What happened to all the non-programmers? (2015)

Antidotes include:

- join the YMCA or other community gym:

It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diverse city. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently in Michigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t. Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2403867/ymca-local-gyms-good-w...

- spend more time in civic spaces like libraries and public parks. Or just being outside in public with an open mind.

- speaking of civic involvement, active participation in your local government will for sure broaden your social circles.

- religious organizations -- at least, good ones -- are cross-sectional in this way too. Quoting MLK Jr, "... any [church] that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold thing, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."

- community work, like habitat for humanity or the like, will put you in a new sphere of folks too.

I'm glad I read the article, I thought this was about the death of sysadmins at first glance.

Speaking to the content though; and it may seem dismissive or odd but: I tend to make friends with random people I meet. For instance going the extra mile to be friendly with service workers (remembering names, asking about family and following up later, generally having good memory for birthdays etc) has landed me a fair crop of friends.

People are rarely in the service industry long and they tend to be wildly different, person-to-person, and they have extended friend groups too which if you get very friendly may end up increasing your circles even further.

It sounds weird typing this out, like I consider them some kind of resource to be tapped, but what I'm trying to get across is to be kind to people and friendship will happen. I've never gone looking for friends and almost my entire friend group (outside of IRC) has nothing to do with tech.

Some of the people I was just friendly with and became friends with are now personal trainers, nutritionists, nurses and architects. It's almost a problem because we have very little in common, we can only share lamentation about things like open offices and the country we live in. :P

> - are under 35

> - live in San Francisco, Berkeley or Oakland

With those criteria, assuming you are in the tech field, you're probably making an order of magnitude more than your age-group peers.

It seems entirely reasonable that you wouldn't bump into the non-tech crowd since they can't afford the same lifestyle as you.

Over here in the Midwest, software jobs pay much more in line with other college-educated professions.

As a result, I'm the only programmer in my friend group, and most of the people make the same ballpark of money as I do.

Monoculture basically just means upper middle class men in tech coupled with the argument of implicit negation that less diverse == bad. This self flagellation from the PMC and tech is just really... I don't know what to make of it, but I would say is harmful. If you really want to break out of your professional cohort, pick up a hobby which requires other people like sports/music/civic activities/religion/car meets/quilting/neighborhood gardening/whatever. You'll find most of those folk tend to be somewhat like minded as well, but how we spend our free time basically boils down "doing what I enjoy doing around others that respect me on some level". You do you, and let's not get too caught up with having the correct friends.

Lol, I wish I had that problem. Where I live, it's finding like-minded geeks that requires actual effort. IT people are largely social pariahs, unless they are on the business side of things. And it's really been the case for most of my life, over two different countries.

It's just that the Bay Area is an economic district, that's all. There are districts in Europe where everyone is somehow involved in making pipes and faucets, others where everyone works in the clothing industry, even some where everyone is into the business of fantasy miniatures....

SF "makes bits", so chances are that if you throw a stone there you'll hit 3 developers, 2 "product guys", and 4 devops (insert a basement-dweller-sysadmin-joke here). I actually found it pretty exciting the few times I was over there - a land where nerds don't have to be ashamed of "being in IT"! Talking coding and gadgets over dinner is socially accepted! How refreshing!

Obviously there is a degree of class selection in place, but it was always such. Did your parents know a lot of homeless people or fruit-pickers? I wouldn't think so.

In an Internet world, you can find friends who are a perfect fit, so you might never need to find others.

I was visiting my grandparents a couple weeks ago and they were baffled at how young people never know their neighbours. And it is true. I know the one neighbour that has lived to the right of my parents house. Nowhere else that I have lived have I even known the names of the people across the hall.

I tend to just have 6 friends at any given time who consume 3 hours a day in total. There isn’t room for more people without sacrificing other conversations. And yes, most are software engineers/otherwise in tech.

The 10% estimate is likely too low. Looking around my social circle, I see:

* A grad student neuroscientist (which actually means "Matlab programmer")

* A statistician (which actually means "R programmer")

* Various other kinds of scientists and mathematicians, whose day-to-day work is actually programming

* A rabbi (who is applying to programming boot camps)

* A number of unemployed people, trying to learn to program in various ways (from self-study to degree programs to bootcamps)

Most of these would not be counted, but if I talked to them at a dinner party, I would count them as programmers.

My brother-in-law is a plumber. Guess what? All of his buddies are in the trades. My mom was a school teacher. Guess what? All her friends were school teachers. When I was a software developer, I ran in circles with a lot of other tech people. Now that I'm in real estate, we hang out with a lot of other real estate agents (especially given that my partner was formerly in real estate and all her closest friends were in the business too).

Point being - for a good many people, given well-documented challenges of making adult friends, our work / industry creates a natural social circle.

Our best friends from outside those work circles came from when she ran an AirBnB back in the day and met people from all over the world.

>I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries. Preferably a more elegant sport that doesn’t require a bunch of awkward equipment. Maybe Ultimate or rock climbing– Wait, crap.

hit the gym and do some weight-lifting, solve two problems at once. Also just go out and hit the bars. (okay maybe not the greatest advice right now). Unlike the author my parents were solidly working class so I always was very aware of straddling two very different social circles, between academia and tech work and the people I grew up with. There's no reason to live in either bubble really and in a big city it's not that hard to have a healthy social circle, just requires leaving your comfort zone.

