Be nice to nerds

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702183-forget-cool-kids-geeks-are-now-shaping-new-products-and-services-be-nice-nerds

by jaoued • 10 years ago

93 68 10 years ago

economist.com

johan_larson2• 10 years ago

Are these the ads by GE that the article is talking about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xGoBlI_fdg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDIEJrog3s

marsrover• 10 years ago

That first commercial made me seriously crack up when I saw it for the first time. Great commercial.

kartD• 10 years ago

Oh god, those are hilarious

LogicFailsMe• 10 years ago

Third one is dead-on.

tacon• 10 years ago

Does anyone know where to find those IBM commercials from the dotcom boom that made fun of nerdy IT people? One had someone run in saying "Server's down! It doesn't scale!" and the other guy goes to his keyboard and says "Lock. The. Door." The other one had a web designer asking a puzzled businessman "You can have a spinning logo, or a burning logo."

anonbanker• 10 years ago

Does anyone else think this is just nerd blackface, much like The Big Bang Theory? We're laughing at the nerd, not with him.

gourou• 10 years ago

As the success of Pokémon Go, an augmented-reality game, shows (see article), there can be big profits in the avant-garde areas where nerds like to experiment

The article doesn't point to the correct page but to a story about Theranos, strange.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702208-theranoss-fo...

return0• 10 years ago

Chances are it was written by a bad bot

estefan• 10 years ago

This year tuition fees at these boot-camps will reach around $200m in America alone.

Jeez, I'm in the wrong business...

as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time

See above. I thank you :-D

bradleyjg• 10 years ago

I don't care if it is supposed to have been reclaimed. To me 'nerd' is a nasty, derogatory word that I don't use myself and I take offense when other people use.

gkilmain3• 10 years ago

Agreed, labels suck, though I have been called a bro-grammer and for some reason it doesn't bother me. Maybe because its the antithesis of nerd.

danbolt• 10 years ago

That's interesting. I feel like brogrammer would bug me a lot more than nerd. It could just be preferences though.

mordocai3• 10 years ago

I'm am perfectly happy to be called nerd/geek but call me a bro-grammer and you will definitely piss me off. (and I'll hate myself a little for inspiring someone to call me a bro-grammer)

rdrey• 10 years ago

I would hate being called a bro-grammer, because for me it implies that other geeks aren't taking you seriously.

Waterluvian2• 10 years ago

Very interesting to hear that. The opposite is true for me and I never would have thought people are still offended by that word. Very good to know that a word that's fun and light hearted to me might still offend others.

msandford• 10 years ago

It's very common for a word to be OK for in-groups to use and not OK for out-groups to use. When someone in the in-group uses it, it's acceptable because they identify with it and it's a term of endearment. When the out-group uses it it's a label and a slur.

I'm not going to list any of these because I'm not in most of the in-groups (other than nerd) but if you think about it I'm sure you'll be able to come up with some examples.

eistrati• 10 years ago

It's strongly advised to be nice to people in general, but I agree that "Chances are you may end up working for them" :-)

knowaveragejoe• 10 years ago

Uh, hasn't this been the case for quite some time now? What is this article saying that wasn't being said about computer whiz-kids in the 90s?

panzagl• 10 years ago

Nerds have been poised to rule the world for about as long as Linux has been ready to break out onto the desktop.

Eire_Banshee• 10 years ago

Andreessen Horowitz has invested in various gadgets and products that early adopters have embraced, including a nutrient-rich drinkable meal for engineers too busy to take a break from coding, called Soylent.

What? Does nobody else think that is... messed up?

mordocai3• 10 years ago

Soylent? I mean, it isn't really for "engineers too busy to take a break from coding". That's just the way the journalist chose to phrase it (and I found it hilarious as a soylent consumer).

Its basically the same idea as the other "liquid meal replacements" out there. Cheaper than a real meal and nutrient rich with little to no preparation.

I have it for lunch often just because I don't want to bother with making/buying lunch.

mfoy_• 10 years ago

I assume he means the name... it's basically a reference to Soylent Green and cannibalism. "Soylent" is a portmanteau of "soy" and "lentil", but "Soylent" specifically is most commonly associated with the movie about a similar meal replacement where the secret ingredient was other humans.

Because of that, I literally thought the "Soylent" thing was a joke, I didn't think someone would ACTUALLY try to sell a meal replacement called "Soylent"... it's just... a bit macabre.

AnimalMuppet3• 10 years ago

Of course, if you're having Soylent for lunch, you're still buying lunch. You're just not having to go out to buy lunch.

khedoros2• 10 years ago

Well, it's not like it's Soylent Green.

tremon• 10 years ago

Indeed, I think the use of such a derogatory description in an article called "be nice" is messed up.

s_dev• 10 years ago

I agreed with everything in the article and thats why I think it's a poor article.

