On Technical Entitlement

by tessr • 14 years ago

75 95 14 years ago

Normally when I see accusations of entitlement, it's quickly answered by people who deny it or otherwise reveal their entitlement via their ignorance of the problem. I truly hope that I'm not engaging in that, but I don't understand the "entitlement" aspect.

I guess I'm confused as to what technical entitlement is? At some points in the article it seems to simply be technical ability? Or is it technical ability that's used (purposefully?) to put down others? The article seems to place a girl soldering at a young age in with people who demean those who score low on a test all under an umbrella of "entitled". But I'm not sure this is intentional.

>I know logically that I’m pretty good. But I never feel like I’m as good, or as experienced, as everyone else. I always feel like I’m behind, trying to catch up to a group of super-elites who’ve been programming since they could walk.

This is how I feel all day, every day and yet because I started before my peers and was a helpful resource when we were in our first CS classes they regard me in this manner. Most of the time I have to shrug and say "I don't know" which they find surprising. Which leads back to me feeling like I'm trying to catch up with those people that do know it all. (Then again, I also acknowledge that some people know more about somethings [surely many things] than I do, but there are probably some things that I know more about. We are the sum of our experiences after all). I think there is always someone who knows more, and someone who knows less. I try to use that as motivation to learn more and get better.

I think maybe I just take issue with the word "entitlement". It has a different connotation to me.

I think I agree with the conclusion of the post. There's almost two issues at the heart of this. On one hand, it's hard to enter any field when your peers have an upper-hand of any kind. On the other, your peers can do things to make the field more approachable - like not be jerks, be helpful, etc.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how one solves this problem. Some people are destined to be jerks, and when they see a strength over someone else, they will use it to make themselves feel better. :(

((Just read the bio, I'm also an SDE Intern at MS. Small, small world.))

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

I'm in the same boat as you. I don't really know what she's talking about. Is this like the kid that started playing baseball when he was 4 and ends up better than everyone else in middle school? Or am I missing it completely...

nja• 14 years ago

If I understood correctly, it's the attitude that one's technical accomplishments (especially at a young age) serve as proof of superiority over others.

I agree that it's a problem, and I look forward to the discussion on HN about how to not only avoid it ourselves but how to encourage others to do so as well.

cluda01• 14 years ago

My understanding of it is that technical entitlement is a characteristic of someone who uses their early and rapid advancements with electronics or computers to be a know it all jerk. The main problem stated here is that they drive people away from the field before they get to honestly evaluate whether or not computer science is a viable career choice for them.

Frankly this isn't new or unique to technology, these people crop up everywhere humans do. Think unapproachable meat head at the gym. What's unique to technology is that it's "ok" or perceived as socially acceptable for technologists to behave this way. It's not.

She closes with (paraphrasing and generalizing) since mainstream society at large thinks its acceptable (if only to be avoided by non-technically inclined people) we need to change the attitude ourselves. From this the technology field will advance with the huge increase in potential talent pool.

tessr14• 14 years ago

This sums my points up really, really nicely. Thanks!

greggman• 14 years ago

What does this have to do with entitlement though?

en·ti·tle·ment/enˈtītlmənt/ Noun: The fact of having a right to something. The amount to which a person has a right.

Usually this is applied to someone that believes they are entitled to something. Food, housing..,

I don't see anything these jerk programmers are thinking they are entitled too.

nzmsv• 14 years ago

Great post. But why is there a biographic blurb about being a developer at Microsoft at 18 at the end? Isn't this exactly the kind of "in your face, I did cooler things at 18 than you ever will" kind of thing that you are arguing against?

On another note, I think one of the problems in the community is that criticism is directed at people, not their code. We forget that people can and do learn and get better. For an example, read the comments about people who fail the FizzBuzz test, or those who code in PHP.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

Surely it is no sin to state one's bio on one's own blog. Especially if one avoids using phrases like "in your face, clueless peons!!!"

tessr14• 14 years ago

The next time I write my boilerplate bio, I'm totally going to use that line.

Just kidding. (Can people on HN read sarcasm? I never know.)

andrewflnr2• 14 years ago

It seemed to me like a boilerplate signature, mainly because of the italics.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

And that's the point: her boilerplate signature is basically exactly the sort of thing she's complaining about (as far as I can tell from the post, which, admittedly, left me somewhat confused).

thyrsus• 14 years ago

Let's adopt this attitude toward those who use what we might consider inferior tools (PHP in this example): it is harder to succeed with an inferior tool, thus success with it is to be all the more admired - in the same way that one might admire someone who implemented a web server on a TRS-80, or dug a basement with a simple shovel.

From there, one can ask: why did you do it that way? And then do our best to learn from the answer.

pnathan2• 14 years ago

Sorry, but, actually, intern, not developer.

tessr14• 14 years ago

Indeed.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

I know logically that I’m pretty good. But I never feel like I’m as good, or as experienced, as everyone else. I always feel like I’m behind, trying to catch up to a group of super-elites who’ve been programming since they could walk.

