Why People Don't Like Nerds or Programmers (In School)

http://rorymarinich.tumblr.com/post/100927259/why-people-dont-like-nerds-or-programmers

by inglorian • 17 years ago

85 143 17 years ago

rorymarinich.tumblr.com

Many good points but missing one important observation. The cliques in school are hierarchical in nature. All groups may be exclusive toward other members but a band geek cannot make a jock's life miserable as a pastime. Members of each clique can torment those in the "lower castes" with virtually no social cost for those actions. For fun, to fit in, because daddy never hugged them, whatever.

The Nerds and programmers almost always find themselves on the bottom. Things look different when you're a Dalit.

chacha102• 17 years ago

Once you eliminate the jocks and cheerleaders, the hierarchy actually seems to disappear. The nerds still try to be alienated for the most part, but the without the focus on sports, I find that all the other cliques just become 'different' instead of one being higher than the other. That might just be at my school though.

GavinB• 17 years ago

It all has to do with the perceived attractiveness of the group members, especially those composed primarily of females. If they attractive people are spread out among groups, the cliques are separate but equal. If they're concentrated, the cliques become hierarchical.

A desired group can basically set the hierarchy by what they define as attractive.

Most people don't actually want to leave the social group that they're in, as pg observed in one of his essays. The one exception is when their group is specifically a lesser version of another, usually the hangers-on.The nerds may really like programming and have no desire to play sports -- but they would love to date the attractive girls from any group.

The verbal and physical abuse in the system comes from members of a group which has attractive members of the opposite sex trying to keep down the others. For example, the jocks know that the nerds would like to date the cheerleaders, and so the jocks act to keep their supremacy.

It's high school, it's all about sex, what did you expect?

dasil0032• 17 years ago

It really depends on the school. In my high school there was no dominant clique, so the situation was somewhat as the author described. Sure people made fun of nerds, mostly because they left themselves open to it by being different and socially awkward, but there was definitely no strict hierarchy amongst cliques. I think there is some truth to the idea that certain nerds create a sense of superiority as a defense mechanism (think Comic Book Guy), but that is not the root cause of the nerd's social status.

After the opening section I think the rant goes completely off the deep end with a rapid succession of wrong-headed generalizations. It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out. The idea that programmers define themselves by what they are not, or by nitpicking inconsequential details is laughable. Sure programmers may be a bit more prone to nasty protracted flamewars over subtle issues, but we don't define ourselves that way. Sure our communities form around tools moreso than ideas (though not exclusively), but that's simply a matter of necessity given the detail of using any particular tool well. Personally I find the notion that "I define myself as a programmer" offensive. Programming is something I do, and I do it reasonably well, but at the end of the day it's only one of many things I do, and it's certainly not "who I am."

HalcyonMuse• 17 years ago

Judging by the rest of Mr. Marinich's content, I'd be surprised if you're very far off the mark. Here's what I found particularly ironic: most of the online stuff of his I read (well, skimmed) was pretty negative, hostile and generally involved lashing out at people.

After about five minutes I couldn't help but think of Maddox.

chairface18• 17 years ago

> After the opening section I think the rant goes completely off the deep end with a rapid succession of wrong-headed generalizations.

Hang on - there was a part without wrong-headed generalizations? The way I read it, the first two sentences tripped my generalization alarm. The guy constantly extrapolates from his tiny sample and says that the whole world is that way.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Personally I find the notion that "I define myself as a programmer" offensive. Programming is something I do, and I do it reasonably well, but at the end of the day it's only one of many things I do, and it's certainly not "who I am."

I agree. As I say, that's the sort of programmer I tend to like. The problem is, that's not the sort that aspiring programmers run into when they're first learning. I joined my first coding community at thirteen; for the last five years, I've seen no community that wasn't arrogant and hostile to a fault. The closest I got to nice was the Ubuntu community, who had a tendency to respond to bug reports with "You should look at the wiki page", where the wiki page was 50 pages long.

It reads like an 18-year-old who just finished high school and now thinks he's got it all figured out.

If I had it all figured out, I wouldn't write about it. As it stands, I'm aware of just how clueless I am. As I say here: I'm not a programmer. As I imply: I've been a part of this group of nerds for most of my life. I wrote this to engender a reaction amongst certain types of people, so I could get into a discussion with them about what's wrong with my statements here and what's right. The people I was expecting wasn't the Hacker News group. The fact that this post got rated this high makes me want to stop writing things with potentially ensnaring titles, because I don't want this on Hacker News.

I know I wrote it, and so I've got to own up to it here, but this wasn't the audience I wanted with this, and I regret that it's been put here.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Are you so certain it's hierarchical in nature?