Hall mark of a good read is being doubtful of the posited headline premise but afterwards being utterly convinced of a new thought or stance.

You could have written this 20 years ago and it would feel just as accurate. I mean the premise is that nerds are trendsetters. The article contains lots of a fun anecdotes but nothing convincing or more importantly new. Exactly what does this article say thats new?

Since Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg emerged people have looked to nerds to be good candidates for captains of industry.

biot• 10 years ago

  > Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but
  > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front.

Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that? It sounds a bit like someone who is a computer neophyte wearing (non-ironically) a t-shirt that says:

  CTRL+ALT+DEL
  I'm a computer expert

dragonwriter5• 10 years ago

> Techies in San Francisco don not only hoodies but > also T-shirts with “G∑∑K” emblazoned on the front.
Really, a geek would actually wear a t-shirt like that?

A techie might. A geek would have something more like "ΓΙΚ".

tamana• 10 years ago

You are confusing geek with Greek.

nine_k2• 10 years ago

No self-respecting geek would misuse a sigma where an epsilon belongs.

dragonwriter5• 10 years ago

Phonetically, I'm think it should be an iota, not an epsilon, though either is far closer than sigma.

sevensor• 10 years ago

It's hard not to read gSSk there. I scratch my head.

saosebastiao• 10 years ago

“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them,” wrote Charles Sykes, author of the book “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School”, first published in 2007.

I'm not sure why this guy is getting credit for a saying that was a common teacher's refrain when I was still in middle school in the early 90's.

Regardless, nerd (still hate the word, but I'll use it here for the sake of brevity) triumphalism isn't going to help it happen. It feeds a superiority complex and an underdog mentality at the same time...the product of which can be quite cringy at times [0].

Nerds are becoming increasingly important as technology and science become more prevalent in our daily lives, but at the end of the day nerds still can't do it all by themselves. Even companies that are led by nerds still have people who aren't nerds that work for them and keep them alive: PR people, HR managers, financial analysts and accountants, etc. I would argue that the 99th percentile of financial and organizational managers are 1000x more valuable than the 99th percentile 10x engineer. Even the nerdiest of nerd-led ycombinator unicorns would consider themselves extremely lucky to be bought out by Bain Capital or Goldman Saks private equity, or to have 20% of their IPO value swindled from them by an investment bank. These organizations don't give a shit about how the world works, just about how well it makes them money.

Middle managers that shit on nerds are never successful, but nerds that shit on middle managers aren't successful either. If you can't see your position as symbiotic, you are doomed to failure.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10238132

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

Honestly, the amount of energy that a person can waste on something other than being mutually supportive is staggering. It's generally much better to consider people in more human terms, than "Nerd" or "Manager" in any case.

sakopov• 10 years ago

After living in the US for nearly 2 decades I am still amazed at the fact that Americans belittle and make fun of people who are experts in certain fields and go as far as calling them names. When I was a kid in USSR I participated in a club called "Юный радиолюбитель" (similar to amateur radio hobbyist) where kids from 9 to 16 made electronic gadgets, radios, games and etc from publicly available schematics. I remember how fascinated everyone in my class was when I talked about the stuff I worked on. When I came to the US, still as a teenager, I was mocked as a geek or nerd. It is the oddest thing and still makes no sense to me.

az0xff• 10 years ago

Anecdotally, I feel that it's mostly because of stereotypes that nerds are socially awkward. In American culture, there's a lot of emphasis on being popular.

collyw• 10 years ago

Yes, just looking at the replies here, it seems that everyone wants to shoehorn themselves and other into categories. I am a nerd in many ways, but I am also plenty of other things.

asimuvPR2• 10 years ago

Culturally there are two main groups:

1. Popular or "cool" people. Anyone who is not "book smart".

2. Nerds, geeks, etc. People considered to be smart.

There are people who somehow manage to belong to both sides. But its very clear cut. Everything you do is defined by that. I don't know how it came about, but have noticed that it came to be during the early 20th century. If you look back at media from around after WW2 ended (late 40s and 50s) it starts to become used in movies and television. Popular people are into sports, cars, etc. Nerds are science types.

I experienced both sides in high school. In my experience, the popular side was more concerned in having a good time than anything. They wanted the attention. The nerds were generally better people all around. Nicer when you got to know them. I was a nerd who did sports and somehow ended up in between. But then decided to go full "nerd". The right choice because those friendships have lasted.

dragonwriter5• 10 years ago

Culturally there are two main groups:

Except, really, no.

1. Popular or "cool" people. Anyone who is not "book smart".

Except lots of people in this group are book smart, and even recognized as such by their peers in this group. It just isn't seen as dominating who they are.

2. Nerds, geeks, etc. People considered to be smart.

I would say that nerds, geeks, etc. as distinct from "popular" are defined more by perceived (from the "popular" perspective) overattachment to niche intellectual pursuits.