Me too. I think that for most people, that feeling will never fully go away. It's a common enough sentiment across all disciplines that we have a name for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

But, I was confused by this paragraph:

People often cite social ineptitude as a reason for unpleasant behavior in tech. But, frankly, I’m tired of that excuse. The fact is, the behavior that comes from technical entitlement is poisonous.

My confusion is that I don't think of it as an excuse, but as the fundamental reason. The remainder of your post discusses how we can fix the fundamental reason.

jerf2• 14 years ago

This sounds a lot more like the problem than entitlement.

But nothing can be done about it. Getting professionals in the field to be more respectful of women? Can be done. Making efforts to reach out in elementary schools earlier and get girls more interested in tech at an early age? Sure. Great stuff. Getting teenaged boys to stop swaggering at each other, especially in front of the girls? Like stopping the tide from coming in. Never going to happen.

No sarcasm, no cynicism. You can't make teenage boys not be teenage boys. People have been trying for a long time for reasons a lot better and more numerous than this.

It may help to be less intimidated, though, to point out that while swaggering at each other, teenage boys can often be... shall we say... less than truthful? I've been programming since I was about nine... if by "programming" you mean stringing together some GOTOs and PRINTs in BASIC. I didn't really start programming programming until college. But rest assured teenage-boy me isn't exactly going to fill in the less-than-flattering details of my tech experience while claiming to have been programming since I was nine.

(Oh... and... don't try to throw this fact back in the teenaged boy's face. Whatever will happen, it won't be fun for anyone. Just keep it in the back of your head, share it as needed.)

Tichy6• 14 years ago

I don't think if somebody says "I have been programming since age 9" people assume that age 9 that person was engineering a huge enterprise project employing TDD.

slaundy• 14 years ago

If the problem is something inherent in the male constitution, then why don't we see this disparity across all majors?

tessr14• 14 years ago

Hmm, maybe. I guess I meant more that bad behavior is more acceptable in tech because people are "socially awkward"--when, really, it doesn't matter WHY people are exclusive because the effects don't change.

roguecoder3• 14 years ago

Anyone who is trying to one-up someone else is exhibiting social intelligence. The "socially awkward" excuse is completely illogical. Nerds who act that way are acting just like all the jocks we disparage. Just because they are using lines of code and obscure knowledge instead of pushups or interceptions caught doesn't mean they aren't doing exactly the same thing.

I think that bad behavior is more acceptable in tech because people think being abnormal and living in a "meritocracy" gives them a right to treat other people, especially normal people or anyone they feel superior to, badly. It leads to lots of trying to prove you aren't a "normal" person or somehow inferior so the people around you won't treat you badly. It is a miserable way to live.

The people who are actually weird and different are treated badly by the so-called "socially awkward" nerds. I agree with you: it is an excuse for why they shouldn't be expected to know better. There is no such thing, though. I'm dyslexic and I still had to learn to read and I'm still judged on my spelling. Even if something is harder for someone, that just means they need to work harder at it or find another way to get to the same end goal.

The people I have known who are actually on the autism spectrum, rather than just using it as an excuse, all have.

calinet6• 14 years ago

Fantastic article, odd terminology—I think "pretentiousness" or something else might describe it better.

The author should read the book "The No Asshole Rule" if she hasn't already. I think it explores exactly this phenomenon in the corporate environment and describes how to avoid it.

Lastly, I think you'll find this kind of pretentiousness isn't unique to our field. Anytime you find a large enough group, the assholes will shine through. I'm all for calling attention to them and not letting them control the community though, so you have my full support!

tessr14• 14 years ago

I'll definitely check that out, thanks!

xaa2• 14 years ago

Of course, arrogance and elitism are bad. But I hope tech never stops being a meritocracy.

I would wager that most would-be CS people are put off from the subject not because of the arrogance of current programmers but simply because the subject is hard.

jmduke• 14 years ago

"I would wager that most would-be CS people are put off from the subject not because of the arrogance of current programmers but simply because the subject is hard."

Maybe you don't realize it, but that mindset is arrogant. A lot of subjects are hard. CS isn't easy, but it sure seems a lot more difficult than it really is when you're sitting in a 100-level class struggling to understand the material when a sizable portion of the students are engaging in pissing contents because they mastered the material in middle school.

I know -- I've been one of those struggling students.

scott_s3• 14 years ago

I agree. While I saw technical entitlement in my CS undergrad courses, I never did see it in my math and physics courses.

xaa2• 14 years ago

In the U.S. there is a documented deficit of students entering STEM fields, which includes (but is not limited to) CS.

My thesis is that this is because these subjects are objectively harder than, say, business or English. Whether it's politically correct or arrogant to say so has no bearing on whether it's true or not.

tytso• 14 years ago

One of the big problems is that there is such a huge range of ability for people who are otherwise, say, in the entering freshman class. A quarter of a century ago (that makes me feel old!) one of the ways which MIT solved the problem was by using Scheme in the intro to CS class. The first lecture was all about abstractions and lambda's, and nothing about Lisp/Scheme syntax --- and the first problem set asked you to code in Scheme. You were expected to figure it all out from the language reference manual.

