The Secret Guild of Silicon Valley

Is this how business people look at the people who actually make things? It's pretty unsettling.

Also, it's pretty ignorant: Anyone who's been to a Google office or to Twitter's or Facebook's office can tell you that what someone wears or what their BMI is has nothing to do with what makes a company scale.

At Google where you have 24,000 -- a significant number of which are engineers, you have old engineers, young engineers, engineers who have beards, engineers who happen to not even be male -- even engineers who wear skinny jeans and live in the mission.

The engineers I know at Apple are really well put together and make excellent software.

The entire post bleeds with broad generalities about hipsters and neckbeards. How does this pass for discourse?

This article is bullshit.

I'm sorry but it really, truly is. I've noticed a trend here on HN that more and more of these inane articles are appearing, labelling some group and then stereotypically applying properties to the people in them.

This one is the worst. Every line is a blatant lie, pulled from thin air or just a single experience the author once had. It's obvious that he has no clue.

Why does the article get 50 points? It should be flagged.

Yes ... and the world is controlled by the Illuminati ... </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, I find this statement to be BS: "Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java — not Javascript, Perl, or PHP".

I'm a C person and have been for over a decade. That doesn't mean I think every problem can be solved by C. Most recently, I have fallen head over heals for Rails. I truly think that is an excellent tool for prototyping of web applications. Would I use C or C++ for this task? Absolutely not!

You have to use the right tool for the job.

I'm surprised by the number of upvotes on this.

He overhears one guy's comment and spins a yarn. With no basis.

Sure there are programmers who like settlers of catalan and wear joke tshirts. Doesn't mean they're programming Gods.

What the original off the cuff remark meant is get someone with some serious experience who's done it before, someone skilled in more than one language and who actually understands the fundamentals behind the frameworks, in fact they could actually could write a framework themselves.

But Javascript, PHP and Perl? C, C++ and Java. Come on, who's this guy kidding?

Crap. We've been discovered. Time to go hide under a rock!

The article is stating the obvious: strong engineers that have been building very big services all know each other. That's what happens when you've been in any industry long enough.

Autism is not a personality trait.

People magazine would have more respect.

This post is so clueless I almost wonder if it's some kind of in-joke. He mentions Foursquare, which is exactly the wrong company to use as an example of "fat guys who know C++".

One of their top engineers is well known as an expert Java and Scala programmer, but also has a user picture of himself sporting pink-tinted glasses and artfully mussed hair. And I guarantee he had more fun last weekend than you did.

A broadly, perhaps overly general (and oversimplified) read, for sure, but still interesting.

As I am about to graduate college I stand at a crossroads of choosing, roughly, which path I want to go down... iOS development offers a nice compromise, as you can make beautiful things that get Rails hipsters excited, but it's still a strict superset of C and you can do some pointer magic when you need to.

Not sure what the implications are of entering industry as a FULL full stack generalist (not just HTML/JS/Ruby/SQL but all those + userland C++/Obj-C/Java and kernel level C code).

Sometimes those Mixpanel job posts look mighty interesting...

Maybe I should pivot my personal blog/website...

=]

"This is the coveted currency that companies like foursquare can offer."

s/can/can't/

A few points:

1. There is no guild. Just a cultural and perhaps even a generational gap.

2. This "guild" is not isolated to Silicon Valley. I would venture to guess that the neckbeard-to-hipster ratio is far higher everywhere outside of the Bay Area.

3. There is a minor inconsistency in the claim that the neckbeards don't use social media, and the claim that they receive recruiting messages on LinkedIn.

4. The neckbeards most assuredly DO use perl.