you just hate me because my IQ is sooo high

I’ve worked in offices with booze, ping pong, and arcade games!

but not for us. it’s used as a hiring incentive and plonked into the middle of the office, but any use of those things at work will quickly result in a PIP. the booze, ping pong, and arcade games are for techbros only — the founders and their nepotism hires, specifically. any engineer caught using any of those things clearly isn’t working hard enough, because they haven’t converted their entire body and mind into a machine for writing shit code for shit capitalists.

By the beer standard the most tech-bro-y place I've worked was Swiss Bank Corp / O'Connor in Chicago, a software focused trading shop. In 1994. NeXT machines and Symbolics LISP machines on the private trading floor kind of place, with refrigerators kept stocked with free sodas and beer. Beer was for after 5, except on St Patrick's day, when coolers of beer came out at about noon. Also, Nerf guns on the trading floor.

And yet, at least for the people I know best from there, they didn't turn out to be tech bros. Perhaps there's a generational aspect.

As one insider told me (who is not me): ‘imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists’ … what would the reaction be?’

With the amount of misandry omnipresent in mainstream media. I'm starting to question which way is up and which is down.

Paul never evolved beyond that blog post (Edit: this one, which he wrote when he was 40 years old) he wrote about the poor nerds sadly. And the the whole nerd/jock thing has not really been relevant for ages anyway, superman plays warhammer ffs.

TPOT word chess, with the rules directly stolen from ^W^W cribbed from ^W^W^W inspired by LW

If I hated nerds I certainly wouldn’t have Star Trek themed filk music stuck in my head. What I hate is a variety of things including the casual misogyny among nerds of a certain generation (cough gygax) and the way in which tech CEOs and adherents attempt to regild our society.

And yeah, exactly, if you can interact with others as a nerd nobody hates you these days. Nerdy shit is just culture now

I didn't have much respect for him before, but seeing him absolutely lose his shit and scream for the feds to save Silicon Valley Bank instead of manning up like Rockefeller and getting his rich friends together to bail them out without government help shredded whatever little respect I did have.

It's like being a Radiohead fan post-OK Computer

Unfortunately, this already exists

Upwork (previously e-Lance) has a massive systemic lowest-bid-wins downpressure dynamic already, favouring labour from extremely low-cost markets and rushthrough result output. It is occasionally possible to find a good/decent bit of work on there, but largely I t’s a shitshow across multiple dimensions. (There’s more I could say here but it probably deserves its own post somewhere)

And then there’s fucking Turing, a newer entrant to the market labour arbitrage space (because, really, that’s what these are). Turing is a Startup. They explicitly search out developers from developing/third-world nations, mail them (e.g. I got on mail they could only have gotten from scraped commits), and then pitch them on a number that is “better than what they may get locally” but still far below whatever it is that Turing itself bills to end customer. And they called it fucking Turing.

So are techbros just software devs? I'm unsure what it means now. I thought it referred to the bitcoin/venture capitalist types

Has he done anything but blog, microblog and lispturbate since he sold his E Commerce site?

The real “techbros” are all business people in an actual position of power, not the introverted QA tester just trying to get through the day.

If the QA tester goes home and checks his Raspberry Pi dogecoin mining rig, and is saving up for a Cybertruck, he's probably a tech bro, if only a larval one.

there’s an upvoted post on here about how to take away the average working class tech worker’s job

Are you talking about mine? The point of the post was that techbros and tech industry workers are not the same thing, and that actually the tech workers whose valor those CEOs are stealing are vulnerable to the same tactics techbro startups have used to fuck over workers in other sectors.

A lot of software devs and tech workers are marginalised, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged. Too many people in this thread are completely ignoring any kind of intersectionality just because they’re men.

A lot of people in every industry are marginalized, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged.

I am a queer, neurodivergent, left wing tech worker myself. Most of the regulars here are probably at least two or three of those things as well. I know lots of tech workers who are in no way techbros, but I've also met some of the least class conscious, most obliviously racist and misogynist opportunist motherfuckers who would lick the boots of every billionaire on earth for a chance to join their ranks. This is about the latter.

that's great and not in any way what this is about, not to mention that you're the one identifying the people you speak of with the horrible techbros in the OP. but thanks for your driveby

Think you slightly misinterpreted the tone here and missed that people are mostly agreeing with you re what the term tech bros means. (A tech bro can still be a worker of course, workers can also be bad people. Anyway there are various different groups all sides muddle together (see how the OP tweet muddles 'people who rule tech' with nerds with tech bros with tech workers and finance people etc.

And you are imho doing the same here, with the 'real techbros are' part, as that is imho the 'the nerds who have taken over the world' part. While in this thread the tendency is to use techbro as a term for toxic masculine man who works for a tech company/related company who makes the environment harder for minorities/women/ND people. That most of people in tech are democrats (which is quite useless as an indicator as our local sneerclub posting shows (see how many people defended SSC Scott by calling him a democrat), both parties in the USA allow for a lot of rightwingers and shitty people) is not that relevant. Anyway, if the old reddit sneerclub regulars who now also post in techtakes are any indication this place is a little bit further left than you thought.

Which isn't to say I disagree with the idea of your post that we should be careful not to shoot too broadly, but I don't think that is really happening here, a post basically agreeing with you is at almost 60 upvotes right now (which for techtakes is quite a high amount). So yeah I think your heart is in the right place but you have seemed to have misread the tone of this place a bit.

“A lot of software devs and tech workers are marginalised, neurodivergent or otherwise socially disadvantaged. Too many people in this thread are completely ignoring any kind of intersectionality just because they’re men.”

Even though this person’s recent posting history really does make me assume good faith, the particular flavor of misreading the conversation really does provoke a “ooh, paul graham, zat you?” response.

It actually takes a lot of IQ to infer, you know, context.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating the obvious...

your mum doesn't mention iq

you don’t say