Huh, I had thought the "brogrammer" thing was a parody, not a serious self-description. I usually run across variants of the descriptor "bro-ish" as derogatory, not something people actually want to call themselves; for example, "brostep" is a derogatory term for a subgenre of dubstep that dubstep purists don't like, not something people proudly call their own music. But I'm admittedly totally out of this particular loop.
I thought so too, but the word I hear from people I know at Facebook (where the term originated) indicate that the people who started this are pretty dead serious about the concept.
Thankfully I work with no brogrammers - this might actually start being a hiring disadvantage if companies are known to be brogrammer-heavy.
It's a very useful indicator that the company is looking to hire barely-sentient PHP monkeys rather than actual programmers to solve interesting problems.
I've never heard that about Facebook, only the opposite: they hire awesome programmers, and then teach them PHP. Certainly, any Facebook developers I've met (online or in real life) have been pretty awesome, though my sample size is in the single digits.
Interesting. I wasn't referring specifically to Facebook, btw, and I've never seen Facebook mention "brogrammers" in their job postings.
Do they self-identify as "brogrammers?" If so, did they do so before joining Facebook or only after the fact?
The self-described bro in the linked article appears to only "program" in PHP according to his own website, so I think my assumption that he's just a monkey is fair.
I totally agree with this. I thought it was a joke. I didn't think frat guys were actually learning to code and calling themselves programmers or something...
The point of this blog post is basically that it doesn't matter if you program or what, if you're a douche, you are a douche.
There's been a few posts on here and reddit about brogrammers at facebook and zynga that were completely serious. If I recall correctly there was a recruitment post here not that long ago where the entire post was about looking for "brogrammers" and based on the comments of the poster he was 100% completely serious even with the negative feedback from the other posters.
Now that I think of it, there was actually a YC company's recruiting post on HN that used it (not entirely clear how seriously), which created a bit of a backlash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3168038
I think it's probably not a good recruiting strategy, because it telegraphs both that this might be a problematic opening for women, and that anyone worried they'll be deemed too egghead/nerdy might want to pass. Even if you don't care about sexism (which you should), a job ad that implies that nerdy programmers may not be welcome really restricts the size of the candidate pool. On the other hand, if that's the company culture, maybe it's better to know ahead of time...
I think a lot of people are repulsed by the idea of spending a career surrounded by the "programmer" stereotype (i.e. monomaniacal, male, introverts). Part of me wonders whether advertising a more traditionally social work environment might not attract a lot of talent that doesn't fit the "programmer" mold (including women!).
I'm not sure a frat-ish vibe is the best way to accomplish that, though. In particular, I don't think cultural geekness is the problem; women are fairly well represented in cultural geekdom outside of programming, especially in recent years. For example, most sci-fi/fantasy fanfic authors are female, and gender balances at general-geekness conventions (e.g. Comic Con) is closer to even than it is at specifically tech events.
a job ad that implies that nerdy programmers may not be welcome really restricts the size of the candidate pool.
that's what I find funny about the whole thing. "we're hiring programmers! no nerds." that's an unlikely strategy for success even when programmers are easy to hire -- which they are currently not.
And would that be a problem? Not that we need a method to spot bad recruiters, but for those who still think that it makes sense to evaluate quality, what you describe could be a good method to identify the most degenerate ones.
