugged out when working.
Both is kinda funny, because I'm mostly a chill guy. But it kept many people from bothering me at work...
Great Satire! But, I don't see too many of this exact stereotype around, especially the weight lifting type. I mean I see little bits of these behaviors in other people, but not all wrapped in 1 person.
However, I'm not sure how I feel about the particular emphasis on mocking people who lift and take protein supplements. It's definitely obnoxious when people define themselves by the fact that they lift, but at the same time, almost everyone I know who exhibits some the "alpha" behaviors described in this article w/r/t working out (like showing up to work in gym clothes) is not doing so in a deliberately show-offy way. They just like working out. If anything, in my experience people who do things like that tend to have serious confidence issues and being "swole" helps them with that.
I know it's just a joke, just seems like a stereotype that's very erroneous to me. And for the record, I do not lift and probably never will. I've always been a more run/bike/swim type of person, although I should probably exercise more in general.