My solution was to find an international/group home. Your roommates friends become your friends and suddenly you are in a diverse group.

Over the last year I stayed with 9 people in 1 house. 2 school teachers, 1 in CSR, 1 lecturer, 1 grad student, 3 in tech (and only 1 in big-tech: Me) and 1 in pharmacy.

To-be-fair, I was in Boston . But, my peers ended up in far more homogeneous peer groups when they just stayed with people they knew or other 1/2 random strangers.

Pick-up sports or Adult-sports-leagues have worked well for this purpose too. I play(ed) soccer, but Basketball or the like would also work.

Lastly, just date someone not-in-tech. Dating apps are great for this. If it turns into a relationship, your partner will make sure their friends become your friends. It is a story as old as time. Although dating-outside-tech can be tricky for some. Not every group is as open to brutally honest and logic-1st/ empathy-2nd style of communication in tech.

Try volunteering. I had this exact conversation yesterday on a firetruck on the way back from a hazard reduction burn, that one of the things we all valued most about our volunteering experience was that we were exposed to people we wouldn't normally hang out with in our professional or social circles.

That said, on this particular truck three people out of the crew of four were programmers. We thankfully pulled up the conversation about the merits of Jupyter Notebooks for BI tooling before the fourth crew member, who is studying forensics, got so bored her eyes rolled right out of her head.

Clearly not considered: new acquaintances may be filtering out the author. I was in SF less than a week and found locals were friendlier if they didn't know I worked in tech, doubly so with the Bay area natives.

If you don't want to be pigeon-holed as the stereotypical Tech worker ('the ones ruining SF'), then show you have other interests and qualities. Author has done a fine job of defining the edges of that particular mould. The fix is the same as the other comments - break the mould, get outside the comfort zone.

Hacker News (or indeed anywhere online) is probably not going to be the space to resolve this issue! Those who weren't at the dinner party are not here to provide insight!

> "Obviously not football, since I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries."

That's exactly something a programmer (or an academic) would say. I box and I hear the same words from my coworkers.

If you stopped treating your brain as the most important fucking organ in your body (not that it isn't), you might open yourself up to hobbies that emphasize other aspects of your person. You would probably meet new kinds of people in those activities.

Do a combat sport. I've been doing various combat sports for 20 years now and I hardly ever run into people in tech. Plus, it's incredibly fun, useful (self-defense) and interesting; there is a lot of strategy and creativity involved.

Jiu Jitsu is super popular most everywhere now, but Judo is really fun too, as well as wrestling. Striking sports are great as well, but you can't really go live in practice in a striking sport. You can spar in striking at 50% a few times a week (and that's pushing it), but you can roll at 100% in Jiu Jitsu up to every day. I always found the latter much more fun.

I get round this by doing amateur theatre. Most of my friends are from theatre and they're a varied bunch. Doctors, Teachers, Vets and Lawyers are the most common professions but also lots of random jobs such as train Conductor, HR manager, entrepreneur, music instructor, charity worker and marketing execs.

There are a few techies but it's rare, and those that are tend more towards management type roles that IC engineers.

Unfortunately theatre is likely the last industry that'll recover from covid but once it does I thoroughly recommend it.

Does he hang out in the east bay? Oakland / Berkeley is way less techie than SF so combining the three cities would yield artificially low stats.

Well, it sounds like the author is 1) single and 2) above 30.

That's going to screen most "families" out of your social circle and that's a LOT of people. Most folks (tech and non-tech) start getting pressured to have families by the age of 30.

However, the whole premise of the article is that only being surrounded by techies is bad. Why?

Would he feel the same if he was only surrounded by musicians?

I found that doing activities not related to nerd culture really helps you connect with non-programmers. Dancing, sports, volunteering (aside from Code for America, which is great, but filled with programmers) all help.

Also, regularly socializing with non-programmers seems to be a check against some of the anti-social habits we're all prone to pick up

There is a definitive social glue that will introduce yourself to lots of people with a wide spectrum of different interests and is a crazy, always smiling, thing called dog

Dogs are NOT for everybody. Having a dog is a 10-15 years commitment and shouldn't be done by impulse, specially if you work from home. Could bark at 4AM, the owner will need to remove a lot of s*t and wake up early each day of the weeks, (Sundays also) and definitely can damage seriously your capability to focus in remote working from home.

But nothing prevents you to volunteer to walk a pooch or just borrow one once a month from a friend or grandma to go out and take a walk. A friendly middle sized dog will love to tell everybody how awesome is their father. Is the second best visiting card that a human can show after babies (Money would be the third).

It might be that I live on the other side of the world to the author but this hasn't really been a problem for me. I've been a developer for 10 years or so and find that in Brazilian jiu jitsu there's a pretty even split between university/not-university educated people resulting in a social circle that is pretty diverse, at least from a formal education point of view. In my case the city is somewhat expensive to live in so most of the people that can afford hobbies in this area will earn a similar income and have similar schedules. The article also felt like there was a weird bit of class focus and as other commenters have said the author needs to expand their thoughts on what sports are available and the lives other "non-tech" people live.

