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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

What does anything Peter Thiel says have to do with Google? The writer calls him "an ideological leader in the Valley". That's a pretty tenuous connection.

And the contrast with Drexel and Milken? Come on, those people went to jail for fraud!

This is fact-free dreck that's just adding to the noise.

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Agreed, the author seems not very knowledgeable and just lumps everything together - Silicon Valley brogrammer culture (is there a brogrammer culture at google? Haven't heard of one), Peter Thiel's political writings, surveillance capitalism and junk bond traders. As if he wanted to implant a vague "these people are bad" thought into the mind of a reader without diving much into the specifics.

I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term. In my experience programmers tend to be shy, introverted, soft spoken, and more socially awkward than average - the exact opposite of the type of person "bro" typically refers to. I've never worked at a company where the programmers are the extroverted outspoken machismo ex-fraternity type who regularly lift weights and play beer pong at their bachelor pads before hitting the bars/clubs.

Martin Shkreli (the pharma CEO who gained fame after jacking up the price of a drug by 5000% overnight) is referred to in the press as "pharma bro". What makes him a "bro"? He's awkward, unpolished, and more resembles the overcompensating nerd from high school than the binge-drinking football-playing jock who got invited to the parties.

Tech has never had a "brogrammer" culture. The term is just used to paint the picture of programmers as being misogynistic.

> I never really understood this loaded/gendered "brogrammer" term.

Me neither. I'm not Silicon Valley-based so when the articles started to appear about some guys who pop their polo collars and work out between writing lines of code I just assumed that this is a quirky new meme that is based on a few eccentric characters existing in real life. And a stereotypical google engineer in my mind is polite to a fault and not in any way a brogrammer (I wonder, is this grounded in reality or are my stereotypes off the mark?)

Evidently, the word "bro" is convenient: it is short; it is vaguely pejorative; you can seamlessly attach it to other words to mark the specific bro (pharma bro, google bro etc.)

They're not anywhere near as common as Silicon Valley's detractors claim, but they do exist. They tend to cluster, which is maybe why you haven't seen (m)any. I would cite the early Rails community (from maybe 2005 to 2009, but don't pin me down on exact dates) as one that had a very high concentration of "brogrammers", which lead to all kinds of nastiness; most infamously, the deliberate sexism at their conferences.

Fortunately, once Rails grew up and put on a suit and tie, they kicked out most of the toxic people and the situation got a lot better... and Rails even became a better framework at the same time to boot. Just one example of the axiom that "rock stars" and "brogrammers" don't actually produce better code.

There are brogrammers. I don't think they're more or less sexist on average though. Just out going engineers in a male dominated field.

Oh, the facts are correct, they're just not used in any sensible way. Look no further than the use of references to fictional television and movies as supporting evidence.

It feels like something thrown together by scraping a bunch of random content from blog posts on Silicon Valley.

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