There is a very loose correlation with perceived smarts here, but its quite possible to be perceived as geeky/nerdy without being perceived as smart, and vice versa.

Also, you leave out (3) the very wide group of people who are neither particularly popular nor perceived as geeks/nerds.

serge2k2• 10 years ago

There are people who somehow manage to belong to both sides. But its very clear cut. Everything you do is defined by that.

If you live in a sitcom maybe.

pcmaffey• 10 years ago

It all comes down to our culture of hero worship.

American heroes are defined by Hollywood. The #1 trait being - they get the girl. This Darwinistic prerogative of American Individualism has been the defining factor of our hero worship. If you don't fit the description, you are lesser.

Tech is introducing "the ability to change the world" as a competing concept to biological evolution. Thus, we are seeing nerdy entrepreneurs slowly added to the lexicon of hero worship.

cafard• 10 years ago

American?

Ford Madox Ford quotes a saying from the north of England: When land is gone and money spent/Then learning is most excellent.

The Prince of Hanover who just caused a shakeup in the Gottingen faculty said "Professors, dancing girls, and whores: you can hire them for money anywhere." (Except, as it turned out, when the professors have names like Grimm and Humboldt, maybe you can't.)

No doubt one could multiply the examples. If America is at all a special case, it is probably because things traditionally changed faster here, and yesterday's learning might not apply to today's situation.

Veratyr• 10 years ago

Although I'm very much Australian, my wife is Russian and her mother is a teacher. During a visit to my wife's small city, we attended some kind of summer show at her mother's school, which had students from elementary to high school levels.

There were some great dances performed by both girls and boys, of all ages. Some of the dances were rather "feminine" by the standards I was used to (I'd say ballroom maybe?) and I asked my wife and her mother whether the boys had issues with teasing or bullying. They actually seemed genuinely confused about why dancing would lead to teasing/bullying (their answer of course was no, there was no harassment).

In my rural Australian high school there were a few boys who danced (and numerous girls) and the prevailing attitude seemed to be that "masculine" dancing like break dancing was cool and totally okay while "feminine" dancing like ballet would have you treated like an outcast, teased and bullied.

I'm not sure whether the attitude I encountered in Russia is particular to my wife's region (North Caucasus) or all of Russia but it was quite interesting to see just how different things were.

clifanatic2• 10 years ago

Not only that, but as somebody who was actually a nerd before it was popular, I'm terrified of the "coolification" of geekiness. As an actual awkward social misfit, I'm pretty sure that if nerdiness actually becomes trendy, I'll be uninvited from the "club". It used to be that, at the very least, there was a place for me because I could read hexadecimal and recite the TCP header format. If computer programming becomes any "hipper", I won't even have a place here.

vijayr• 10 years ago

Here is another thing that still amazes me in the U.S - making fun of old people just because they are old (and not for any other reason). This isn't as common elsewhere as it is here, at least in my experience.

sjg007• 10 years ago

Just watch "mean girls".. It's celebrification.

Kluny• 10 years ago

I checked the date on this article assuming it was written in 1998. Nope, July 16, 2016. O-kay. Thought we had moved on, but I guess the Economist hasn't.

btbuildem• 10 years ago

“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you may end up working for them”

Uhhh, no, chances are you're gonna be working for some MBA or other, alongside the other nerds.

nine_k2• 10 years ago

Depends on the industry. In IT, I most of my bosses had a definitely nerdy background, except maybe one (who was still pretty nerd-friendy).

kamaal• 10 years ago

Most bosses are basically political nerds. Their area of expertise is politics.

oconnor0• 10 years ago

So the argument is "be nice to nerds because they make and shape new things"? What happened to be kind to people because they are people?

imh• 10 years ago

At the time [2011], the naysayers thought coding was a weird, fringe activity for computer-science geeks.

Is this at all true?

clifanatic2• 10 years ago

I was already pretty old five years ago and I can confirm that this was not at all true at that time.

serge2k2• 10 years ago

presents the “brogrammer” startup culture in all its grit and glory

Not one of the main characters could be described as a Brogrammer.

Each month at least 70m people play “League of Legends”, a complex multiplayer online game; that is more than play baseball, softball or tennis worldwide.

... soccer?

The “sharing economy”, exemplified by Lyft and Airbnb, also was originally a nerd thing: they prefer renting to buying stuff.

or we prefer cheap/better. Uber and Lyft are cheaper than a taxi and better. AirBnB means I can rent an apartment instead of a sketchy motel. If anything Zipcar would be a better example, pay to rent a car short term so you don't need to buy one. The whole point seems odd though.

Brands like Mountain Dew and Doritos have sponsored video-game competitions

and are mocked for it... Drink verification can.

as a nerd I don't really like being lumped in with Dew chugging CoD players or anything to do with LoL. kinda /s

that feels as awkward to watch as an engineer trying to do stand-up comedy for the first time

because engineers aren't funny right.

Be nice to nerds

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