Beware the Pretty People

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/

by ldayley • 11 years ago

101 102 11 years ago

swatow5• 11 years ago

Funny how the nerd stereotype is used in different contexts.

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech.

However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was actually part of the counterculture movement. The old guard of cyber-hippies need to stop the slide into corporate monotony.

yummyfajitas8• 11 years ago

There is an important thread connecting the two:

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side...

This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their person directly ("creep", "racist", "nerd").

It's a fairly general purpose attack that can be targeted at almost anything. One of the more dangerous places is in hiring and evaluation; witness how objective and meritocratic nerd hiring practices (e.g. hire-by-github, death by brainteaser) are now attacked. Similarly, the idea of an individual contributor is also under attack ("you can't have a 10x programmer, you can only have a 10x team"). Once objective measures are eliminated, we'll just descend into petty politics of the sort that "pretty people" are very good at.

majormajor• 11 years ago

Eh, I feel like a lot of that is an overreaction. The sort that makes it hard to have an honest discussion about stuff like diversity from either side.

For instance, I've done a lot of interviewing with the Google-type whiteboard coding questions, and all it's really told me is that they don't show crap for how good they're going to be at their everyday job (e.g. will this person consistently submit un-tested code to code review, will they pay as much attention to detail in their job as they do in interview-mode...).

It make sure people all meet a minimum bar for a certain sort of smartness, but that smartness doesn't have a lot to do with most development tasks.

It works pretty well for identifying the superstars—there's always that tier that blows through whatever you give them way faster—but if you need to hire more people than you have superstars applying, it's kinda crappy. (Except for all the others that have been tried...)

In the meantime, when not stuck doing interviews, I'll continue to pay attention to details, deploy code that's been tested and handles its edge cases, get stuff done, and get my hair cut regularly, play basketball, and buy nice clothes even if others in the office are in flip flops. And sometimes I'll wear flip flops too, depending on how I feel that day, whatever.

swatow5• 11 years ago

But the people making these attacks are mostly actual feminists, liberals and diversity advocates. They are not business people or MBAs.

Maybe the MBAs jump on the bandwagon, but I think they mostly do it to pick the winning side, not because they fear the latent power of nerds.

That said, I think you've very accurately described the various attacks on traditional nerd/Silicon Valley culture that are occurring.

hackuser2• 11 years ago

Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's not that they think, 'I want to exclude women from tech jobs'; they blindly follow old patterns of hiring and other behavior. Humans naturally are very egocentric and have to work to see things from others' perspectives. When they do, they change; most people don't want to be sexist.

So of course many think it's meritocratic; they don't see the obstacles because they never experienced them. And of course some think they are victims of persecution; they don't see what they are perpetrating.

Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our society, if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?

[1] U.S. population is 77% white, so I estimate 38% white male. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[2] Wild guess at the % of SV tech workers that are white male.

EDIT: Minor rewording for emphasis

hackuser2• 11 years ago

On meritocracy, including in tech:

"'Meritocracy' is not what you think: don’t forget about the 'ocracy'"

http://themonkeycage.org/2013/07/13/meritocracy-is-not-what-...

(The Monkey Cage is a/the leading blog on political science.)

pyre2• 11 years ago

This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking power in tech.

I think that you're just falling into the same stereotyping game. Talking about all of this in such generalities is useless. Nothing is specific enough to be actionable or really be "proven" or "disproven." It just devolves into people shouting at each other.

O____________O3• 11 years ago

objective and meritocratic nerd hiring practices (e.g. hire-by-github, death by brainteaser)

That selects for adequately privileged (generally) white males with the spare time to create projects on github and a particular interest in brain-teasers.

To my knowledge, hiring in all fields is an utter joke, with essentially zero research ever having been performed. It's entirely based on bias and guided by HR-fueled fears of lawsuits.

informatimago3• 11 years ago

Again, wrong. Nerd culture has no misogynistic dark side. But women have a very anti-nerd dark side.

freshhawk2• 11 years ago

There isn't one stereotype from that era for good reason. There are a bunch of disparate ones. There were and are cyber-hippies in large very progressive groups. They are the ones being talked to here.

Some of them are the reason that these tech culture problems are recognized as important problems.

So yes, the stereotype acts as a stereotype: taking on only the set of features needed to support an argument.

