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deburo 2 days ago

What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both? Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?

ModernMech 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Brogrammers are in it for the love of money. Programmers are in it for the love of programming.

roncesvalles 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The distinction is even easier to make these days -- brogrammers aren't actually programmers.

There is an emerging coterie of people whose entire approach to software startups is to vibecode an MVP, raise enough seed to hire a real programmer (or get one interested enough to become their "cofounder") and move on to the next MVP. To them, doing one company at a time in the era of LLMs is a sucker's game.

_superposition_ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I fell into this career because I programmed as a kid, hacked on pre internet bboards, and understood how to drive a computer via the command line. I like solving the problems. GED, college dropout. I never planned on making this much money, but I'm certainly not giving it up. I don't feel like I fit in either camp tbh.

SkyeCA 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Love doesn't pay the bills and this industry will kill any love a normal person has for programming.

hectdev 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what if you're in it for both? I like solving puzzles and want to extract the maximum amount I am due for making a company profits.

rexpop 2 days ago | parent [-]

Good, then you're not a scab!

Legend2440 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it.

For most people it's a job, and that's ok.

nicoburns 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it

That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.

Legend2440 2 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe? Dev job at a non-tech F500 company. All these guys have kids and houses in the suburbs.

plorkyeran 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

To the best of my knowledge zero of the people passionate about programming that I know have spent a meaningful portion of their career at non-tech companies. Internships or first jobs out of college are common, but the passionate people end up going somewhere where the thing they're working on is more than an incidental cost center for their employer.

2 days ago | parent [-]
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nicoburns 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd guess it makes sense that if programming is a passion for you then probably a non-tech-centric F500 company probably isn't where you'd choose to work.

For context: my current company with ~400 employees (not just engineering) is the largest company I've ever worked at.

swatcoder 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.

While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.

But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.

thepasswordis 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What sorts of places do you hang out in, or how old are you?

People who did programming for the love of programming was extremely common in the sortof hacker subculture that existed from 1990-2010is or so.

zdragnar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hello! I hope you have an extra finger, because now you've met another. The money certainly doesn't hurt, but I love what I do.

BeetleB 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't have enough fingers.

We hang out in different crowds.

esseph 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it.

You may need to find a place with a better culture.

spike021 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

even people I know who are supposedly in it for the love of programming inevitably care about the amount of money.

_superposition_ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if carpenters, plumbers and electricians, etc have the same kind of love for their jobs in comparable ratios. I certainly don't ask when I hire one.

esseph 2 days ago | parent [-]

They're making crud apps

acheron 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean I got into it because I loved it as a kid in the 80s and 90s. And I still loved it in college. Turning it into a job quickly crushed any love I had though.

Invictus0 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

normal guy that wants to provide for his family: bro

autistic guy that rejects your PRs because you used tabs instead of spaces: pro

lukevp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you don’t have style rules baked into the PR process, you should. Tabs vs. spaces is a team decision and needs to be matched by everyone to reduce code churn. It’s correct to reject a PR if it violates the team style guide (although it should be automated and have tooling locally to enforce it as well.)

Invictus0 2 days ago | parent [-]

the only thing that matters is making money fast. everything else DOES NOT MATTER, and ESPECIALLY not the invisible characters between the words.

2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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hectdev 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I worked for twitter and there was a guy like this. I made a big stink that "yo, everything this guy says just needs to be in a linter" and they actually implemented it.

rexpop 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

On the contrary, the pro is likely to prefer tabs—you can adjust the display-width for better ergonomics.

dgellow 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you watched HBO’s Silicon Valley? Does a surprisingly good job at defining that subculture