That was a pretty big leveler back then, because most students, even those who had used a lot of computers in grade school and elementary school, were mostly exposed to Apple II's and TRS-80's and Microsoft Basic. Lisp would have been new to most students. (I had learned PDP-8 assembler around age 7 or 8, and FOCAL a few years earlier, and later some Pascal and C code, and Z80 assembler, but Lisp was pretty new to me.)

These days, it's a lot harder. I suppose the rough equivalent would be handing freshmen a problem set using ML. But I'm not sure Universities could get away with that today. Back then, we had too many people trying to get into computer science, so handing out a problem set w/o any prior instruction and expecting you to learn a new language from the reference manual was part of the filtering process so we wouldn't have too many people trying to become CS majors....

pnathan2• 14 years ago

The idea of having a levelling language as the first thing you do in computer science really attracts me.

One of the big turnoffs is the know-it-alls in early CS courses. Having a language like Scheme or ML or Haskell whack them on their butt - just like everyone else would provide a certain democracy to the pain.

I'm pretty sure I was one of those jackasses back then. ML would have handed me back my head on a copper platter, and I would have really learned higher level computer science a lot earlier.

ef4• 14 years ago

Having taken the classic MIT 6.001 scheme course, the choice of language didn't really level things out. There was still a big difference between people who came in with years of exposure to code and people who didn't.

Even though many of the topics were new to everybody, the experienced people had a better context to understand why each topic was interesting and useful. That kind of intrinsic motivation makes any kind of learning easier.

I had written lots of terrible programs already, so for me the course was a series of Aha! moments. People without that experience seemed to have a harder time with "What's the point of this?".

It makes me wonder if one couldn't design a curriculum that's deliberately designed to get people writing terrible programs first, in order to motivate the techniques for avoiding those problems.

tessr14• 14 years ago

Haha! Well, at Penn one of our intro courses is in OCaml, which is a fantastic leveling language. I felt like I was programming for the firs time... which, actually, was awesome! I know a lot of my classmates felt like they could skip the course, but I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed learning to think in a new way.

carterschonwald• 14 years ago

I can assure you that scheme or haskell isn't a leveler :-), there'll still be folks who taught themselves scheme and haskell and a dash of pl theory / general cs during high school self directed. That is all :-)

(personally know a number of such folks, and they're some of the most amazingly nice & open folks I know)

SteveJS• 14 years ago

I experienced both sides of that filtering by major. I took 6.001 and 18.001 freshman year. Scheme was great. However the first problem set for 18.001 convinced me being a math major was dumb. Why do rote proofs like A*0=0 for all A? I am always grateful I later took Arthur Mattuck's 18.100 which gave access to that mindset for people who didn't have it naturally. I am also grateful that I quickly learned what I truly enjoyed rather than having a long drawn out process to realize it.

drewinglis• 14 years ago

At CMU, one of the first classes is, in fact, in SML.

strlen• 14 years ago

Well, most students these days still would not have been exposed to lambda calculus in high school: I'd wager that most students who played with Lisp/Scheme in high school wrote imperative code (taking advantage of mutable cons cells and loop/do macros). Indeed, the very website we're conversing on is written in imperative-style Lisp.

So no, I don't think that students with prior programming experience are significantly better prepared for tail recursion, Y-combinators, and purely functional data structures upon entering a CS program.

My theory is that it no longer levels the playing as other effects have crept up: the "technically entitled" student today mostly visible has an edge over a highly talented but (not _yet_) experienced student stemming from a strong knowledge of UNIX (thanks to Linux and OS X) and other development tools. In the 1980s/early 90s, learning a new environment (UNIX, VMS, TOPS-20, ITS) and new tools (vi, emacs, make) would have leveled the field for all students.

While an anecdote doesn't prove this theory, a friend told me how she took $AnotherPrestigiousUniversity's[1] equivalent of 6.001. She had no prior programming experience (at all) and got an A (not easy, as the average GPA in that university's CS department was significantly below 3.0). Nonetheless she did not consider switching to a CS major. The environment played a role: she specifically called out the attitude students with prior UNIX experience had towards those without it. She also felt that much of the knowledge gained in that class wasn't applicable to real-world software development or to her natural sciences major.

Personally if I don't think switching to ML or even Haskell would mean students dropping out of CS: CMU uses SML for CS majors, my alma mater (a good, but not a top-15 CS/Engineering school) used Haskell once and now uses SML, as do many other schools. However, I don't think teaching typed lambda calculus would ameliorate technical entitlement any more than teaching untyped lambda calculus does.

A greater equalizer would be to require students to use more of their EE, Math, and hard sciences knowledge in their programming courses: I've noted that EECS/CSE majors tend to be more diverse than the CS majors due to "a fancy .vimrc won't help you pass diff-eqs" effect. However, it may have the adverse effects of also repelling less mathematically inclined CS majors (whether technically entitled or not).