So don't use or think in terms of "nerds", as that's too coarse to be useful or to tell you anything. Tech is an industry with various subcultures. The OP didn't use the stereotype anyway.

meric4• 11 years ago

The nerd subculture is composed of White males among others, and certainly not dominated by them. It's funny you say nerds have a misogynistic dark side because often a group of nerds first congregate because they weren't interested in spending effort to be popular or attractive and so were a group of rejects and misfits hanging out with each other. You can force some women into 'nerd culture' to make it diversified but then the misfits and rejects are only going to leave and make another group because, well, they're rejected and seen as misfits by the other people you forcefully put in there.

The same will occur in the tech industry, as you forcefully insert people from other subcultures into the tech industry, rejects and misfits that first started the industry up will be, well, seen as misfits and become rejected, and will thus leave. The tech industry will become more diversified and conformist, and the misfits and rejects will move on to other things, and then some big wave of change will come from those other things, and those other things would be full of misfits and rejects who happen to be white males, (well america is majority white, what else do you expect), and then we can start this misogyny debate all over again.

You can't force everyone to work well with misfits and rejects. Though you can kick out the misfits and rejects, there will always be misfits and rejects, if not here, then they will be somewhere else, working on what society has ignored, so far.

tux2• 11 years ago

LOL What an article. "Now that the tech industry is cool, the pretty people are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of the way." Good luck with that :) Don't judge the book by its cover! "While we do, though, we need the weirdos, the rebels, the counterculture, to be gathering together and founding companies." Not sure what misfits and weirdos they mean maybe "Pretty People"

bigtunacan• 11 years ago

Techcrunch puts out so much garbage and fluff these days that I just don't bother anymore.

tux2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I couldn't stop laughing when read the article.

DannoHung• 11 years ago

I have personally long argued that TechCrunch should be outright banned from HN.

blackobelisk• 11 years ago

conflating ugliness with being counterculture lol

LanceH• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what techcrunch truly brings us, but I'm not worried about the "pretty people" crowding out the computer science, engineer, math and science majors. There are too many qualities that can't be faked and no amount of hair gel will compensate. It will always be easy to find someone who has paid the price over someone who just bought the clothes.

freshhawk2• 11 years ago

The power dynamic being discussed isn't about people being crowded out. It's about their autonomy and profit sharing being reduced. The same people will still do the work, that's half the point.

You are taking "pretty people" too literally.

jqm3• 11 years ago

On the flip side, wearing hair gel doesn't mean a person can't program a computer.

adventured• 11 years ago

I find the overall attitude to be fascinating, and self-defeating. They refer to the pretty ivy league people elbowing in, basically; taking over.

Well what use do I have for those people exactly? They can't stop me from building what I want to. They have no say in the matter, no influence over me. They only become part of my equation if I allow it. For $30, or $50, or $200 per month I can build almost anything I care to in the software realm. Today my biggest limitation is time.

The tech industry is lacking in (or no longer dominated by) geeks, nerds, weirdos? Even if that's true: 1) who cares 2) it has no impact on me 3) that would be the fault of the geeks, nerds and weirdos that are allowing themselves to be told what to do.

I'm going to build whatever the hell I please. If I allow one of the so-called pretty ivy league type to stop me, then I have nobody to fault but myself.

I don't need venture capital. I don't need pretty ivy league types with freshly printed MBAs. I need sales, and a product worth paying for that makes sales possible.

Customers provide growth capital. Anything else - including allowing the types dreaded by this article to be on the playing field - is optional.

tarp• 11 years ago

"But we still tend to measure their success wholly in terms of millions raised, billions in valuation, revenues, profits, and timeline to IPO. That’s not genuinely subversive. That’s not truly disruptive. That’s establishment talk."

snarfy• 11 years ago

If non-technical pretty-people pass your technical interview, you've failed.

rpcope1• 11 years ago

It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS, I do miss some of the hacker ethos that may have waned when the web went big. That being said, I find it a rather perverse juxtaposition to take about governments and Wall Street abusing the tech industry and then hold up he examples of Uber and bitcoin as movements counter to this. While there may have been some inefficiency in the Taxi medallion system, Uber seems to thrive on skirting labor laws and relying on the perhaps misplaced hype surround the "gig economy." Bitcoin is also not a terribly appropriate choice; while the idea of the blockchain is novel, the technology is kind of wasteful (all of energy required to move the blockchain along, probably coming from non-renewables), it's built on arguably shaky financial grounds (nothing like a sovereign to back it, it's often theorized to be a Ponzi scheme), and Wall Street is getting into it big time. Both of these seem to be part of the "pop tech" the author is rallying against.

