*Brogrammers* or "The Ugly Underbelly of Coder Culture."

[Rman Virgil]

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Sheds a stark light on otherwise baffling behavior. A night and day contrast, too.

But perhaps there are other PoVs with equally valid explanatory power - like hangin' out with Yetti ?

Still, i'm reminded of trying to mix oil and water. Fat chance, that.

Here's the Infoworld article link from a few months back.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/application- ... ure-190618

"Brogrammers" and frats...

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[aubergine]

IMHO women and older blokes aren't stupid/arrogant enough to work 18-hour days seven days a week under insanely stressful conditions (particularly coming up to release times) -- they work to live, not live to code. Younger blokes, however, tend to take it in their stride on the false assertion that they don't need sleep or any other aspect of a healthy lifestyle (I'm speaking from personal experience).

With recent developments in the way code is written and managed over the past few years, I think things will start to change. But lots of established code houses are going to remain young-male dominated for quite some time to come, regardless of what they try to do to break out of that paradigm.

[Rman Virgil]

IMHO women and older blokes aren't stupid/arrogant enough to work 18-hour days seven days a week under insanely stressful conditions (particularly coming up to release times) -- they work to live, not live to code. Younger blokes, however, tend to take it in their stride on the false assertion that they don't need sleep or any other aspect of a healthy lifestyle (I'm speaking from personal experience).

With recent developments in the way code is written and managed over the past few years, I think things will start to change. But lots of established code houses are going to remain young-male dominated for quite some time to come, regardless of what they try to do to break out of that paradigm.

You make some valid points, to be sure.

To make another related point from my experience I'm gonna seperate females from older blokes. (Mind you I've been fortunate that in my work experience I've collaborated with more than the norm of females that were major players. Love their energy and can't imagine relating to a culture of male dominated frats being remotely as rewarding.)

The female situation has been like this for decades. From the get go of this field / industry, really. Not so with older blokes. The phenomenon of older blokes has evolved to what it is now over the last ten years or so.

Let's use WZ as an example. The Pumpkin team was dominated by older blokes. By the time they came to designing and creating WZ those older blokes had about 12 - 14 years of commercial game creation experience and a number of those games seminal in the history of comp games. Those older blokes also made for quite a different cultural experience because of that wide-ranging, mature life experience they brought to the table in everything they did as an adjunct to supporting the codeing creation itself. The frat mindset doesn't have anything like that kind of power because of it's root insularity.

'Course there is the obvious exception of social networking creations like Facebook, but even that had to transcend its frat origins to succeed long-term in a competitive market place. This last speaks to one of the values of competition in that if you donot respect diversity across the demographic spectrum then you will promulgate an anemia that can surely result in failure, as the GOP and Mitt just discovered to their dismay in their quest for power on the global stage

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[zydonk]

Can I stick my nose in here as a non-techie lay person? I'm going to assume that "industrial" coding is - like other industrial grade activities - about productivity, ie profit for those who set up the industry. Young men may make up the bulk of the work force here simply because they are the most productive. The motivation is not money as such, but deferred income as in making it up to the next grade, where the income will be greater. Many of these young man will burn out long before - in effect they will de-select themselves for promotion.

The problem for young coders here is that coding is in a sense easy to do. You sit in a chair before a machine and keeping adding characters onto a string. It's like knitting in a way. It's not physically demanding, not even particularly stressful (like being a soldier or a truck driver, for instance). It also seems creative - in the way that all aspects of computing seem creative, in that one thing - binary notation - gets transmogrified into something completely different, like video games, sewage control, super-precision bombing.

The only real problem with all this arises when these young coders do work for themselves. They forget that they are only workers, that they have little or no objective management skills. Thus they tend to fall in love with whatever that produce for themselves - like how a battery hen might feel if it could actually hatch one of its own eggs - even if it is complete rubbish. Of course, this really doesn't matter - so long as they maintain productivity when clocked in.

Is there a moral to all this? No. If a sweat shop worker in SE Asia was desperate enough to need to work a textile machine in her spare time, what do you think she would make? One armed sweat shirts? Soleless joggers? You can bet she wouldn't waste her time producing rubbish.