The difference between a jock and a band geek is that the jock will resort to violence to defend himself. I've pranked jocks before with groups of band geeks. It often leads to a scuffle. When band geeks are strong enough to fight back, they don't get bullied either.

You don't torment people because of your own psychological past. Usually it's done out of irritation. The meek, quiet type usually gets ignored in favor of the one who talks too much in class, not because people hate smart people, but because there are certain sorts who are really jerks about it and that irritates people. That's also why bullies tend to be on the smarter side of the spectrum. I knew kids in the studies (low-level) courses and kids in the advanced courses, and the ones who were more likely to mock a kid was all in the advanced courses. I've been in the mocking situation before, so it all works.

chairface18• 17 years ago

> The meek, quiet type usually gets ignored in favor of the one who talks too much in class, not because people hate smart people, but because there are certain sorts who are really jerks about it and that irritates people.

Okay, wait a second. First off, I have a hard time picturing how someone can be that much of a "jerk" by answering a teacher's question. And secondly, are you honestly siding with a bully who beats on a kid for that kind of behavior? I mean, I understand that it can be irritating to hear from the same kid all the time, but frankly, the onus is on the bully to deal with this incredibly minor irritation in a less destructive way. Your implication that those being tormented are more at fault than the tormentors sickens me.

quoderat• 17 years ago

This writer is really clueless as to what high school is like for those on the bottom of the heap -- I mean, really, no idea at all.

For that reason, it's hard to listen to what else he has to say, no matter how relevant or (potentially) awesome.

Obvious that he's never been the low end of the totem pole. It may be different now, but when I was in high school, geeks and nerds got shit on by every group -- the jocks, the actors and actresses. Everyone.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

It may be different now, but when I was in high school, geeks and nerds got shit on by every group -- the jocks, the actors and actresses. Everyone.

Everyone's mileage varies. I went to a decent public school in the suburbs, and most people in my social circle belonged to a couple of others tribes as well - I was pretty active in the business competitions (as well as programming). Most other "nerd elites" were in marching band, actors, singers, swimmers, fencers, jugglers, etc. Sure, there were plain old jerks, but they were a certain a minority, and easy to ignore.

tylermenezes• 17 years ago

It seems to be different depending on where you are. The geeks at my high school (myself included) are, at least respected, and in the cases of many of my friends actually have a social life. (I'm too busy with the internet for that.) On the other hand, I know some people from other places who've had terrible experiences, so it's really hard to generalize.

njoubert• 17 years ago

It definitely varies. I was not all that invested in programming at all, spending most of my time biking and playing music, but as a "smart kid" there was lots of ostracizing going around, just because I didn't play the main sport that everyone plays.

What I take away from this is the importance of growing up - you get through those stages and move into a more nurturing community of people that support what you create, not the details of how you created it.

eru• 17 years ago

"Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top—and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things."

Growing up is important. But early stress does have long-term consequences.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

I spent all my time on computers, I played Dungeons & Dragons. I spent all my time up until I was about 15 being shat on, and being incredibly angry because I thought I was being persecuted for my intelligence. Then, in my sophomore year, I took a drama class, realized that people didn't care what kind of person I was as long as I was an interesting person who wasn't too obnoxious, and began to move away from my nerdier friends and towards a much more cosmopolitan group of kids that included film buffs and stoners and snarky hipsters. I'm still friends with a lot of my old friends - I go to college with one - and there's still a latent exclusivity where the group of anime/computer people act pretty rude towards people not in the group.

As was said by another commenter, perhaps it's different everywhere you go. I was in a place where I realized later on in high school that all of the torment and suffering towards nerds had some sort of a logical pull. And my school wasn't some sort of utopia: one dweeby kid in marching band had a bag of shaving cream smashed against his face during lunch as part of a hazing routine. What I noticed from that incident was this: while perhaps that one thing was inevitable, a lot of the sympathy I had towards that poor bullied kid dissolved away when he turned that one single incident into a sort of theater for discussing how unloved he was - particularly since that was the sort of thing I did when I was younger, too.

I wish I'd focused more on the programming aspect of this thing, though, because to be honest high school isn't worth talking about in my mind, not in this context. This was a response to an article titled "Rails is (still) a ghetto", where the author took a similarly hyperobnoxious approach to looking at a problem that didn't require anything obnoxious, and the larger problem is that the world of programming is highly inaccessible to non-programmers.

bena3• 17 years ago

The problem is that it was also the programming community that is pointing out that the guy was being kind of a douche. You are taking a very small portion of the community and extrapolating extremes from that. The plural of anecdote is not data.

jimbokun5• 17 years ago

I just want to know how you can hold up the "Rails community" as a positive example of socially well adjusted people, when their acknowledged leader just explicitly approved of a presentation that would obviously result in complaints of sexual harassment in any normal workplace setting (and did result in such a complaint, although given in an almost apologetic tone because she knew that her complaints would not be well received by the Ruby community, and was proven right).

endlessvoid944• 17 years ago

I thought that was the point of the essay. We're all old (and hopefully mature enough) now to accept that maybe it wasn't completely the jock's (or whomever's) fault that the nerds were unpopular.