I would rather see kids encouraged to hack all things (not just web sites and walled garden mobile app) to keep the old school tech culture alive, and I certainly feel the need to make sure things like GNU continue, as it, amongst other things, have provided the means to rally against big corporations controlling access to the interesting bits of technology (like being priced out) back in the day. I personally feel as though copyleft is important from this perspective, though this is probably a somewhat controversial opinion. One thing the author doesn't mention as something we should focus on, is if we want to keep the tech industry from locking us out of technology as we know it, I think we should also work to make sure tech giants and other corporations don't strong arm standards organizations and force development into walled non-free gardens, especially like with Google and Apple's threatening moves with regards to the internet (i.e. iOS locking out competing browsers, Google trying to completely lock out others from gTLDs like .dev).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I also find the equating of "pretty people" and the use of "nerd" around a lot of the culture surrounding technology both click-baity and ad hominem.

nostrademons• 11 years ago

It's actually a lot easier to get started hacking now, in the age of Javascript and the web, than it was 25 years ago. I remember begging my dad to buy me Think Pascal when I got a computer so I could learn to program. Computers cost about $2500 then, and the compiler itself was about $200. Now one of the best languages to learn, Javascript, comes free with excellent developer tools in every web browser, which comes free with a computer that can be bought for <$1000. If you want to play with server side stuff you can put it up on Heroku, again for free.

I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and professional back-end engineer, etc.

michaelmrose• 11 years ago

Rasberi Pi 2 $35 crummy usb drive $6 Keyboard from thrift store $2 Mouse from thrift store $3 Monitor from thrift store $10

A functional computer for $56. Not the best but probably a lot faster than the one you paid $2500 for.

sounds• 11 years ago

That edit is the part I wish had been your thesis. (Because now I feel like I have to write the following:)

There _is_ a unifying theme to the trends TechCrunch is writing about, but it's not what TechCrunch says it is. TechCrunch: "the establishment is flocking to the tech industry."

That's just the eternal september, ad infinitum. Hate being pushed out? So did the people _you_ pushed out, when you were annoying and first found IRC and you and your peers flooded all the old cool dives, driving hackers ever deeper underground.

The easy ways out don't work when you're faced with filtering out annoying newcomers. Some are fundametally wrong (racism is essentially a quick band-aid reaction to newcomers). Using money as a filter (country clubs) doesn't work either--there's always that annoying newly-minted millionaire who wants to break into your circle. Legislation to suppress young upstart competition even fails for the same reason: eventually your industry becomes so totally ossified that the whole thing can be toppled (US automakers).

Fundamentally, anybody who doesn't get Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is going to fail. "When voters have three or more distinct options, no rank order voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide (complete and transitive) ranking while also meeting a pre-specified set of criteria." I would propose strengthening it to: any pre-specified set of criteria, at all, ever. In other words, you just can't have all three:

1. Purely democratic or meritocratic or whatever

2. Total transparency (of rules and laws)

3. Adaptation of the rules and laws

So you get this never-ending cycle: the hackers get together and make something really cool. They are able to work together. Then comes the flood of newbies. After things get overloaded, anybody actually contributing to the original project either sells out or goes deeper underground. The project coasts on autopilot until something breaks, then it crashes and burns.

It doesn't matter who the participants are, from simple rule-based sims up to human-level intelligence, the outcome is the same.

The exceptions, I think, prove the rule:

1. BSD and the Linux kernel -- essentially ruled by benevolent dictators.

2. Representative democracies -- they can work. I'm deliberately refusing to think about why here, since that's politics.

3. The internet. Not IP or the OSI model or the DNS system, but the idea that anyone, anywhere can conceive of an idea, and then communicate it nearly instantly. This includes a worldwide language (or tools to automatically translate), global comms and the hacks to circumvent state-sponsored net terrorism, the unwritten code of conduct that most netizens are guided by, the ability to search and explore, and on and on.

