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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c [medium.com]

Many programmers aren’t hackers, and there isn’t a single thing wrong with that. Literacy of any kind is a beautiful thing. In today’s market, demand for code-literate employees far exceeds the supply, so engineering teams contain both hackers and non-hackers. Increasingly, the latter outnumber the former. This is still a beautiful thing — until the latter realise there are enough of them to push the weirdoes out, and do it.

It’s easy to forget that only 20 years ago — around the time I graduated high school — the Internet was a ghost town compared to today. Okay, a ghost town with a thriving university and more communal watering holes than you could have shaken a stick at, but next to nothing in the way of business. Then we won the right to encrypt Net traffic with ciphers and keys incidentally strong enough to protect credit card numbers in transit, and suddenly e-commerce exploded. The smell of wealth attracts the power-hungry and the job-hungry like raw meat does flies, and two bubbles later, the pull is still as strong as ever. (It’s as if there’s some fundamental human drive to communicate or something.) Successive waves of subcultural immigration into the tech industry have brought with them a myriad of social signaling dialects. Without active effort, it’s easy to miss that between two techies, one signifier can easily have three or more meanings, depending entirely on how the people involved got to where they are.

Original Submission