An outside perspective is almost always useful in figuring things out. I found this essay hit home. I was definitely in the nerd group, and if I had read this in high school, it would've helped.

chairface18• 17 years ago

> maybe it wasn't completely the jock's (or whomever's) fault that the nerds were unpopular.

I can agree with this to a point - by the time high school rolls around, yeah, the unpopular kids probably have adopted a set of behaviors that contributes to them being unpopular. However, those behaviors are probably defenses developed against some early damaging experiences. And who is responsible for those experiences? In my experience, it was those same jocks (or whatever) inflicting their damage all the way up.

Personally, I find it much more helpful not to worry about who to blame for unpopularity itself, and to focus more on what is _done_ to the unpopular. And the responsibility for that is much more clear.

mikedouglas• 17 years ago

Ugh, typography on that page is a mess. The title shadow is distracting, and the leading feels cramped.

Off topic, but please fix.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

What browser/OS are you using? The shadows have been tricky - on Safari they look vastly better than on other browsers, and I've been trying to get it not to look tacky. I might disable them entirely for non-Safari browsers.

Agree with you about the leading. This is the first thing I've written where the title has dropped to two lines, and it looks icky compared to with one. This theme is very much a work in progress - just started coding it in early last week - so I'll tidy those things up.

ighost• 17 years ago

He makes a few decent points, but it really doesn't seem like he understands nerds or complex social interactions between different personality types very well.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Elaborate, if you don't mind.

gne1963• 17 years ago

If you guys have never seen the Dilbert cartoon "The Knack", have a look... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmYDgncMhXw It will lighten your mood after reading this post...

jmtame• 17 years ago

What makes a great writer? Someone who understands both angles, someone who has been both popular and a nerd. See Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular, which was the first essay I ever read of Paul's in high school as a sophomore and that got me hooked on reading the rest of his: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

thi• 17 years ago

Having just come from there (it made for an interesting experience on my end), I can say that his article is indeed very well written.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

There's something ironic about a post on nerds being deliberately exclusionary which redirects IE browsers to a Safari download link.

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Where's the article? I get the Safari download splash, but I can't see or find the article.

Reading the comments, I guess I don't care and aren't missing much.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

This bit is particularly appropriate:

Hell, programmers argue over web browsers. There is an elitist and closed-off system among hardcore coders that says certain things are better than others, usually for no reason, often for bad reasons.

Psyonic3• 17 years ago

Right.... as opposed to the rest of the population arguing over which (baseball team, basketball team, hockey team, football team, soccer team, nascar driver, music group, shoe label, clothing label) is better, which while I guess isn't "elitist and closed-off" definitely says certain things are better than others, usually for no reason, and often for bad reasons.

Or in other words, so-called nerds have different interests than the rest of the population, and they act completely normal about those interests within their peer group.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

As of right now, the theme that I'm using breaks entirely in Internet Explorer. I've had it up for about a week and haven't had the time to determine just why that is. The text simply won't display. So I put that up for the time being, knowing that my blog is read almost entirely through RSS, typically not by IE6 users, and that it's unpopular enough that I typically don't see my postings show up anywhere else.

I wrote out a thoughtful little thing explaining why it was currently redirecting, then got a complaint from an IE6 tester that that page wasn't displaying, and decided "Fuck it, I'll wait until later to make my blog respectable." I'm in the middle of a big redesign/name change/shebang, and since this isn't the blog that'll be the center of that redesign, I'm not focusing very much on it until the other pieces are more ready.

endlessvoid944• 17 years ago

This seems like exactly the sort of response this essay doesn't like. It immediately points out flaws without regard to the message as a whole.

Finding flaws is valuable if you're doing a startup or figuring out a good design, but if you're in any sort of social situation, it will instantly turn people off to you 100%.

volida2• 17 years ago

"you need to be smart in order to be a part of the group"

This is a wrong assumption, because there are people who are smart but are not (computer) nerds.

andylei• 17 years ago

the argument "you need to be smart in order to be part of the group" is the not the same as "being smart means you are in the group".

volida2• 17 years ago

On its own yes. But in the phrase used:

"Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down. Invitation to a study group? Rejected. The most bitingly ironic comes when a person in a group of nerds gets an invitation to a party. If you’re one of the more social people in your scene, try it. Invite an anime person or a programmer - one of those people - out to an event. Chances are you’ll be declined. There’s every possibility you’ll be rejected impolitely. The whole concept of the nerd clique is based on elitism: you need to be smart in order to be a part of the group."

I've read once about a cheerleader who became a rocket scientist.

The article is based on wrong assumptions. People don't reject you because you belong to a "smart" group but rather because "computer nerds" tend to lack social skills (at some point in their early life at least), that make seem akward. or themselves reject specific attitude/people who they don't feel combatible, so it's a human behaviour thing that you should expect that those you reject they will reject you.

Dalziel• 17 years ago

I'm sorry that's complete BS. Yes there are arrogant nerds and especially more on the internet where the 'geeky' have held sway for longer. But the simple fact is that as noonespecial pointed out, the sporty 'popular' will be more confident in a group of nerds than the other way around because there is no risk for them. The nerds can't make their day-to-day life in school a living hell.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

What's the risk for nerds?

When I developed the attitude I've got now, the one that accepts my faults and doesn't immediately get nasty, the change in people was almost immediate. Most people really would rather like you than dislike you, and the instant you start accepting them, they start liking you back. The people who are real jerks and tormentors drop it after it stops affecting you - and that doesn't mean your responding harshly or ignoring it, it means your ignoring the fact that they're attempting to be tormentors. If you ask a bullying jock a question about his sports team, and start just talking to him about the stuff he does, they're completely nonplussed, and after just a little bit, they start treating you like a normal human being.

There is an imaginary risk, and I agree with you that it's terrifying as hell to think that people are against you. I've been there. But it's not a real risk, and once you overcome that nonexistent worry - and that's absolutely not an easy thing to do - you realize that nobody is any more at risk than anybody else.

chairface18• 17 years ago

> What's the risk for nerds?

The risk, of course, is that they'll screw something up and the tormentors will continue to torment. These are generally socially awkward people we're talking about. You're being rather silly to suggest that someone who isn't at home in social situations to begin with and has been ostracized for pretty much their entire life is not at risk of real failure in a social environment.

I'm glad that you were successful in your social ladder climb. But you are pretending that _everyone_ will be successful. It's simply not a foregone conclusion - there are losers in this game, even among those who try their hardest not to be.

> you realize that nobody is any more at risk than anybody else

This is so very false that I don't even know where to begin. Are you saying that there are not real advantages and disadvantages in social situations? Can you not see that the captain of the football team is way less likely to be harassed than the math dweeb?

jimbokun5• 17 years ago

Here is the terrible, unvarnished secret behind much of my nerdy outcast existence in high school:

I generally found many of my peers boring as hell.

I tried going to a "get hammered in the middle of the woods" party (yes, it was that kind of high school), but I didn't drink, and no one was doing anything especially interesting, or saying anything especially interesting, and it was boring as hell, but everyone else being inebriated were oblivious to the dumbfounding level of boredom surrounding them, making it all the more frustrating.

So, I guess it really comes down to my not wanting to drink that resulted in my anti-social nerdiness. It was not until college that I found actually interesting people doing actually interesting and fun activities, without benefit of mind altering substances.

jgoosdh• 17 years ago

what a sad, angry little man...

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Perhaps it's not my place to say this, since this is an attack on me, but it's sad that something like this got 4 points on Hacker News. It adds nothing to the conversation and is roundly negative.

Now that you've insulted me and called me both angry and sad, I'd like you to explain yourself further so I can respond in kind.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 17 years ago

I cannot vouch for the "angry little man" comment, but you've run aground with massive sweeping generalizations that do not hold very true with many geeks.

We all wern't made fun of in high school. Some of us even had plenty of jock friends and stayed away from the "introvert hate everybody clueless programmers group".

And there's one really cool thing about being a "nerd": You learn a lot about a multitude of subjects. Because of that, you can learn of the interconnectedness between subjects. It's what I did, and I was able to help, say, a few cheerleaders on their advanced chemistry course, or watch a film while "critiquing" it.

I also taught a few of these students biology... no no no, not sex (no, that would be a bit later). Winemaking. I mean, if you want to be popular, you stand out. Even if it is a 'little bit', you make yourself memorable. People of all sorts will look past general quirkiness if you're a cool guy.

The toughest group to join was that nerd group, at least in my HS. I assume it was a mixture of not trusting or they thought I was too stupid. My SO however had a completely difference experience, in which there was really no real cliques (there were, in name usually).

endlessvoid944• 17 years ago

Please elaborate. Don't just insult.

sachmanb• 17 years ago

seems as if he has a problem with introverts

jeffesp• 17 years ago

Him and the rest of our society.

Edit: Not to seem too negative, but I have just run into this attitude in most people that aren't introverts. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sides of that coin, but I feel like the introvert side gets labeled as the bad one.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 17 years ago

I had a good talk about introvert/extrovert differences with my philosophy professor. He explained that different cultures had differences in which one was perceived better.

In places like the US, extroversion is accepted and liked. However, in places like Germany, introversion is well respected and as an equal to extroversion.

I asked why and he said that he really didn't know. It's just the difference in culture.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Not necessarily with introverts, but with introverts who believe that their introversion is why people don't like them.

There are introvert athletes and actors and musicians, but they're more popular in society. One of the quote-unquote coolest kids I know is a drummer who just never talks. He's incredibly shy. He smiles when people talk to him and says nothing, and for whatever reason people just absolutely love him. So introversion in and of itself isn't the issue.

dkarl8• 17 years ago

Introverts don't necessarily have bad social skills. The average introvert is kind of an anti-nerd -- the same elements are there, but the causation is inverted. An introvert's self-imposed isolation comes off as snobbery, which creates a social challenge for them. Nerds are socially challenged, which leads to social isolation, which they try to frame as high standards (i.e., justified snobbery.)

The Introvert: introversion => social isolation => perceived snobbery => social challenges

The Nerd: socially challenged => social isolation => pretense of snobbery or introversion

mmiller• 17 years ago

I think he makes a good point in that nerds tend to exclude themselves, but I think it's a defense mechanism from being rejected. Believe me, when I was in jr. high and high school (more than 20 years ago, now) I wanted to "join the crowd" badly. I wasn't allowed in, and I felt awkward every time I tried to join in. I just didn't fit the social milieu. I didn't feel the need to exclude others (there's a difference between this and excluding yourself). If someone else wanted to be my friend I gladly accepted them. So I don't get this whole thing about how "nerds exclude everyone else." That wasn't my experience.

derefr2• 17 years ago

> Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down. Invitation to a study group? Rejected. The most bitingly ironic comes when a person in a group of nerds gets an invitation to a party. If you’re one of the more social people in your scene, try it. Invite an anime person or a programmer - one of those people - out to an event. Chances are you’ll be declined. There’s every possibility you’ll be rejected impolitely.

I agree completely that nerds do this. I did this. But I never did it to be "elite", or to keep the other person "below" me. Instead, I always assumed that the cheerleader (or whomever it was) was playing a very nasty practical joke on me—that if I accepted, they'd laugh in my face and wander away, or worse, I'd show up at the party to find myself a scapegoat for some random act of civil unrest previously committed that night by the partygoers. And yes, I even made friends only with other nerds—but only because I could tell, by the fear they showed toward the other groups, that they were a prey, not a predator, species, and were thus unlikely to harm me if I associated with them.

(If you can't tell, I was bullied for my entire elementary school life before entering high-school; I imagine I would have had quite a different outlook otherwise. Thankfully, by grade 11 or so, the concept of "clique" had dissolved in my high-school, so I did get to discover what a mentally-healthy high-school experience was like.)

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

But I never did it to be "elite", or to keep the other person "below" me. Instead, I always assumed that the cheerleader (or whomever it was) was playing a very nasty practical joke on me—that if I accepted, they'd laugh in my face and wander away, or worse, I'd show up at the party to find myself a scapegoat for some random act of civil unrest previously committed that night by the partygoers. And yes, I even made friends only with other nerds—but only because I could tell, by the fear they showed toward the other groups, that they were a prey, not a predator, species, and were thus unlikely to harm me if I associated with them.

I was going to elaborate upon that but decided against it. Yes: nerds don't do things to be exclusive. They're not particularly snobby people. Their reactions tend to stem from alienation and paranoia: they act like that because they either don't think that other people like them at all, or because they want to maintain an image of some exclusivity on their own part.

The problem with that attitude is that it encourages people to be nasty back and to avoid your social group. And the people in a group of nerds that do notice that tend to start getting negative attitude from the rest of the group. I wasn't alone in this. One of my friends was part of the bookworm group of pretty people who studied too much, and I thought he was a twofaced backstabbing liar. That was eighth grade, and I'd like to think I've matured since then, but I certainly understand where you're coming from.

Tichy• 17 years ago

You had a cheerleader ask you about programming? Cool ;-)

amalcon2• 17 years ago

Indeed.

I'd also done things that might appear like this on occasion, even though I trusted that the person asking wasn't playing some sort of practical joke or simply trying to get me to do their work for them. The reason is that the questions were often things like "How do I make a web page on geocities?" or "How do I program DOS?"