I started out as an incredibly technically entitled student. I was able to use that to convince a university to admit me despite modest high school grades (by attending a community college college for a year and writing a personal statement about a programming internship I had in HS as part of the transfer application). What humbled me were upper division CS courses and realizing that I could learn a tremendous deal from people who (oh, the horror!) used pine instead of mutt. It turns out knowing UNIX minutia was not in itself terribly relevant for long term career success...

I still think I benefited greatly from pre-university hacking, but when I took a graduate machine learning course, I couldn't help but think "what if I spent the time to grok integration by parts in my HS calculus class instead of day dreaming about how I'll reconfigure my X11 window manager?" Perhaps that's why there's far less technical arrogance in the industry vs. academia: may be the students who retain that arrogance convince themselves that there's nothing they can learn from others and graduate with less qualifications that their peers?

[1] Obscuring details as not to discourage any students from applying to this university. Today's situation may be radically different from ~2002-2004 timeframe.

kandalf• 14 years ago

Penn's second intro class is indeed in OCaml, mostly due to the effect it has of leveling the playing field. It really turned out quite well, and most of the students enjoy it.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

The first classes in CS are indeed LISP at the local federal university.

That doesn't change the fact (it actually makes it even more amazing) that some people study CS for years, yet have near zero programming ability.

wonnage• 14 years ago

Take a common behavior (an desire to show off), give it a special name, now it's a psychological disorder plaguing our community.

Let's be serious now, we all understand that showing off is rude. A great majority of developers both male and female are good enough human beings to avoid being rude. But as with any community, you will have assholes who you'll have to either deal with harshly (e.g kick them out of the event they disrupt) or ignore (as you would when reading Youtube comments).

abc_lisper• 14 years ago

tl;dr: Nothing unusual, move along

tessr14• 14 years ago

temphn• 14 years ago

Unless you are Mozart himself, you will always be Salieri to someone.

datalus2• 14 years ago

My stepfather, who passed recently, always told me this in every discussion we got into that was tangentially related to this sort of topic. I think he really had it instilled in him while he was at MIT. It makes a lot of sense, there's always going to be someone else better than you. With that fact in mind, it becomes easier to be happier about not being top dog. It also makes it amusing to watch people jockey for position, be confident in yourself and fly as high as you can . Find like minded people who make you better and enrich your life, there's no time to waste on the a-holes.

This may sound overly simplistic, but it's the best I've worked out so far coming into the tech world as one of those CS undergrads who had their first taste of actual programming at the collegiate level.

bherms4• 14 years ago

Techies, math nerds, and science geeks are generally an alienating group. Someone recently asked me why this is (being an unassuming software developer) and my reply was:

"they're usually nerds, geeks, and other socially alienated people who have always felt below everyone else (jocks, popular kids in hs) and finally have some sense of superiority so they revel in it and you combine that with their already stunted ability to socialize or interact with people and it becomes a fucking mess"

I feel like this is the problem. When I was in the Air Force, we had the same issue with people who had been picked on as kids or who had never been in a leadership role. You could tell they had a chip on their shoulder and just loved the fact they now held superiority in some small way over the same type of people that used to pick on them. This generally made them the worst leaders, by far, and made them incredibly difficult to work with because their smugness alienated everyone else.

tessr14• 14 years ago

This is a really interesting point, and I'm sure that it's a factor for a lot of people. I hadn't thought of it at all!

Retric• 14 years ago

Despite what a lot of media suggest plenty of people hung out the geek crowd, not because they felt inferior, but because they found most people boring. Shock and horror the caption of the football team can love to play chess and be great at it. I was incredibly nerdy in high-school, had a lot of fun, and I was rather popular.

That said; there are a lot of people out there and if you go looking for a stereotype you can often find it, or at least convince yourself that's what your seeing.

PS: Team sports can actually be a lot of fun.

bherms4• 14 years ago

Obviously it's true that people bust stereotypes every day. I'm in th same boat you were... Computer/math/video game/comics "nerd" who also was vp of the class, captain of the wrestling team, very popular, and accepted by every group.

Just because there are people who violate the stereotypes doesn't mean that my original observation doesn't hold any water.

wccrawford• 14 years ago

1 other way to look at it: We were excluded from everything and generally treated like crap. We formed our own cliques and we're happy with them. Why the would we want to let the people in who once shunned us? We don't want that kind of person around us.

And before anyone says, "Not everyone treated you that way," they did. The ones that weren't actively tormenting us were passively allowing it to happen while they were allowed into the groups. Everyone that wasn't against us was with us.

So yeah. We're a pretty closed group now. It shouldn't come as a surprise at all.

bherms4• 14 years ago

Exactly. You hit the nail on the head. It's not surprising at all.

The converse (inverse? I always mix them up) is true too. What would the jocks do if a nerd tried to come out for a sport? Generally make fun of, pick on, and possibly try to hurt them. This mentality exists within all groups.

