Facebook’s hacker-way culture may have been the root of a new motif where programmers no longer have to wear pocket protectors and have tape on the bridge of their glasses.
Danilo Stern-Sapad writes code for a living, but don’t call him a geek.
He wears sunglasses and blasts 2Pac while programming. He enjoys playing Battle Shots — like the board game Battleship, only with liquor — at the office. He and fellow coders at startup BetterWorks are lavished with attention by industry recruiters desperate for engineering talent.
“We got invited to a party in Malibu where there were naked women in the hot tub,” said Stern-Sapad, 25. “We’re the cool programmers.”
Technology’s latest boom has generated a new, more testosterone-fueled breed of coder.
Sure, the job still requires enormous brainpower, yet today’s engineers are drawn from diverse backgrounds, and many eschew the laboratory intellectualism that prevailed when semiconductors ruled Silicon Valley.
“I don’t need to wear a pocket protector to be a programmer,” says John Manoogian III, a software engineer and entrepreneur.
At some startups, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that it’s given rise to a new title: brogrammer.
A portmanteau of the frat-house moniker “bro” and “programmer,” the term has become the subject of a Facebook group joined by more than 21,000 people; the name of a series of hacker get-togethers in Austin, Texas; the punch line for online ads; and the topic of a humorous discussion on question-and-answer site Quora titled, “How does a programmer become a brogrammer?” (One pointer: Drink Red Bull, beer and “brotein” shakes.)
One popular online video featured Brooklyn-based programmer Rob Spectre giving a presentation entitled, “Learn Brogramming the Hard Way.”
“It’s entirely a joke,” said Spectre, who works at the startup Twilio. “Developers by nature are not super confrontational ‘Jersey Shore’ types, which is why we find brogramming so funny.”