In the former case, after establishing that they didn't want me to actually sit down in the computer lab after school and give an hour or two of instruction, all I could really say is that "It's really not something I can just explain in ten minutes." That comes off as a bit of a brush-off.

In the latter case, the question actually doesn't make sense. One can't "program DOS" any more than one can "perform a photograph". People became offended more than once by my genuine attempts to figure out what they were actually trying to ask. When I do get down to it, it seems they're usually asking "how do I make a game like Wolfenstein? That's kind of an old game so it should be easy!". That is just a more egregious example of the first case.

But yeah, this is the reason geeks don't accept invitations to parties. They've been burnt by requests like this before, and are worried about being burnt again.

derefr2• 17 years ago

Just because the person didn't know enough about the domain to use the correct terminology is no reason to belittle them by thinking they "want to do something stupid," though (and yes, that's why they're angry); half of software engineering is figuring out what the heck people mean with their requirements, and the usual best first assumption, no matter who your client/student is, is that they want to do something cool :)

I like to give anyone who asks me to teach them "to make games" or anything similar this test first, though: I take a pen and put it down on a page of paper, and tell them to tell me to draw a happy face on it, without expecting me to know what a happy face, or even a circle, is. I take everything they say literally, and tell them "this is how the computer would react to that." Clears up any misconceptions pretty quickly. :)

dkarl8• 17 years ago

I think my group of friends prided ourselves on being a little more inclusive, an easy distinction to achieve, but we still followed the same pattern the popular people did and the same pattern followed by HN: we valued the current state of our group and wanted to protect it. We knew we could drive out most people just by being ourselves, but more desperate people had to be sent social cues saying, "You're welcome once in a while, but don't push it." I don't remember us being overtly rude, though.

I remember being particularly mortified about a retarded kid who kept coming and talking to me about his chances of getting into "Hahvahd." I don't know who was messing with his head, but he honestly thought that being an Eagle Scout (honorary, I'm sure) gave him a a good shot at getting into Harvard, and he wanted to talk to me about it. The retarded kid was a bit slower with the social cues. I hated him for that. And I was smart enough to know that's how normal people felt about me, which made me hate him even worse, but I never made fun of him to his face.

strlen• 17 years ago

This is rambling and seems to be entirely empirically false. On top of it makes a vice out of "nerdiness" and a virtue of "coolness" ("uncool asshole") without any sort of argument to back it.

tutwabee• 17 years ago

"The response that I try to lob into these discussions, reduced to its crudest form, is: Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of one of the largest web sites on the planet, and his web site is beautiful, and it brings joy to a lot of people, so apparently being a good programmer isn’t what makes you design beautiful things that make people happy, in which case being a good programmer sounds like a fucking waste."

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. His coding abilities cannot be judged unless it is known how much of the Facebook code he actually wrote. I assume the majority of it was not written by him.

noamsml2• 17 years ago

Also, though Facebook is clearly a resounding success, I'm not sure I'd use the words "beautiful" and "makes people happy". More like "useful" and "makes people connected".

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

It makes people happy. My mother has found old high school friends - old high school crushes, even - and met up with people who left her life a long time ago. A friend of mine in Washington D.C. uses it to organize all her groups of friends for her homecoming party. I used Facebook for writing my notes before I decided to make everything I wrote public, and I bonded with a lot of people over issues I'd never thought other people cared about. It's used for organizing protests and finding phone numbers and occasionally hooking up. Connections lead largely to happiness.

I think Facebook is one of the best-looking sites that's ever been, though the last two redesigns haven't been too tight. The original layout, with the links on the side and the two-column profile, was one of those things that vastly inspired me when I was younger. The level of order it forced on its users was stunning, especially compared to MySpace. Now it's been tuning down some of the things I liked - especially the "How do you know this person" syntax - but it's still more usable than any other site that huge. The fact that people can intuitively figure out how to post photos, videos, events, groups, notes, friend people, fan pages, add applications, all without any advice - my grandfather figured it all out without help - is one of those things that's so impressive that it's easy to ignore because you take it for granted. Meanwhile, a lot of the things that have become common in sites - the thing that stands out to me is the resizing textfields - were first popularly used in Facebook. When I wrote for AllFacebook my main interest was scouring the site, clicking everything I could, looking for those finesses. So it's beautiful in terms of dedication to usability if nothing else.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

I don't get it. I went to a public school, and it was nothing like this - sure, we had our little tribes, and our little dramas, but most people belonged to several of them - I took lots of business and marketing classes and was a programmer nerd. Many other programmer nerds were actors, in marching band, and in the choir. The class president and swim team captain took AP CompSci, wasn't too bad of a programmer himself, and an exceptionally nice guy, to absolutely everyone. Sure, there were dicks, but who cares about them?

jimbokun5• 17 years ago

"Sure, there were dicks, but who cares about them?"