I'm sure there's something really interesting to discuss here about sociology and the human psyche, but unfortunately I'm not well versed in those subjects.

krishnakv• 14 years ago

Is it possible that our reaction to techies and what they can do comes entirely from within?

i.e. the geeks are not really doing anything to intimidate the rest of us, they are just going about their daily lives. Its us who are assigning special labels to them, assigning special meaning to what they say ("oh he just mentioned his stackoverflow reputation, big showoff" :-) )and getting intimidated.

Also, I see this in all walks of life. Chess players have ELO rating scores, cyclists and runners talk about miles per week, programmers talk about their stakoverflow score, SEO consultants talk about their # of twitter followers etc.

If you want to be really intimidated by child prodigies, look at other fields like mathematics (Terrence Tao?), chess (Bobby Fischer). Truly awe-inspiring (and dare I say, God given) talent from a very young age.

We have it OK here in IT. Probably time to work on ourselves to be satisfied and compare less :-).

bherms4• 14 years ago

I like your perspective as its one I hadn't considered. Perhaps the idea of intimidation comes entirely from our own fears of not fitting in (which could be amplified when you consider the Possibility that perhaps some people who generally "belong" feel more self-conscious about fitting in with a new group as being an outsider is foreign to them... There's also something to be said about the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I don't have all night :) )...

Tichy6• 14 years ago

I don't understand it - it is bad to be too good at something, or better than person X?

There is the issue of "loud" people, but what does it have to do with technology? There was a psychological experiment that showed people will assume people who talk/brag more are more competent, even if they aren't. The existence of that psychological effect implies that such braggarts do exist, in all walks of life.

But wouldn't it be better to work about your own issues of confidence than complain about unimportant bystanders. I don't think those loud people are very popular anyway. (loud == entitled from the article).

michaelbwang• 14 years ago

After reading this article, I still don't quite understand the meaning of technical entitlement. Is it the same thing as technical elitism? Moreover, I feel the whole post is just about elitism - albeit in the tech world - which is nothing new. I don't see the point Tess is trying to make.

[edit] spelling error

pjscott2• 14 years ago

I think the buzzword "entitlement" is just being misused here. The post makes more sense if you mentally replace entitlement with a nonsense word like flurblement, and then infer its meaning from context.

Spearchucker2• 14 years ago

Technical entitlement is only a problem if you let it be. Understand that the guy boasting about x at age y (or whatever) is doing so only because he seeks (needs) your approval. It's the old social status game. Your approval is his validation.

I guess I've been lucky in that I started to program (for myself) because I was just... interested. I never studied CS or maths or, well, anything. But here I am, 22 years of programming later still not giving a damn that you can do language a or pattern b that I've never heard about.

I've come across this elitism thing so many, many times and the cool thing with age is that it (age) is inversely proportional to the give-a-shit-o-meter.

tessr14• 14 years ago

Unfortunately people often choose careers when they still care what their peers think.

Spearchucker2• 14 years ago

What my peers think of me is none of my business. It never was. If the opinion of one's peers is a factor to someone making such an important decision (choosing a career) then I have little sympathy.

politician• 14 years ago

After reading this blog, I have a genuinely honest question -- when women-only events see high participation is the "wogrammer" a distinct subculture?

EDIT: I'm having difficultly phrasing this thought, please don't assume a negative intent.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

No. No more of this.

If you lack the confidence to get what you want in life, that's YOUR problem. Nobody else's.

I don't care about who put you down or who made it look so easy or who was bragging about what. This is not some fairytale land where everything is handed to you; you have to fight for what you want in life. It's not a strange phenomena specific to technology. Life is hard. The good things are hard. The people who excel are those with enough tenacity, skill, and chutzpah to do what it takes to succeed in whatever their endeavor.

Don't like it? Tough. It's been that way since the dawn of time, and it's not going to change.

datalus2• 14 years ago

LOL. I'm pretty sure humans weren't around since the dawn of time. Also, asserting that things will never change is about the worst way to prove a point.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass

Tichy6• 14 years ago

I have to agree - it is so simple, just avoid the jerks and hang out with the nice people instead. Or try to see the real issues of the jerks, some of them might just be insecure and covering it up by techno babble.

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

Possibly the one way to break down this barrier is if we all develop our explain it like I'm five skills.

I've often seen people use jargon inappropriately. They weren't attempting to communicate succinctly and accurately with their peers, but were bandying around these words to make themselves feel smarter and more intellectually superior.

mattmanser4• 14 years ago

This seems light on facts and thick on anecdotes, not sure why this is getting upvoted.

This could be about Chess, audio-video club, Warhammer or D&D, any subject that attracts males of a certain inclination that make up for their woeful lack of skills in other areas by boasting their encyclopaedic and often ultimately wisdomless knowledge of an area that they have little actual experience in.

This reminds me of walking into a Games Workshop when I was in my late 20s for a trip down memory lane and getting accosted by an extremely social awkward 16 year old who harangued me for having a terrible army, even though I'd not played for 8 or 9 years!