[aubergine]

You're right in that the motivation for most young blokes isn't money. It's about the challenge, working out how to explain something that's perfectly obvious to a human to that lump of hardware sat on the desk. And yes, it is very creative, it's like you can create your own universe out of nothing.

However, I would disagree on your assertions that it's easy, not physically demanding, and not stressful. Coding can be incredibly complex, physically and mentally exhausting and unimaginably stressful. There's a reason why most coders work very long hours, explaining stuff to a computer is a non-trivial task.

You should give coding a go some time zydonk, seeing as you think it's such an easy task, much like knitting.

[Originway]

Can I stick my nose in here as a non-techie lay person?

you are such a troll, it isn't funny
obviously you don't know the first thing about anything technical, so why do you bother with your assumptions that are clearly incorrect?

The problem for young coders here is that coding is in a sense easy to do. You sit in a chair before a machine and keeping adding characters onto a string. It's like knitting in a way. It's not physically demanding, not even particularly stressful (like being a soldier or a truck driver, for instance). It also seems creative - in the way that all aspects of computing seem creative, in that one thing - binary notation - gets transmogrified into something completely different, like video games, sewage control, super-precision bombing.

how do you even know how old these guys are or what they do?

The only real problem with all this arises when these young coders do work for themselves. They forget that they are only workers, that they have little or no objective management skills. Thus they tend to fall in love with whatever that produce for themselves - like how a battery hen might feel if it could actually hatch one of its own eggs - even if it is complete rubbish. Of course, this really doesn't matter - so long as they maintain productivity when clocked in.

more whiny troll drivel

Is there a moral to all this? No. If a sweat shop worker in SE Asia was desperate enough to need to work a textile machine in her spare time, what do you think she would make? One armed sweat shirts? Soleless joggers? You can bet she wouldn't waste her time producing rubbish.

if you don't like this so called rubbish that only you and a very small minority of others claim, then why are you here?
I suggest you replace your avatar with this, it fits you

[Lord Apocalypse]

No origin.. it fits you rather well. While many of zydonks statements are incorrect (knitting is tedious and rather difficult depending on WHAT you are trying to create) he can state his own opinions.

Programming in any environment can be highly stressful for the younger folks as they do not have the same work ethic or even work culture. The older generation programmers know that they should not have to push 80 hr weeks. As for who is more productive... Have you ever worked an 80 hr week? I have, and more often than not anything beyond 60 hours will actually lessen overall productivity. Its the whole lack of sleep or lack of a day off thing that drains you.

For the highest productivity you really need an experienced coder as young as possible. But.. unless you are a 13 yr old computer whiz you won't find many with young AND experience.

Besides, the older programmers know what and how to do it and want to be compensated for it. Sadly many a corporate structure wants to get labor as cheap as possible. One of the reasons many companies try importing workers on work visas. Very cheap, young labor that is more willing to work impossible hours. Not sure if it is as common as it was when I was taking classes for my CCNA and MCSE. Still wish I had the money for my CCIE... now that is a certification that will get you places

[zydonk]

I would describe coding as exacting - like knitting (get a purl wrong and the garment is ruined) - which would be stressful if you were not a perfectionist. Two experiences of coding. (1) Writing a prog to map fractals on a Sharp EL-9300 (32k of RAM). That's why I know coding is exacting, but more challenging than stressing. (2) Did work for a software house in London about twenty years ago: there I discovered that progging is mostly a matter of "knitting" modules together. They created some of the blocks themselves, but most of them were bought in. Coding out of personal interest was deeply rewarding, doing it for a living (like most paid labour) seemed like galley work.

Obviously, I don't disrespect coders. My second point was really about indulgent coding as a compensation for the time and energy lost to the galley work. Coders can let themselves down here. They work professionally under strict discipline; they should also do so in their personal coding, be it self-discipline or accepted external oversight. That has been my complaint on the Forum - that coders who should know better have been content to replace working code with inferior code - mainly for the reason that they themselves authored it.

RV's opening offering above helps explain at least one of the reasons why this happens.