The real problem seems to be school violence and bullying, and it seems that in the U.S., at least, this is a non-trivial problem.

Dicks you can just ignore are one thing. Dicks who beat up kids smaller than them or pick out kids to ambush with their buddies, cannot be ignored. Sounds like this was not the case at your school, which is great. But it changes everything when violence is involved, and explains why unpopular "nerds" could display exclusion and paranoia, literally as a survival mechanism.

In schools where violence is not widespread, I think Rory's comments have more validity.

ideamonk• 17 years ago

I think his problem is with the people who label themselves as nerds and programmers. The author should go by a person's _work_ to decide how good one is. Not by the air, debates and the talks!

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

I do. My particular group of friends includes nerds and hipsters and radical liberals and libertarians and volleyball players and a whole bunch of people who I hang out with because of who they are and what they do.

This isn't my writing about a dislike of nerds. This is my writing to certain nerds explaining why their situation is what it is.

noamsml2• 17 years ago

Can't say this mirrors my experience of geeks at all, but then again, I went to a school where all cliques were extremely loose-knit and accepting (it was just part of the school culture).

rue• 17 years ago

Americans have a fundamentally different relationship with their High School days from anyone else. Popular culture certainly is not helping shed the obsession, the sense that High School is the defining time in one's life[1].

Somehow it seems that all these stories tie into that theme: the expectations, the sense that one must live their High School role thenceforth, the contemporary judgments made based on factors from High School and so on.

[1] Adolescence is obviously formative just like anything else; I trust you can make the distinction.

yef2• 17 years ago

I'm frustrated that the #2 link on Hacker News right now is a rambling rehash of How To Win Friends and Influence People, the first book listed here: http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Is that what HTWFAIP is about? I've never read it. (Also: is it a good read, or is it overrated?) (Also also: I agree. This should not be here.)

tvon• 17 years ago

It's pretty much a universal top 10 book on the subject of general success for people whose top 10 books anyone cares about.

I want to read it, so far I've just used the audio book and enjoyed it, but didn't really focus on it as much as I would have if I had read it.

yef2• 17 years ago

I'd recommend it as a general life-skills sort of book, which can also be applied toward career success in sales or management. If you don't want to read it, just find the summary online, apply it, and see if your life changes. It's harder to implement than it sounds, at least in my experience.

hunterjrj• 17 years ago

I'd say it is a necessary read for anyone who is interested in advancing their career either within an organization or independently. The advice offered in the book isn't difficult to implement, it is essentially common sense and manners. I've read the book about a half dozen times and with each read I gain a little more insight into how to conduct myself professionally.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

When you go online and want to learn programming, you run into the uncool assholes. The ones who’ll take "How to I make a web site that people can join" not as an admission of some guy who doesn’t care about the details but as a sign of weakness. I’ve seen responses to that question that range from "You obviously aren’t ready" to "It depends on how you want the site to scale." What bullshit!

No no no. That's me, but it's not because of anything to do with spotting "a sign of weakness".

Let me try to use a non-car analogy: Imagine I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and you come up to me and ask "how do I build a staircase?". The kinds of thoughts going through my head might be:

1) A staircase is obviously wood, cut to shape, then fixed together. It's also obviously quite a big thing. There's no need to answer with the low level "obvious" things like "you will need a large workshop", if you want to build a staircase you probably already have woodworking tools and experience and now want a bigger project, so an answer telling you basic outline steps would be insultingly patronising and unhelpful.

Also, an answer covering enough steps from scratch would take far too long for a forum post or discussion reply, so if I make the judgement that you don't have any of the experience and haven't considered it at all then you might get a dismissive "with a lot of work" reply.

(OK, maybe if we met informally and you asked, you might be just making conversation, but nobody goes to a technical forum and asks how to build a website just to make friends, do they, so that doesn't apply).

2) On the other hand, if you have spotted the obvious then you're asking one question but meaning another - maybe what kind of wood can I use to make it look nice, what building regs must it comply to, how can I reinforce it, what fireproofing treatments work well? What styles of bannister were popular in Victorian times?

There could be a lot of fun stuff, but again too many directions to go in all in one answer - this is where you get the "it depends what style you want" answer. It's not bullshit, it's better than that, it's skipping straight to acknowledgement, acceptance and directed at whichever obstacle or major design consideration comes to mind first.

