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Comment by pattusk | Hacker News Reader

> Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. [...] In fact some nerds are quite fierce.

That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article. Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.

The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development. Whether it's code quality, clever hacks, optimization... everything about what we do has a competitive element.

Come to think of it, I can't actually think of any nerdy activity that isn't, in practice, extremely competitive.

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It is probably because competition is so commonly attributed to physical athletics. Physical strength or stamina exhibited on the playing field is competition.

Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.

There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.

The actual people?

Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.

Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.

Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.

Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.

It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.

to play devils advocate How much is this Amazon or its just the way all warehouse US workers are treated?

I have heard far worse things about non amazon warehouse workers in the UK Sports Direct for example.

I think its mostly due to the diffusion of what a "nerd" is. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" used to be a insult, now its trendy for some reason, and seems to mostly be a term for modern consumerist culture (buy lots of stuff in some sort of genre and be a nerd)

> now its trendy for some reason

Culture follows power. Once a bunch of tech nerds became billionaires in the 1990s, every aspect of that subculture gained prestige.

Collecting comic books? Memorizing all the Star Wars and Star Trek quotes, and reading side fan fictions about each of the characters?

Eh, pedantry is a form of competitiveness, and all of these activities seem to foster pedantry (e.g. "that's not part of this canon!").

That way everything is competitive. Pedantry does not have to be competitive at all.

I think pedantry is often a way of asserting status ("I know this thing, you don't"), though I agree it doesn't intrinsically have to be.

> The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development.

This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.

I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.

And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".

> Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.

I think that is little bit you choosing very competitive things to engage in. People who were obsessed with start trek for example did not build competitive societies. And I worked in multiple teams that did not felt overly competitive to me at all.

Through, I would not see Counterstrike nerdy at all. This sort of games is more of the most stereotypical guy pastime that exists.

LAN parties are nerdy for sure.

Watching anime. Or Star Trek.

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