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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

I'm not in SV (Seattle instead), but I'm already tired of "work parties". For once I'd like to talk about something other than vim vs. emacs, Android vs. iOS, Python vs. Ruby, etc etc ad infinitum.

The homogeneity of this environment is aggravating. It takes a lot of work to break out of it. I'm not sure what it is about geeks, but much of our community seems to take pride in being about tech - and only being about tech.

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One of the fantastic things about moving to Italy for me was meeting lots of people who do various things in life. Sure, I have friends that I can 'geek out' with from time to time, but even most of them have plenty of non-programmer friends. Also, being a programmer, as far as I can tell, seems to be regarded as a job like most others, not something too terribly nerdy or uncool.

I have a coder friend who recently moved to NYC and he reports (for the most part) the same thing. In Seattle telling people he's a software engineer does one of two things: it starts a big geek-out discussion about something, or people roll their eyes "oh boy, another one of you guys". In NYC on the other hand people regard it as just another job.

I completely agree with you on that. I find it really annoying and frankly a bit simplistic to debate those types of things. It is one of the biggest turn-offs to being friends with a "geek" for me.

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