So, "how do you build a website that people can join" leads me to think something like:

A website people can join means giving them a form to fill in, keeping their details, and providing a login prompt later. This is obvious to anyone who has used a couple of websites with signup forms.

So either you understand the steps of a site you can signup to and would have Googled until you found out more about those steps and asked a more specific question (What's HTML? What's a webhost? What happens to information in a form once I click submit? How can I keep it around?), or you're really asking for design and obstacle avoidance suggestions, e.g. scaling, security, server load, etc.

Hence the replies: You haven't Googled for the basics, that suggests you aren't ready for the amount of work involved, or you aren't really asking such a basic question so you don't get a basic answer.

Jem2• 17 years ago

Or, in the case of someone who asked me that exact question recently, what they really want is for you to provide them with code for free.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

They can have the code for free - Joomla, for instance or Drupal, that's not the issue, it's something deeper than that.

I wouldn't go to an exotic plant center and ask how to grow a sequoia tree and when they ask if I have any gardening experience, say no. Have any tools? No. Have anywhere to grow one? No. Do I want to read a book on them? No. I don't want to go through all this growing a tree bullshit, I just want to grow a sequoia tree! It'll need a lot of space. Don't give me this scaling crap. It'll need a tropical soil makeup. I don't care about soil chemistry you nerd, I just want to grow a big tree!

If I wanted to jump into a big project, why not? I'd research to find out where they normally grow, where seeds for unusual plants can be obtained, how to germinate and care for similar (tree, tropical, whatever) seeds and what kinds of soils and watering they might require, and arrange a big space to grow it in - then I'd contact someone appropriate and describe my plan, make it clear I was determined and ask for their advice.

I'm having trouble putting my finger on what's annoying me, it's not the request for free code - you can have it. It's not the asking for help - I'll help when I can (if I'm interested).

There's something about the questioner being unwilling to help themselves. Not a lack of understanding about a topic, but a lack of understanding about understanding in general. A kind of feeling that some people think things are literally magic, not just a chain of connections that anyone learn about and manipulate.

It's probably because I'm a nerd who likes details (in areas I'm interested in, at least), but it's puzzling.

endlessvoid944• 17 years ago

Most (not all) of the responses here seem to absolutely confirm this essay's main points.

The posters here generally are taking some kind of offense to this, and feel the need to shoot it full of holes. In the meantime, this behavior is only reinforcing the point to anyone who happens to not be a programmer.

It's actually quite striking.

bena3• 17 years ago

If someone came on here and said something blatantly false such as "Gravity doesn't exist. Here's a bunch of technobabble explaining why it doesn't. Anyone who doesn't agree is a douche and part of the conspiracy to hide the truth." Would the multitudes of people coming to refute his points confirm his point that there is a conspiracy to hide the truth?

Or would it mean that he just may be wrong.

rorymarinich42• 17 years ago

Bullshit. Gravity is a provable part of science. The social sciences are harder to deal with. Meanwhile, you want proof? I'll offer myself and every single person I know who's willing to be social as proof. I'm friends with guys with weird hair and glasses who use Digg and they were an accepted part of high school because they didn't go out of their way to be exclusive and closed-off. When I decided to stop being a dick to people just to preempt their disliking me, I found out that I was rarely disliked. (In fact, I went to a further extreme, because I'm quick to call people out for saying stupid things and I like colorful insults, and yet people didn't mind so much as I continued to get along with them.)

Show me the person who makes an active attempt to stop being hated - not by being "cool" but by starting to act friendly towards people - and fails after a few weeks' effort and I'll consider your experiment a potential refutation.

Would the multitudes of people coming to refute his points confirm his point that there is a conspiracy to hide the truth?

I said "Nerds are in denial" and a lot of people jumped on board to deny it. I'm not saying that proves it either way, because I don't presume to judge people by their comments online, but it's not exactly evidence of my wrongdoing.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

"Cheerleader come over and ask about programming? Shot down"

In what planet did you grow up?

chanux• 17 years ago

Hehe the guy missed the point. It's those nerds & programmers who made the world for him (people like him) to do their cheesy things on top of.

illustraden• 17 years ago

One time, this guy at my school made it to Hollywood in American Idol and the school paper did a bit on that and a friend at that time became irate. Like, RAGING, throwing things against the wall. He said he did cooler things in programming-he had hurricane coding skills. As opposed to something as utterly inane as American Idol and nobody wrote an article on him. After graduating, I make it a point to avoid people like that. I'm completely traumatized from being surrounded by those people every day for 4 years. My friends now don't know what the heck i'm talking about when something triggers those memories and I marvel about how obnoxious those people were. Then she sent me this article, and she asked me, you mean like this? And I said YES!

Why People Don't Like Nerds or Programmers (In School)

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