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Its almost as if a guy in STEM and a techbro are not synonymous
Anyway if any of you actually do hate techbros for being nerds and wanna give a fuck you to computer geeks in general and tech enterpreneurs in particular, I have an evil plan for you.
Found the Uber for software development. Create an app to connect customers with freelance developers (particularly in lower income countries) and crucially, make sure the developers are responsible for their own infrastructure. Have the devs shoulder the ever-growing burden of cloud bills and server maintenance, minimize your own role except as a middleman and encourage a race to the bottom between the people doing the actual work. Use your VC money on lawyers, manipulative user interface development, marketing and sabotaging your competition.
Congratulations, you will have accelerated the inevitable devaluation of the computer programming profession and stripped it of its perceived prestige. You will have fucked over the majority of software developers and IT operations people. You might even break the pretension that finance bros owe their wealth to their skill with computing technology. You will hoist some “disruptors” by their own petard, hit a bunch of people for collateral damage and probably make a lot of money for bigger fish capitalists.
Do not actually do this, or I hope one day you will be treated like the pestilent leech you are. Consider becoming a communist instead.
Unfortunately, this already exists
Upwork (previously e-Lance) has a massive systemic lowest-bid-wins downpressure dynamic already, favouring labour from extremely low-cost markets and rushthrough result output. It is occasionally possible to find a good/decent bit of work on there, but largely I t’s a shitshow across multiple dimensions. (There’s more I could say here but it probably deserves its own post somewhere)
And then there’s fucking Turing, a newer entrant to the market labour arbitrage space (because, really, that’s what these are). Turing is a Startup. They explicitly search out developers from developing/third-world nations, mail them (e.g. I got on mail they could only have gotten from scraped commits), and then pitch them on a number that is “better than what they may get locally” but still far below whatever it is that Turing itself bills to end customer. And they called it fucking Turing.
I’m glad Alan Turing never met the modern techbros
<Captioned image of Miyazaki: Computer was a mistake – Alan Turing>
So are techbros just software devs? I’m unsure what it means now. I thought it referred to the bitcoin/venture capitalist types
No, that is not what I meant. Not all software devs are techbros at all. Techbros are people characterized by their romanticization of computing history viewed through a corporatist lens; an obsession with IT and Fintech megacorps and trend-du-jour bandwagons like blockchains or AI; a façade of laid back trendiness; business ideas based on rent-seeking and value extraction; or attempts to minimize, excuse and deny the deep-seated misogyny and racism within startup and tech corporate culture.
What I’m saying is that there is a certain prestige (albeit a steadily diminishing one) associated with the technical professions, paricularly software development, and the venture capital types are taking advantage of that fact by acting as if their wealth is built on their technical talents (e.g. Paul Graham appointing himself and his news site as champions of hacker culture or Elon Musk attempting his out-of-touch idea of code review).
The idea was that if you hated both techbros and actual computer nerds, you could help ruin that prestige by taking a page from the VCs themselves (Airbnb in particular being an Y Combinator startup). Make everyone an “independent contractor”, shift the ever-accumulating capital expenditure on them, make the crabs drag each other back into the bucket and position yourself as the purely extractive middle man. See how the techbros like it when you do it to their little sacred cow industry.
And as @froztbyte points out, some of this has already happened. I’m just trying to imagine the cognitive dissonance of pretending you’re a genius programmer while also believing (even celebrating) that LLMs will replace software developers.
Shit like this is why I hate nerds. (Note: am nerd, by any sensible measure.)
You think I hate nerds? Ha ha, fuck you. If I did hate nerds, I could never do the kind of damage to the reputation of the geek subculture that Paul Graham and his like-minded cohorts have.
Come on out and nerd fight me, posers. I will outnerd you. I will eat you for breakfast. You ain’t got shit on me. Give me six lines written by the hand of the most pedantic bluecheck and I will pedantically point out seven fallacies in them, write a filk song about it and arrange it to chiptune.
Yet somehow people don’t seem to hate me for being a nerd. I think I’m fairly popular and most people react to my nerdy interests positively, or at worst indifferently. If it sounds like I’m bragging, I’m not saying I’m some super cool gigachad, but that anyone is compared to these losers.
People don’t hate techbros for being nerds, or men for that matter. If I (a nerdy man) am the one who supposedly hates nerds and men, why are you the one implying that the faults I criticise techbros for are innate to nerds and men?
Oh well, we all know the real reason techbros hate leftists is that we make so much better art, have better sex, do better science and are oh so resentably attractive.
Techbro was originally used to describe the type of men who made it difficult for women in tech, then somewhere along the line the general public realized the same dudes were also making it difficult for lots if people in lots of places.
If tech folks never actually acted like frat bros, the bro appellation never would have happened. I’ve worked in offices with Kegs cor crissakes.
