Hacker News Reader

Comment by drgath | Hacker News Reader

I feel this same way about "brogrammers", do they even exist? I've never met one, and I'm a pretty social guy. I'm sure there are some douchy guys who happen to be programmers, but are there enough to even call it a trend? Or is it just this mythical "they" who we love to poke fun at and make nonsensical statements like "We can't serve alcohol at tech events because it will attract brogrammers."

View on HN

I work with several who are at a separate office from the one I work at. They're a royal pain in the ass because, for all their questionable engineering decisions (a system that crashes - stack-trace to the server console - because of a single bad field in the database), they are remarkably politically astute. Much of our leadership thinks that brogrammers are what top-notch software developers are like, which makes their brogrammer mentality all the more irritating.

I've never heard of these "brogrammers". Perhaps I'm not reading the right blogs so as to be whipped into a proper frenzy.

I've never met one as well, and it always struck me as odd that a really good programmer could also be a brogrammer. Becoming a good programmer requires incredible patience, reasoning, self-learning, and solitude (among others). Those qualities seem to undermine the image of a brogrammer.

The "Business Week" story about brogrammers which sparked a lot of the recent conversation talks about brogrammers programming with one hand while doing pushups with the other.

That's just laughable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com