I think any good example would have some element of a social hack in it. The social hacks are the most interesting.

potatoyogurt• 11 years ago

I agree with your general point, but the part about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is kind of nonsense. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is a really specific provable statement about voting systems based on ranked preferences. You can't just change the conditions around freely and and there are certainly many sets of criteria that a ranked voting system can satisfy.

jonnybgood• 11 years ago

I don't actually hold this opinion, because I don't know the truth of it, but I remember reading a comment about women in tech that entertained the idea of why there isn't many women in tech. The opinion was that women are more socially aware than men. CS/tech with its mainstream stereotypes of nerds wasn't something that most women wanted to be associated with. If I entertained the thought put forth by this TC article, I can perhaps predict an influx of women in CS/tech due to it becoming more "socially acceptable", because of the changing stereotypes.

An oversimplification, but entertaining nonetheless.

Animats2• 11 years ago

The headline didn't match the rant.

My first thought, reading that, was of Shai Agassi, the founder of Better Place, the battery-swap electric car company. Years ago I went to a meeting in SF where he spoke, and saw that that he was very good looking, spoke very well, and had a business plan that was total bullshit. Several heads of state and many investors were convinced by him. In the end, he burned through about $800 million and only put about a few hundred cars, built by Renault, on the road, before the bankruptcy.

That's what I was thinking when I read the title.

jkuria• 11 years ago

Everything you say about Better Place is true but give the man a little credit. He emerged from the hacker culture in Israel and was a programmer himself for a long time before moving to the US in '96.

brianberns• 11 years ago

I've been developing software professionally for 25 years and it's always been a business. The suits have been exploiting the nerds for a long time. Welcome to capitalism!

mmaunder• 11 years ago

Reminds me of something I heard Buffet say once in an interview with (I think it was) Maria Bartiromo: On Wall St we get the innovators then the imitators and then the swarming incompetents.

I think it's really this applied to the Valley - and I think what you're seeing is people who don't have tech chops, but they've seen what tech success brings and they want that, so they have to sell something else and in this case it's charm, good looks or good taste in shoes.

jqm3• 11 years ago

It isn't a zero sum game. People looking to make a quick buck don't stop misfits from playing with computers.

As if one must be a social misfit or physically misshapen to be involved with computers in the first place, which is itself a ridiculous premise.

informatimago3• 11 years ago

This is a zero sum game to some extend: employers will prefer to hire beautiful people even if they're less proficient than social misfits. On average and a grand scale, this is catastrophic.

salgernon• 11 years ago

Apropos this article, today I received a box of "vintage" hardware and software manuals. It's a hobby, ok? But amongst them was an original photocopy of this article from psychology today, circa 1980:

  http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac

In which the LOTS user "gandalf" bemoans the isolation and singlemindedness of the typical Stanford hacker, and the rebuttals from those he describes. It was an interesting bit of the social story that underlies the "weird" folk tradition.

post-• 11 years ago

There are a lot of problems with this article, but I want to focus on this paragraph:

What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate. [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-redd...] It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.

I'm not sure that I trust Jon Evans' -- or any one person's -- assessment of subversion. The whole point of subversion is to overturn ("vertere") the status quo from below ("sub"), while this article seems content to maintain the current systems of marginalized nerd-dom (which has always been a suspect category) and capitalism (which is interesting and because as a system it preferences what's mainstream and marketable -- Evans has contradicted himself again).

When Evans writes, "Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate," in support of his call for subversion, he glosses over the fact that the list includes some of the most mainstream nonprofits in the world (plus two well-known psychoactive research organizations). I'm not saying that these charities aren't doing good things -- I think it's fair to assume that they are -- I'm saying that supporting them can't be viewed as an act of subversion, and that assuming limited resources, support for them means lost support for other _actually subversive_ organizations that mean to do just as much good in the world.

"It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there." But change doesn't mean patching what exists; change -- subversive change -- means offering a replacement.

thomasfoster96• 11 years ago

I'm still not sure what the title has to do with the actual contents of the article, but the basic premise contained therein isn't exactly ground breaking - people want to make money from tech, regardless of how much they care about culture or product.

The last few paragraphs are a bit more interesting. Understandably, lots of people are now seeing that you can gain things from your work or financial input into something that aren't just financial. For some people, non profits will provide greater rewards than for profits.

crazy1van• 11 years ago

"I believe capitalism is excellent … up to a point. (I don’t believe anyone who has travelled in the developing world as much as I have can reasonably think otherwise.)"