It's odd because I have never really felt this living outside of sf. my personal circles include lots of other professionals like doctors, lawyers, consultants, accountants, (non software) engineers, etc. Don't these people exist in San Francisco too?

I'm also a programmer, but I have quite a few friends who are very different from me in a lot of ways. For instance, my main hobby brings me into contact with a lot of people who are 20+ years older than me.

I did not engineer this, nor do I have any particular interest in knowing a bunch of older, white men. It just happened that way, because my hobby is popular with this particular demographic. If the author is bothered by their lack of non-programmer friends, surely the easiest way to correct that would be to find a hobby that attracts a different sort of folk. That might not be a viable solution right now due to COVID restrictions, but we're not going to all be stuck in our homes forever.

I guess the author didn't keep up with anyone interesting from high school or college?

And I guess they don't talk to anyone outside of engineering at their workplace? No HR, no producers, no designers?

(Also dinner party? ...ah March 2015)

I was at my engineering college reunion around the time this piece was written. It was shocking the number of people that had pivoted from chemistry, physics, biology, or engineering into "software engineering", including people who hold PhDs in non-CS fields. It does feel like the programming profession has been sucking up talent left and right.

I live in a non-coastal tech center and have the opposite problem- I love my friends, but almost none of my social circle programs for a living. It would be nice to be able to talk tech more outside of dedicated meetups or hackathons.

I played adult baseball for a few years. Incredibly enjoyable and kept me grounded with a bunch of people from all walks of life. We had a doctor, a programmer (me), an assistant prof, a plumber, a couple of carpenters, an auto body tech, a DJ, a security guard, and a couple guys who filtered in and out where I didn’t know their jobs. It wasn’t gender balanced at all, of course.

Adult softball gives a slightly less diverse in some ways but adds gender diversity. Neither is particularly dangerous among sports. (I’d put them as less risk than hockey or soccer and way less than football.)

Interesting read. Honestly I never took stock of my "social network occupational diversity" but after reading this I feel lucky. Almost no one in my circle of friends shares the same industry, let alone job title. It has a wide range of age groups -1 decade / + 2 decades which may explain it. I'm rural so age isn't very homogenized and any local bars or clubs have a wide spread. We don't talk much about work... I'm now wondering if this is because our professions don't overlap.

It’s because the author isn’t an independent, rational thinker and still hasn’t realized that.

You aren’t a slave to your current social setting. For instance, sports. There are far more than football and ultimate. Kind of irrational to stop at 2?

Here’s some help. Sailing. Soccer. Baseball. Softball. Tennis. Golf. Basketball. Table tennis. Badminton. Rock climbing. Bicycling. Trail running. Cricket. Swimming. Diving. Fishing. Roller blading. Dancing. Martial arts. Boxing. Bowling.

The author doesn’t realize that football even at 150lbs is dangerous. Try flag football.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9146034

I regularly go to the climbing gym. I couldn't help noticing that there are so many programmers in the climbing gym. People talk about programming related topic all the time.

I also went to a dancing school for a year, but I hardly saw any programmer there.

I also like snowboarding but it's hard to interact with people around you so I don't know.

Outside of sports, I like board games and there are more programmers than average.

Maybe don't rule sports out entirely. I accidentally joined a hockey team full of lawyers in Oakland. I guess similar people tend to clump even outside of the tech bubble; it's easiest to recruit people in your network. They would get their summer interns to fill in if we were short players.

I also know several teachers who rock climb though of course there are plenty of techies too.

If you have to whip up R to confirm your social immaturity, what hope is there to break out of the shell and experience life's diversity? But you can be glad for the friends you have anyways.

I never felt that. Few of my friends are programmers. Horse trainer, corporate lawyer, landlord, city building inspector, medical illustrator.

Join a church (or synagogue or mosque). Secularism has a societal cost, one of which is the loss of community institutions like churches, where you have a wide variety of people, from different classes, mixing in a common space.

Also ... start a family.

Get out of California. As fast as you can, preferably at a cost that's not easy to justify.

>” In fact, just the fact that I’m interested in doing sports for leisure is associated with class, since it’s not something that would be so easy for, say, manual laborers or shift workers.”

I think the bias here is the opposite: the author is politically biased to believe this “classism struggle” somehow doesn’t enable manual Labors to play sports?

I think the author should visit the developing world more frequently to realize how common futbol is here, for example.

I’ve been invited to pickup futbol (soccer) games in Mexico and Panama. From what I can tell, it’s a sport played around the world, including in the poorest parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This is all too frequent—- a politically biased author is unable to face their own biases and instead attempts to enforce them?

Yes, there are socioeconomic differences between world regions. But that doesn’t preclude people from enjoying sports.

Not everything is a consequence of neomarxist political thought. Perhaps explore the world, before making biased presuppositions, author.

The tech community does everything in its power to set up echo chambers and marginalize outside views as much as possible, then somebody wonders why everybody in their in-group is all the same as them... It’s not terribly shocking.