My advice to the author. That's life, stop lamenting it. These people didn't get on the sports team, they didn't get a girlfriend at 14, they really are struggling to find themselves and they're struggling in so many other areas, so let them revel in their actual skills for god's sake and grow up and accept it, even if they can't. Because emotionally you're so much older than they are.

I am getting a little annoyed with the 'women in tech' meme, we can't all be rounded individuals at 18 because society, almost deliberately, is failing a large section of males. If this is making tech a male dominated arena then so be it. It is refreshingly simple and without the emotional nuance that many young males find hard to comprehend, IF this THEN that. Our society brought it on ourselves.

Men are different to women. Women are different to men. What you are describing in this article, almost heart breakingly, is many a male geeks first steps into a social world. To expect them to be able to function as effectively as you with other people is wrong. They can't yet. Some of them will flower. But that's just how men work.

But you seem to want to emasculate them all.

aidenn02• 14 years ago

1) There is data to back that lack of confidence is part of the reason for fewer women in CS.

2) It is a reasonable (though untested) hypothesis that the behavior associated with "technical entitlement" exacerbates the problem. Therefore this is an issue that needs to be considered

3) Telling teenagers on either side to change isn't going to fix the issue. You suggest that women in tech change, TFA suggests that men in tech change. Neither is useful.

mattmanser4• 14 years ago

1) What I'm saying is bluntly this, so what? Males are characterized by an over abundance of confidence, would you brow beat them all to being meek? This is exactly the emasculation I mentioned above.

2) I still don't even know what the hell "technical entitlement" is? I think you actually mean over-confidence. See 1.

3) I'm simply saying accept it. Moaning about it is like a man moaning about a woman turning up late to a date. Or even not at all. If you are capable of changing that bizarre female behaviour, you're welcome to fix this bizarre male behaviour too. This isn't about teenagers, this is about fundamental gender differences.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

But you seem to want to emasculate them all.

That is totally out of line. It breaks every standard of civility we're supposed to be keeping here. I feel ashamed for HN.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but your comments frequently come across as abrasive. An occasional bite is one thing, but with you the needle always seems to be fluctuating into the red. I usually try reading what you have to say because you seem smart enough, but then this nastiness comes out and it's a drag.

But "you seem to want to emasculate them all" is on another level entirely, so mean and so rude it's like a parody.

mattmanser4• 14 years ago

I certainly didn't mean it like that, it was meant as a melancholic line rather than an attacking one.

mangoman• 14 years ago

I don't necessarily feel that I'm trying to catch up to a group of super-elites, but what I feel is just a sense of grandness in the whole scope of CS and just hacking in general that I'm afraid I'll never be able to comprehend. I love to program, and I love figuring out new things, but there just is SO MUCH tech out there, I have no clue if I've ever scratched or will ever scratch the depth of any technology I touch.

In a way though, I think that's what drives me to push myself towards projects that are just on the right side of impossible. I want to learn that which seems daunting, on the wrong side of what feels doable. And if I accomplish that task, in retrospect I really only see the parts of the project that I could have done better. Whether or not technical entitlement is hurting our industry, it is certainly unjustified. There is always much more to learn than any one person could possibly know.

tessr14• 14 years ago

This is a really inspiring attitude. I know what you're talking about--I often feel this way myself.

The difference is that while this is inspiring, having people put you down or call you stupid isn't.

ixacto2• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter what the gender ratio is in tech. Are we encouraging more young men to become nurses and primary-school teachers?

CS is one of the most open if not, THE most open field right now. There isn't a FE/PE/PHD/JD requirement to work at google/ms -- BUT there is the impression that you will look like a socially-retarded nerd, this http://www.google.com/about/jobs/teams/engineering/ is Google's engineering jobs page. And people wonder why there image-conscious teenage girls are not interested in programming...

Keep up the good work google.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

Can you explain what is wrong with that Google page? Serious question. Do these guys come across as unfriendly in any way? Or is the problem that they don't look like George Clooney? That they are wearing glasses perhaps?

What kind of things would the hypothetical female engineers have arranged on their desks? Perhaps fully automated doll houses where you can switch on a LED in the oven?

ixacto2• 14 years ago

Their office looks disorganized, they look exactly like the negative stereotype of a programmer. I'll leave that you to figure out ;).

This is what IBM and Microsoft think their employees look like:

http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/home.aspx http://www-03.ibm.com/employment/us/

tessr14• 14 years ago

This post isn't really meant to be about getting more women into tech. It's about getting more of EVERYONE into tech.

And that jobs page is almost hilariously stereotypical.

Tichy6• 14 years ago

So people who look like the ones on that jobs page should not enter tech? I really don't understand your point.

I also don't understand the entitlement aspect. What I experienced is that skilled people get respect. Nobody gets respect for having started programming at age 6. But most of them probably became good programmers, so they get respect.

I can't imagine really good people looking down on others. If you enjoy programming (as an example), why wouldn't you want to spread the joy.

