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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.
I’ve worked in offices with booze, ping pong, and arcade games!
but not for us. it’s used as a hiring incentive and plonked into the middle of the office, but any use of those things at work will quickly result in a PIP. the booze, ping pong, and arcade games are for techbros only — the founders and their nepotism hires, specifically. any engineer caught using any of those things clearly isn’t working hard enough, because they haven’t converted their entire body and mind into a machine for writing shit code for shit capitalists.
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Who could’ve possibly seen that coming? Oh right, literally any woman in the field.
I don’t want alcohol and work to mix. At best I’m drinking with coworkers at work which is just sad, and the sort of people who want alcohol at work much less a level of booze infrastructure needed to have it on tap aren’t the sort of person I want to be drunk with.
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That’s a great point. I hadn’t even considered the alcoholics who are in recovery or attempting to abstain.
Like, I don’t think anyone but active alcoholics or people with serious work life balance issues would want booze on tap at work. As someone who works to have a healthy relationship with alcohol I generally don’t drink at all on work nights (maybe a low or medium abv beer or a glass of wine, but I’m not opening a bottle of wine on a work night for sure).
Like yeah, college sure was fun getting drunk on a Tuesday night, but I couldn’t afford to get that drunk, I was drinking with friends, and I was 21 and didn’t get hangovers unless I was dangerously drunk. I’m a grown ass woman with a wife and career now and my body doesn’t handle booze the way it used to. If my job gave me booze I’d want something like a bottle or 6-pack of something decent to enjoy with my wife on a Friday evening, but even then I wouldn’t want alcoholics to feel tempted or left out. In general the less time I spend with coworkers instead of my wife the happier I am.
But these concerns must just mean I hate men and fun
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.
“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.
no u
you rn
‘nerds taking over the world’ no it was finance with techbros taking over the world. If nerds had taken over there would be a lot more open source and we wouldn’t all be familiar with the word ‘enshitiffication’.
One of the most famous techbros wants people to print out code and has trouble running a python script.
E: that these fucks can play with their venture capital shit while Real Tech Nerds(tm, do not steal!) like Foone have to ask for donations is pretty terrible. (Foone is a fun account to follow if you like somebody who takes old hardware and stuff apart in fun ways).
E: related skeet “1980s techies: Imagine a World Wide Web where all human knowledge can be shared and accessed by everyone. 2020s techbros: We will steal every word you’ve ever shared, every artwork you’ve ever displayed, lock them away in datasets without your permission, then sell them all back to you, but shite.”
Imagine being richer than god and still being mad about how nerds were treated in 80s teen movies.
Paul never evolved beyond that blog post (Edit: this one, which he wrote when he was 40 years old) he wrote about the poor nerds sadly. And the the whole nerd/jock thing has not really been relevant for ages anyway, superman plays warhammer ffs.
I at least appreciate that he points out that he’s describing American schools; my experiences of British schools doesn’t tally with his, but I assume from all the media’s portrayals that his memories match the common US experience.
What if we used different words in a different context? Wouldn’t the meaning change? Checkmate atheists
TPOT word chess, with the rules directly stolen from
^W^Wcribbed from^W^W^Winspired by LW
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.
If I hated nerds I certainly wouldn’t have Star Trek themed filk music stuck in my head. What I hate is a variety of things including the casual misogyny among nerds of a certain generation (cough gygax) and the way in which tech CEOs and adherents attempt to regild our society.
And yeah, exactly, if you can interact with others as a nerd nobody hates you these days. Nerdy shit is just culture now
It’s almost like they’re missing the point that techbros are misogynists and it describes a sexist mindset.
The term techbro specifically refers to someone with a business/finance background who acts like they have tech knowledge without actually having any tech knowledge.
Haha “as one insider told me (who is not me)”
Jason isn’t even a tech bro, he’s just a weird rich dork
I didn’t have much respect for him before, but seeing him absolutely lose his shit and scream for the feds to save Silicon Valley Bank instead of manning up like Rockefeller and getting his rich friends together to bail them out without government help shredded whatever little respect I did have.
Shit like this is why I hate nerds. (Note: am nerd, by any sensible measure.)
It’s like being a Radiohead fan post-OK Computer
As a Radiohead fan post-OKC that’s apt
Image description: a series of three tweets by blue-checks.
Tweet from suzuha:
“techbro” is just the reemergence of thinking it’s cool to hate nerds, mixed in with a bunch of resentment from watching the last 20 years of nerds taking over the world
Reply by Paul Graham:
It’s more a way to hate men.
Reply by jason:
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?’
so you can at once insult nerds, men, and fascists, what’s not to love
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
Yes, I know gig economy for programmers already exists, but to really make it the UberBnB for Upwork, the idea is to push the CAPEX to the workers themselves.
Uber became the world’s biggest taxi company while owning no cars. Airbnb became the world’s biggest hotel chain while owning no hotels. Imagine being the world’s biggest cloud while owning no servers.
ah right, soz, I meant to address that too but was typing from phone and fucked that bit up
more than a few of the projects/things on these sites tend to be in a shape of “programmer provides all facilities”, be it dev tooling or “before launch” site hosting etc. but in favour of your point, it’s still definitely incidental instead of structural/built into the system foundations
might not swing that way either, because it places a lot of leverage on the dev’s side (and in an exploitative economy, the money doesn’t like going for that)
Sounds like they called it “Turing” in the midcentury law enforcement sense.
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.
Thank you this is also a great answer, I still disagree, but I think it’s just on an emotional level and you’ve given me a lot to think about.
Apologies if I’ve come across as combative or rude, I’ve come from my “all” feed and I’m not as familiar with your arguments and terminology as I should be.
Thank you again for your post
The term includes those devs who carry water for the Silicon Valley vulture capitalist crowd as well.
Thank you, I feel that’s blurring the lines in a way I’m not happy with. But I appreciate your answer and the time you took to write it
Ah, good old TPOT, and the teenage-wisdom “you just don’t like hearing the truth” takes. Such elevation, blessed be the fucking clowns.
(Extreme double-lol at paulie coming in hot there)
Its almost as if a guy in STEM and a techbro are not synonymous