By the beer standard the most tech-bro-y place I’ve worked was Swiss Bank Corp / O’Connor in Chicago, a software focused trading shop. In 1994. NeXT machines and Symbolics LISP machines on the private trading floor kind of place, with refrigerators kept stocked with free sodas and beer. Beer was for after 5, except on St Patrick’s day, when coolers of beer came out at about noon. Also, Nerf guns on the trading floor.
And yet, at least for the people I know best from there, they didn’t turn out to be tech bros. Perhaps there’s a generational aspect.
Image doesn’t mention IQ
It actually takes a lot of IQ to infer, you know, context.
To be fair you need a very high IQ to understand
Rick and Mortya Twitter threadIn all seriousness there’s a difference between being a nerd, being smart, and having a high IQ, and the interchanging of these terms can mislead people. The same thing is happening with the term “Techbro” elsewhere in this thread.
why are you talking about iq? the image doesn’t mention it and context and object permanence can’t get you if you post enough shit memes
Let’s stick to one nasty reply per comment. I’m choosing this one as the one to ignore because it’s less coherent.
ok you’re hopeless, fuck along now
the punchline to your joke was The Aristrocrats and yet there were no aristocrats present in the body of the joke
in all seriousness, not all incestuous families are aristrocratic, and the interchanging of these terms can mislead people. the same thing is happening with the “comedy” elsewhere in this thread.
and you haven’t yet understood that you’re missing the point, and that you’re sounding like an utter dipshit with your foot so thoroughly in mouth?
When did lemmy get so mean? I didn’t miss the point. I get that the joke is nft bros don’t understand that people hate them because they’re sexist scam artists, not because they claim to be nerds. Are we limited to only responding directly to the main point of a post? That’s a little limiting to the variety of discussions we could be having, don’t you think?
Since people don’t seem to have gotten my point: I’m not defending techbros. I’m saying that it’s strange to make the title about IQ when they aren’t pretending to have a high IQ, they’re pretending to be nerds. Those are different things.
thank fuck I banned them before they could continue this thread. holy shit
haha, when did [Internet Explorer] get so mean?
IP is the meanest protocol because without it nobody could yell at me when I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the merest possibility that there could be a joke I don’t understand
Gonna have to keep the weird nerds image macro on hand (in scripts/shortcuts)…
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious…
your mum doesn’t mention iq
“What would the reaction be?” It would be different. It would be far more negative. Do you know why it would be more negative? Because women in tech do not hold power in tech. They do not hold power in the world. A misogynistic name for that category of people would be punching down.
By contrast, “techbro” is acceptable because we know who’s in power right now, and it’s punching up.
HTH
As one insider told me (who is not me): ‘imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists’ … what would the reaction be?’
With the amount of misandry omnipresent in mainstream media. I’m starting to question which way is up and which is down.
you rn
no u
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
This thread is using “techbro” to refer to workers way too much, there’s an upvoted post on here about how to take away the average working class tech worker’s job. You guys really think OpenAI is going to outsource to the gig economy? Uber for tech is only going to punish the least well paid devs, the generic webdevs just making websites for a small business. OpenAI isn’t going to let randos fuck around in their codebase.
A lot of software devs and tech workers are marginalised, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged. Too many people in this thread are completely ignoring any kind of intersectionality just because they’re men.
Elon Musk isn’t a tech worker, he’s a tech CEO. Sam Altman isn’t a tech work, he’s a tech CEO. Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Jen-Hsun Huang. All CEOs not tech workers.
The real “techbros” are all business people in an actual position of power, not the introverted QA tester just trying to get through the day. It’s disheartening to see so much class division, when your local tech worker is more likely to be an ally than a “techbro”.
In fact Software Devs are overwhelmingly Democrat (83.9%), it’s up there with Artists (85.9%) and Scientists (88.4%) https://www.zippia.com/advice/democratic-vs-republican-jobs/
edit: Leaving this up because some of the below replies are really helpful. I’ve completely misread the tone/meaning of the post, and I apologise for how hostile/combative this post comes across. I’ve got some learning to do
that’s great and not in any way what this is about, not to mention that you’re the one identifying the people you speak of with the horrible techbros in the OP. but thanks for your driveby
intersectionality is when you carry water for paul fucking graham and get pissed when the name techbro applies just as well to your shitheaded engineering coworker who HR can’t seem to fire as it does to your failson of a CEO who claims to be an expert programmer and has personally caused a significant amount of production downtime in his attempts to prove it
this kind of cognitive dissonance only happens when you’re on the verge of realizing that you are, in fact, the shitheaded techbro, and you have to do what it takes to pretend the label only applies to billionaires
The real “techbros” are all business people in an actual position of power, not the introverted QA tester just trying to get through the day.
If the QA tester goes home and checks his Raspberry Pi dogecoin mining rig, and is saving up for a Cybertruck, he’s probably a tech bro, if only a larval one.