Why don't you just avoid the nasty people. And, to be honest, perhaps see a shrink about your self-consciousness (sorry, but there seems to be an issue and you are shifting the blame instead of confronting yourself).

wmf• 14 years ago

I think privilege is a better term than entitlement. Here's a great article on the topic: http://geekfeminism.org/2010/07/27/if-you-were-hacking-since...

I think a related problem is that this form of bragging is often rewarded (I've seen this myself for pretty much my entire life) because for whatever reason it's seen as a form of merit rather than privilege.

I agree with other posters that there's some impostor syndrome at work here. (see http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Impostor_syndrome ) It is possible to catch up with the boy wonders, so we need to stop saying otherwise.

incongruity• 14 years ago

Personally, I've come to view the word "privilege" as loaded and poisonous. It has been used rightly and wrongly – but wrongly as a weapon or as a way to assert its own sort of superiority – or, even, an unassailable right to talk down to others without actually understanding where those others are coming from (ironically) so much so that, personally, I see it as a word that carries too much baggage to be worth using.

But that's just my $.02

pjscott2• 14 years ago

Make that $0.04 -- I can't stand the use of the word "privilege" in that context, since it invariably causes discussions to turn into accusatory bile-fests. This can be cleverly avoided by replacing the word with its definition.

tessr14• 14 years ago

Thanks for the links. I agree, privilege might be a better term.

roguecoder3• 14 years ago

What about "technical incompetence projection"? They seem to be scared they're not good enough, so they try to make other people feel like they're not good enough instead.

Just having privilege doesn't make people around you feel as bad as wielding that privilege offensively.

flatline3• 14 years ago

I'd like to tackle your supposition of "privilege" and "catching up to boy wonders".

I've been "hacking" since I was 12. You can call it privilege, but if so, it was western privilege, not male privilege:

- I was introduced to computers largely in elementary school, along with the rest of the class. I loved them.

- I spent an entire summer, when I was 12, mowing lawns, weeding, hauling wood, laying down bark and sod, and babysitting until I finally had enough money to buy myself a low-end Mac.

- I had a 2400 baud hand-me-down modem. It was all I could afford. I dialed up BBSs, and when it became available, paid for my own dial-up internet access.

I had western privilege, in that our school had computers, and that we had neighbors that would pay me less than minimum wage to do yard work. However, I didn't have any more 'western privilege' than the other people in my class, including the girls.

Once I had the machine, I spent the next two decades working hard to learn (and keep learning). I taught myself how to use HyperCard, write AppleScript, and eventually some Pascal. I taught myself enough 68k assembly to crack software (mowing lawns does not pay well. I buy my software now). I scrounged a SCSI ZIP drive and used it to install NetBSD (my Mac was one of the rare 68k Macs that used IDE, and NetBSD/mac68k required SCSI), and then eventually moved to Linux on my Mac -- version 2.0.36.

I voraciously read books, I taught myself C, and then ObjC, and eventually ML and Haskell and Ocaml. I taught myself Java, and then I taught myself how to write applications and then larger-scale systems. I have code in the FreeBSD kernel, Mac OS X user-land, and in a number of major commercial products. This took me about 20 years in total, covered far more bases and languages and hardware/software combinations than I can possibly list here, and catapulted me into the career that I have today.

That depth and breadth of experience is not something you can replicate in a year of CS education, or even 4 years of CS education. I haven't stopped learning, and I absolutely disagree with your conclusion about being able to catch up with "boy wonders": unless you put in equivalent effort, you CAN NOT catch up with "boy wonders".

(also, it has nothing to do with being a boy.)

This doesn't mean less experienced people can't contribute. Of course they can contribute. I was doing "useful" stuff when I was just getting started, although I'm certainly embarrassed of most of what I wrote now, and more so for the pieces that are still in active use.

What I take umbrage with is the notion that we must devalue genuine expertise because otherwise we risk turning away potential contributors. That's wrong -- we must value expertise, rather than encourage self-aggrandizement of the inexperienced.

If we genuinely fail to recognize and take advantage of expertise, we'll simply be doomed to an ongoing cyclic re-invention of the wheel across each new generation of software engineers.

rizzom5000• 14 years ago

I'm extremely skeptical that there is any factual link between unpleasant/arrogant behavior and whether or not someone was interested in computers/technology/science at a young age.

When someone says that computer science/software engineering is not for them, then maybe it's because it's not for them and not because engineers are not welcoming enough.

To put it another way, let's say I enjoyed listening to the radio, and decided to go for a degree in music despite the fact that I've never picked up an instrument before. When I get to my first music class and find that it's full of people who have been playing since they were toddlers, should I expect that we'll meet on common ground? If I did, and then became upset about my inability to fit in - that would be my problem, not theirs.

astrofinch• 14 years ago

The funny thing is, you totally can catch up. I have two friends who learned to code after college, both with the explicit aim of getting programming jobs. Both are now working for Silicon Valley startups.