Is the author suggesting capitalism is doing good or bad things for the developing world?

rezendi2• 11 years ago

Good. (Or at least that was the intent.)

pnathan• 11 years ago

Personally, I like the vast majority of nerd culture as I received it. Lots of focus on text, do-o-cracy, intellectual games. ESR's "portrait of a hacker" harmonized with me well when I read it - it did not influence my life, but I found it to be pretty astute.

I am sad to see it passing, but I also know that Change Happens.

dba7dba• 11 years ago

Oh my God. In 1996 or around that time, a friend who was a CS major at one of the major US universities mentioned in a passing that he was seeing a lot of Business School types in CS labs trying to do coding exercises. It changed within 2 years in his view. He thought it was a sign that tech industry was going to take off.

jmduke• 11 years ago

There's a deep, wonderful irony in someone writing on TechCrunch about possible disturbances in the sanctity of software development.

mc323• 11 years ago

No one has or should have stranglehold on nor should claim to own an industry (territorialism). Industries just are -they don't care who the constituents are. People come and go. Does it matter what it once was, and what it's becoming? No. Stop the provincialism and the bemoaning of the illegitimate successors. Things change. They are meant to. People will always try to seek success wherever it can be found, now it's tech, decades from now it will be something else.

I really don't get this. Most people acknowledge there should be a more even balance of women in technology. But, the diversity is only welcome if the women are other nerds? If non nerds want to come to the party, that's despoiling things?

No one owns industries. Yes industries have a history and there were important people who started industries, but they mature and they become part of the mainstream --stop bemoaning this. Accept that things which become mainstream have to acquire aspects of the mainstream.

Of course, this is tech crunch and always wants to eat their cake and have it too.

001sky• 11 years ago

If non nerds want to come to the party, that's despoiling things?

Groupies didn't spoil rock & roll (!)

But I don't think that's really the debate.

snoopybbt• 11 years ago

The problem comes when groupies want to make rock&roll and steal the scene from actual rockers.

informatimago3• 11 years ago

No, the problem is that when nerds come to the party, the party is despoiled by them. It's not a nerd problem, it's a party problem.

flycaliguy• 11 years ago

"Accept that things which become mainstream have to acquire aspects of the mainstream."

I guess my take away was that when weirdness becomes mainstream it becomes nothing more than a toothless affectation. That you should beware of the savvy newcomers who have learned how to adopt a style formed out of rebellion but will use it to push traditional objectives. They will push out the rule breakers while co-opting their mission statements.

So yeah, it's a pretty standard statement about any fashion cycle. The point of the article then is to warn the weirdos, the divergent thinkers who birthed this industry to not let the handsome dudes laughing at them get them down. It's a cute narrative about larger issues. It's about the status quo's tendency to prevent really weird and innovative ideas to take off out of fear it will spoil their comfortable fun. The people who show up after all the weird work is done weren't their in the start because they don't take risks like that.

It's a decent read. It's called "Beware of the Pretty People" and it is written for the freaks. Reminding them to keep on freaking people out, even when it's no longer the standard game plan.

mc323• 11 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. Some people understand that for something to succeed, it has to become mainstream, but there are others for whom the original otherness _is_ their identity. It separates them from larger society, so when larger society takes on those signifiers, they feel threatened. Like the fashion cycle.

This article preys on people's weaknesses --like feeling that their values or lifestyles are being co-opted -as if that were bad in and of itself. If you have solid beliefs, what others do or don't do are irrelevant to you.

I don't think tech crunch really believes in what they say but rather they believe that what they say will resonate with their audience and will result in more income for them. They couldn't possibly care any less about the principles of technologists --whatever alignment there is, is coincidental. Let's ask this, have they ever run articles which would drive down their readership? They may run something with some ironic distance, etc. but that's just a form of co-opting their audience.

vtempest• 11 years ago

This article went so many weird places randomly.

sombremesa• 11 years ago

Here's an interesting Dilbert short I saw that seems to be relevant to the headline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzanWSGXqGc

Animats2• 11 years ago

The "pretty people" thing may have started with Facebook. When Facebook was in downtown Palo Alto, I'd see their employees come out at lunchtime. The men were hunks and the women were hot. I suspected they were hiring based on Facebook pictures.

Beware the Pretty People

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