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by madengr 2876 days ago
Why isn’t the “bro culture” being weeded out of tech at the university stage. Bros’ and frat boys don’t make it through electrical engineering; they flunk out, at least from my experience. I don’t work with anyone like that.

What’s wrong with the tech sector when it comes to computer science? Maybe the science is no longer required?

4 comments

My perspective is that in a tech company you usually still have the nerds and bros dichotomy. The nerds are the engineers, while the bros are the ones in sales/management/community/design positions. You can also see this in pop culture portrayals of tech jobs as well, such as Silicon Valley (Bachman is a bro caricature) or Halt and Catch Fire (Joe's about 90% psychopath, 10% bro).
I think this is definitely an outdated dichotomy, especially in the context of a game company. The bros/jocks now are the gamers, who used to be nerds - now the nerds are the hardcore programmers/database people/accountants. Those who are in the gaming culture are every bit as much in hypermasculine jock culture as football players, just without the physical abilities.
I doubt many of the senior managers mentioned have CS degrees.

It's like the old joke about the limit of Engineering as GPA tends to zero is Business Administration.

> What’s wrong with the tech sector when it comes to computer science? Maybe the science is no longer required?

That's part of it. I'm a CS grad, but I'm "rare" in my circle. Some of it comes from this "natural born programmer genius" vibe.

Don't misread me, I work with some truly talented programmers that weren't CS and some mediocre ones that were, but it has gotten to the point where people are specifically looking at degrees that aren't CS for dev jobs.

You could have amazing software, but if you don’t have a high energy marketing team / operations, you might not reach many people with said amazing software