Programming seriously isn't that hard for anyone who has the necessary general intelligence. It's easier than calculus, for instance.

roguecoder3• 14 years ago

I think lots of the one-up-man-ship is because we are afraid of not being good enough. As soon as we start ripping other people down and they start ripping us down, we all act like we're in the jungle, about to be pounced at any moment with accusations of inadequacy.

Mistakes are impossible to avoid, but you are good enough anyway. Your code might be good enough, but probably you need to iterate over it to find how how it isn't good enough and how best to address those flaws. We need to stop taking criticism personally and, far more importantly, we need to stop giving criticism personally. We need to stop attacking people for being human before they will stop attacking us for our humanity, before we can stop pretending we are superhumans because it is the only way for us to stay safe.

Tech needs compassion, because we deserve to be shown compassion.

jodrellblank• 14 years ago

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt.

If only we'd find a way to teach this as a practical lesson early in school, instead of a "sounds nice, if only" stumbled on as an adult.

You don't have to feel inferior when someone else is behaving superior. Society just assumes you do.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

This is a perennial problem. It's a form of insecurity that can cross into intellectual bullying. Often (usually? always?) the person doing it is unaware that they are doing it.

I think you and your friend are exactly right that the solution is to make a conscious choice not to be that kind of person. That's what I did when I was your age, and I've tried to stick to it. But the key word is "conscious". If you're not conscious that you're doing it, you can't make a conscious decision to stop. What determines that? I think it's a matter of growth: when someone is ready to grow in that way, they will. It can't be forced from the outside. But if you do it, you get good at setting other people at ease, and this helps make your environment more welcoming.

The feeling of constant inner intimidation is common. I have it all the time. You have scott_s's evidence (edit: among others) as well (and you should stick around here long enough to know that scott_s's evidence is significant!) It varies in intensity. One has moments of crushing self-doubt. For the most part, it's a background process. It seems to be normal for some value of "normal", like a wry playmate one is stuck with who never goes away. It's so common among creative people that it may be connected to the creative process. The solution seems to be to know that more or less everyone feels it and get on with one's work.

I really like Hugh Macleod's line: "Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside." We all do that painful comparing, but it's an illusion because of the fallacy involved: we experience our own inadequacies acutely and downplay our achievements, while doing exactly the opposite with others'. (Actually it's worse than that because we have access to our own streaming self-critical monologue and not theirs, so we're not even considering the same data. That's the genius of Macleod's phrasing.) It reminds me of a hilarious fortune cookie a friend used to keep on his office door: "A wise man can see more from the top of a mountain than a fool from the bottom of a well." We're the fool in the well and the other guy is always the wise one on the mountain.

Finally, if you think the know-it-alls are in a stronger position, observe them more closely. If they truly felt they were that smart, they wouldn't be trying so hard to prove it. It's a weak position and not a good place to be in the long run, regardless of how many people they overpower in arguments and status matches.

whiterabbit2• 14 years ago

My school didn't have computers, and my parents didn't see a point of buying me one, even when I made a decision to go to college. So, I built one. It took some time to collect the better parts as my own money was very limited. I collected 2 computers and a lot of junk in my room. Anyone to beat it? (just kidding). I'm foreign born and my sex is "F".

I largely attribute the problem to the culture of competition and entitlement instilled today on kids by their parents (makes me feel old), especially boys and especially non-technical parents. It's like "oh, my, he/she is so smart playing with THIS thing". Then this kid goes to college and feels they need to challenge everybody, and feels intimidated when somebody is better. How can somebody else dare to have an A+ on a test and ask questions to the teacher? I will pop up and ask smarter questions for the sake of it. Or withdraw from this major because I don't feel belonging. I'm entitled to feel that I'm a great programmer. And so on. This culture doesn't teach to just diligently do your assignments/job and collect your A+s/money. A clique of arrogant nerds sounds like an oxymoron to me.

I have a young relative whose computer skills are overpraised in the family even though they are nothing special. He had his first computer when he was 6, my old one. He knows how to create a powerpoint presentation, and attended a class how to build a web page, but when I offered to teach him to program, it wasn't taken (yet?). He's an A student, smart, but not very creative, doesn't take things apart out of curiosity and arrogant out of proportion, if there is any to arrogance. He ridiculed me when I wasn't able to find some button in Skype fast enough. In a few years he will be one of those "I'm a genius" kids in college, and his mother is already planning how she pays off his graduate education to get him the best job.

Tycho• 14 years ago

Entitled to what? I don't get it.

Also, I think the analogy about shorting stock at age 9 is flawed (although amusing). What financial whizzes might point to is confectionary arbitrage in the school playground, or helping their father trade commodities in street markets, or mastering card games, or something like that.

I think what would help people would be a better understanding of how much value you can add to a business with even unexceptional coding skills. When i pursued my education in IT, I was aware that there were people who started at much earlier ages and people whose abilities simply dwarfed my own. But since I'd already seen first hand now my programming could help a business operation, I never doubted for a second that I was 'worthy' of being a serious programmer.

On Technical Entitlement

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