silicon valley
The IT world is often made fun of in sitcoms, tv shows, and media. Nerds are everywhere in the media now, and most represent IT culture in some way, shows like the big bang theory proclaim to be about some nerdy physicists but mostly represent stereotypes of the IT world.
In the real world, IT is only so contrastingly funny due to the brain-dysfunction of many involved and the fact that the phonies make themselves so obvious with time. In business, phonies are common and in fact, how many salesmen aren’t some kind of phony in some regard? However, in IT, there is like this sort of differentiating honor between the phonies and the people who actually get stuff done. It’s the hacker creed. I remember people like ESR writing about being a hacker is a title deemed upon you by others, not something you proclaim yourself. However, the phonies clearly never got that memo, and will proclaim themselves gods, if given the power. Where, in any other career path, do you find people that, clearly at some point had some ability to learn, but at some point, just stopped and decided, I’m good, and then proceed to act like they have something to teach everyone, without actually doing anything but stating the obvious.
At some point in your career, did you decide to give up on ever innovating, what-so-ever, to instead simply repeat the same brain spew, over and over. In IT, you will find this all the time at organizations with bad management. If you are afraid of all change, bow in fear at any notion of a challenge, and have given up at trying to do things yourself, as you inevitably find others to do them for you, you may be an IT phony.
And let’s not get into all the bizarro office-culture bullshit, half of which is completely unnecessary. Do watch and note that most of the people who want and insist upon an office environment, typically needlessly filled with people at desks, are the people that would probably die off without them. Many IT jobs can be done from home or with other such provisions, but generally the phony types are afraid of this, since they don’t have the skills to do stuff themselves, it exposes their lack of value, and only in the office environment where they can play politics will they have any chance to survive.
These are the sad truths of the conflicting mentalities in the IT world – the business phonies versus the nerds, and then you’ve got the nerds who have sold out, essentially, to the business phonies, but really have no place in either world. They have essentially made themselves useless to everyone, with the guise of being the bridge between the two. It’s a damn war, pick a side.
The real truth is, many in the phony camp started in the nerdy camp. A lot of these start-up CEO’s were originally nerdy guys, but the business stuff got to their head, and they forgot how to treat people without looking down upon them. Why can’t everyone be a successful startup CEO, must be so easy right? To them, anyone who can’t do what they did is just not worthy, even if what made their success may have come by pure chance or timing. They represented this really well in the hbo show “silicon valley” with the CEO dictating orders from above, casting value judgements on his employees “below” him, even though he doesn’t know them or even really bother to try. It wouldn’t be quite as funny if there wasn’t a horrible truth behind it, if I hadn’t personally seen the same things myself working in IT.