[protomyth]

It just struct me as a snippy reply and someone trying to laugh off a subject that keeps coming up in our industry. I hate when people laugh off this type of stuff. I figured I'd try (not much of a writer really) to give a less snippy answer. I didn't really succeed. I apologize if that wasn't your intent for the reply and thought behind it.

I can laugh at myself (and I do quite often). If I didn't I think I would have gone insane by now. I don't even have a problem with Hooters, Playboy / Playgirl, or any of the thousands of other places sex is used to sell things. Like I said, hormones and money.

I'm just a little sick of the lack of empathy in this situation. The "midwestern" discussion had the same vibe (obviously not as damaging). Maybe I'm just sick of TV Shows showing a buffalo every damn time they talks about ND, or (much, much more importantly) I'm just sick of thinking about how many developers we have lost because of stuff like this. Can't really be a Meritocracy if stuff isn't based on merit.

[georgeorwell]

It's fine, I'm not offended. The thing is it's very clearly not a meritocracy. There was a comment recently about how Linus got about $1M out of his RedHat shares, and how this seems totally unfair next to someone like Zuckerberg or even say GitHub. The easy money flowing around this current startup bubble is what's attracting the frat boy mentality. As far as empathy is concerned, I think it's pretty much a write-off when mediated by technology. Hell, we can't even get the tone of each other's posts right. And to generalize quite a lot, empathy and making money are just sort of fundamentally odds with each other. I'm sure you'd never see booze bitches (their mindset, not mine) at a free software hackathon.