First came the Dudeitors. Now, meet the Brogrammers.
Brogrammers are coders who aren't super lame geeks. Brogrammers like to party. According to this Businessweek article, you can pick them out from the rest of the nerdy losers because they wear sunglasses, listen to 2pac, turn board games into drinking games, and get invited to naked hot tub parties in Malibu. "We're the cool programmers," one self-proclaimed Brogrammer boasts. Yeah dude, you sound awesome.
The moniker is more than a meme — "Brogrammers" is the name of a series of hacker get-togethers in Austin, and posters at a recent Stanford career fair tried to entice computer science graduates by asking, "Want to bro down and crush code? Klout is hiring." Brogrammers say it's all in good fun — and that it's refreshing to feel like it's acceptable to have a good time when they're out of the lab or start-up office — but the trend is making women, who only make up 21 percent of all programmers, feel even more alienated. "This brogramming thing would definitely turn off a lot of women from working" at startups, said Sara Chipps, founder of Girl Develop It, a series of software development workshops.
The article doesn't really mention the fact that the startup world has also become flashier than it used to be because it's one of the most lucrative fields out there for college grads, except for one quote from a female engineer who says that the frat boy mentality among engineering men is "more pronounced" at startups than in more established organizations. Douchey smart guys are nothing new, but we're used to seeing them on Wall Street and in law firms. Now that guys like Mark Zuckerberg — perhaps the pioneer brogrammer? — make billions while investment bankers get laid off, more people are learning to code for the cash and the fame instead of the passion.
The Rise of the 'Brogrammer' [Bloomberg Businessweek]
Image via Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock.