
The tech boom in Seattle is bringing in droves of successful, insufferable guys - ForHackernews
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/30/amazon_is_killing_my_sex_life_partner/
======
awakened
___“The sad thing about guys who exhibit these brogrammer qualities is they
seem to fall short of greatness in both worlds,” said Parish. “They’re not
purely macho or purely geeky, they’re somewhat pretenders in both...”_ __

Part of the problem is that women like this want a man who looks like Tarzan,
is rich, respected and powerful but who can also change the oil in the car,
fix the plumbing, mow the lawn, fight Brock Lesnar for her honor (and win) and
make her laugh on command.

I tell my wife that she should have married a dozen guys. Yeah, I do so much
stuff that I don't do anything really well. Thanks for noticing and calling me
a pretender. I'm just an average guy like all the rest.

Edit: Happily married for 15 years. My wife and I joke about this. She
understands and has settled for me ;)

~~~
jsolson
I don't share that takeaway from the article. What I took away was:

1) She's looking for someone who has confidence in a well formed personality
all their own.

2) That personality is not defined by what they do for work.

3) Part of that personality includes taking an interest in the lives and
personalities of other people, particularly in the context of a one-on-one
social situation who's entire purpose is (arguably) to get to know one
another.

Sure, I'm certain that if all of the traits you outline came by in one package
they'd happily take it, but the complaint seemed to be that she's encountering
men who, having _any_ of those qualities, assume that's like having all of
them and don't bother to develop the rest of the bits that make us human and
tolerable to fill in the gaps.

My reasoning behind this takeaway is that I spend a fair amount of time
hanging out in (apparently) the same neighborhood and same bars that she does,
and I find a lot of the folks who aren't interested in talking about anything
other than what they do for work similarly insufferable. That said, I'm a guy.
I work in tech. In Seattle. For Google. After having gotten tired of Amazon. I
routinely catch myself being part of the problem (although not the dating
problem as I haven't been single in over ten years).

------
eli_gottlieb
Frankly, given the ratios of male to female residents in Seattle and other
tech-heavy West Coast metro areas, nobody looking to date men (gay or
straight) has any right to complain. You have your pickings!

Are they all kinda similar? Well yeah, but so are the men in all other areas
whose economies are heavily mono-industrial. As a matter of fact, so are the
_women_ in areas whose economies are heavily mono-industrial with emphasis on
more "feminine" professions, _and_ the women in areas with populations more
female than male.

I would say "lower your standards", but that allows you to hold on to the
whole dehumanizing concept of dating-as-meat-market you've got going. In fact,
you should be getting over yourself and understanding that all these
"insufferable" men, _of whom you have your pickings_ , are human beings with
life histories and hopes and dreams of their own.

This mentality that everyone the natives don't like should just pack up and
leave Seattle is actually (shortage of sunlight aside) a significant reason I
have turned down job-offers that would have put me in Seattle.

EDIT: Seriously, normally I don't like contributing to outrage-mongering, but
this is a seriously _bratty_ article. Men are not entitled to women, and
likewise, neither are women entitled to men.

EDIT EDIT: Also, all the really awesome, wonderful men are already married to
the really awesome, wonderful women. This article is giving me an immense urge
to call my fiancee, tell her how incredible she is just for not giving a shit
about cliques and status, and then spend half an hour talking about anime and
board games just to reaffirm how "insufferably" nerdy we both are.

~~~
a3n
> but this is a seriously bratty article.

I kind of get that, but, there's nothing wrong with a bratty article, and
that's her experience. Should she not write about it? Or should she wait until
she fits in with the local men and then write about that?

Or I could say "raise your standards" beyond vanilla, non-challenging,
pleasant writing.

I really appreciate the writer's description of her experience, even if 20
years ago it would have hit close to home for me.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Should she not write about it?

Frankly, why _should_ she write an entire article, other than perhaps on her
personal blog, to complain that she can't find a man who's good enough for her
standards?

>Or I could say "raise your standards" beyond vanilla, non-challenging,
pleasant writing.

Ok, you want challenging? Here's challenging: I would find many of the same
people insufferable as she does. That doesn't mean I feel a right to go
telling the whole world that most people around me are unworthy of love or
friendship, and that the world will have to _fix itself_ by importing a fresh
supply of people _I_ happen to like.

There was a time when I might have thought like that... at age 15. Well, and
maybe up through 19. And I _still_ have a hard time finding _real_ common
ground with people who aren't _at all_ nerdy.

But hey, diversity is the spice of life! I _like_ having things I don't
understand about explained to me! Just last night at Shabbat dinner, I sat
across from a fresh new cellular biology grad-student and asked him what his
lab does. I did _not_ dismiss him as a peer, even when I grew disinterested
because the talk turned to the various drugs he and some electrical
engineering type had indulged in during undergrad. At that point I went over
and listened to my friend the host of the house (and twenty-something
Lubavitch shaliach to my neighborhood) giving his religious lecture for the
evening.

Whom _did_ I dismiss as a social peer, politely ignoring for the rest of the
night? The guy who thought there was something unpleasant about describing
growth rates using terms like "logarithmic", "linear", "polynomial" and
"exponential", who considered me _less human_ for knowing.

This is something that has happened _repeatedly_ to me throughout life, and it
leaves me with rather more empathy for the boring nerds the author doesn't
like dating than for the stuck-up philosophy-major-turned-journalist who can't
be bothered to take an interest in lifestyles beyond the underground
hippie/artist/rocker crowd that brought her to Seattle in the '90s. To me, she
sounds like an insufferable hipster, coincidentally.

Maybe she'll never take an interest, but these are still human beings, not
spoiled meat. Just because I don't like brogrammers or workaholic money-
mongers on a personal level doesn't mean that I want them dehumanized, any
more than I like being dehumanized for being a nerd. Let's have this
subcultural holy war! Why do the hippies and humanities majors get to talk
down to the rest of us?

~~~
chrismcb
>Frankly, why should she write an entire article Uhm, I don't know... wasn't
there an entire tv series, two movies, and another tv series spinnoff that
basically revolved around exactly what this article was discussing? Sure it
was in NYC and talked about all men, but still...

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Yes, I agree, _Sex and the City_ was a deeply problematic and sexist program!

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting reading this from the female perspective. So much of the gender
roles have changed over time. There was a time when this exact same article
could have been written with the sexes reversed, "All she did was talk about
herself and how she was doing this cause, or that cause, and the wasn't it
atrocious about the children starving in foreign countries."

Its a problem when our view of the world is focused on what we personally are
bringing to the world as opposed to the world around us and the people in it.
Perhaps it is the result of having one's "self esteem" pumped up from birth
through college.

It would be like carrying around a small yellow card, one that was the exact
shade and saturation of yellow that was in Vincent's Starry Night painting.
Without the rest of the painting around it, it loses much of its specialness.

------
Tomte
It's time for a single man who speaks Latin fluently, knows how to cook, is
able to talk at least superficially about philosophy and can even shut up
every now and then to _disrupt_ the Seattle dating scene!

Maybe some VC can fund potential "interesting dates", in exchange for a few
percent of the newlywed's house?

~~~
abraham_s
Perhaps something like this :)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7343283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7343283)

------
notabrogrammer
(writing from a throwaway account)

As a young male engineer in SF who is very much _not_ the brogrammer type, I
can understand where the author is coming from. I'm neither a bro, nor a nerd.
I find myself in a vacuum sometimes, wondering where the other "well rounded"
guys from "flyover country" are. Everyone seems to be too caught up in their
startups or caught up in the money. Or their so nerdy that it's impossible to
have an honest conversation with them. (Engineers can be so self-righteous
sometimes.)

There is a lost art that these tech hubs need to find again. Maybe it's "being
a gentleman". Or "being a renaissance person". There are so many soft skills
that most people (young tech guys) lack.

* How do you have a conversation with someone not from your socioeconomic/political/technological/generational background? * How do you treat a woman with respect and dignity? * How do you "pick up girls" without needing to resort to the absurd tactics of The Game? * How do you host a dinner party? * How do you approach the arts and culture? * How do you pay attention to world news and politics? * How do you dress respectfully? * Can you debate philosophy gracefully and purposefully?

From the outside perspective, I'm one of the rich, dumb tech nerds that this
article is rallying against. I'm a white kid from flyover country. I have a
lot of money. My company is very successful by all standard measures. I'm an
engineer, I like science fiction.

It's funny, though, when people (especially women) meet me. They are often
surprised that I am not an idiot brogrammer. I can carry on a conversation
about topics outside of tech. I have opinions about the arts and music. I can
discuss world politics with knowledge and tact. I know how to carry a
conversation: give and take, tell jokes, etc. I have traveled widely.

Because of this differentiation, I've found it very easy to pick up women in
SF. Women are surprised to find a genuine person who actually cares about
them, what their passions are, what they think.

I know I'm not perfect, and I certainly am striving to do better at all of
these things. But I know I'm one of the few who actually pursues these
activities and has interest in these kinds of soft skills. I wish more people
took this approach. I would have more friends, the women of tech hubs would
write fewer articles about idiot brogrammers, and we'd all live a more
fulfilling and happy life.

So here's a plea: let's make a finishing school for nerds. We would all
benefit.

~~~
MichaelGG
I agree that teaching people how to carry on conversations would be a useful
course. But the slight problem with a finishing school is that nerds will
probably disagree on the topics of such a school and find some of these
suggestions offensive.

E.g.

>How do you pay attention to world news and politics?

Hopefully little as most news isn't news in any usable way. And unless you're
actually doing a lot of research, you're unlikely to be discussing anything at
a usable level. It's not like _I 'm_ going to be comment intelligently on e.g.
Crimea without spending what, hours or more(?), reading background on it. News
reporting is unlikely to get much insight other than noting which countries
are in NATO and saying things like if the US started a war with Russia it
would be a big deal. The rest just makes people suffer more bias as they start
overestimating the incidence of uncommon events.

Talking about the news is as small talk as talking about the weather. At least
with the weather you're likely to get some things right.

Politics, at least in the US, seems to be dominated by moronic discourse. Even
the writers/shows that I "agree" with are intellectually dishonest and
obviously just "rooting for the team". I'd be surprised if all modern politics
is not about the same thing.

>Can you debate philosophy gracefully and purposefully?

What do you mean by philosophy? Because what "most people" consider philosophy
is unlikely to lead to any useful discussions. And worse, if you're trying to
have a polite conversation with someone but somehow find out they take
p-zombies seriously... well it puts a downer on the mood. Just like when
someone says they've been feeling sick, probably because of all the WiFi or
chemtrails. Or maybe that's what you mean by graceful? How to say "oh really?"
in a nice tone and change the subject?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>And worse, if you're trying to have a polite conversation with someone but
somehow find out they take p-zombies seriously...

OH GOD! Don't tell me you're some kind of damn dirty naturalist! You people
and your scientism! Don't you know Bayes' Theorem can't even solve the Problem
of Induction!?

</parody of smug philosophy major>

------
crystaln
There really is an epidemic of lameness in SF and Seattle.

I'm a straight single guy. We also want interesting dude friends. I'm
fortunate enough to have found many, but almost all of them are outside the
tech industry or women. Many of my friends don't know what I do, let alone
that I'm quite well off and successful. And if you ask me about my work and
don't notice when I change the subject, I will immediately and without
sympathy move you to my shitlist.

The truth is, all the pasty white faces eager to salve their insecurity by
convincing me of their startup's viability are incredibly shallow and dull.
Learn how to let loose and be a genuine man who doesn't need my approval. Then
come talk to me.

~~~
mattmaroon
To be fair, a genuine man wouldn't change the subject. He'd say what he did.
He just wouldn't consume the entire conversation with it. "I'm a programmer
for Google. Yes, I'm evil, ride free buses, and push rent up. What do you do?"

If your "friends" don't know what you do or that you're successful, you're not
genuine. You shouldn't be ashamed of it. You just shouldn't be all-consumed by
it either.

~~~
crystaln
You might have confused "genuine" with "compliant" and "truthful."

I am under no obligation to answer your stupid, predicable, and irrelevant to
our social future questions.

In fact, it would disingenuous of me to give you the impression that your
social style was anything but annoying and bland, and likely to lead to me
never wanting to see you again.

~~~
FireBeyond
Honestly, not much would be missed if this is your attitude to things that
don't work exactly the way you want them to.

I'd hazard a guess that your friends are more likely 'acquaintances' or
'hangout buddies' (nothing wrong with that) than friends. I know what all of
my friends do in life (and it's a diverse mix, from trauma docs to people who
work for the governor to self-made day traders to senior management at IT
multi-nationals) and, perhaps surprisingly to you, we are able to balance work
as a minor conversation topic from time to time.

But phrases such as 'stupid', 'predictable', 'irrelevant', 'annoying', 'bland'
only give off the perception of you as having quite the superiority complex,
haughtily sniffing down your nose at anyone deigning to disagree.

Why? For we are not our jobs. But as we move through our lives, particularly
beyond that first job or two, the kind of person we might be, our wants and
desires are not defined, but least elucidated at by how we choose to spend a
quarter of our lives.

~~~
crystaln
Contrary to your guess, this approach has brought far higher quality and more
intimate relationships into my life. You'd be surprised how immediately
rejecting what you anticipate will bother you results in the void being filled
by what will add to your life.

If someone is still in a phase of their life where the first question out of
their mouth is "what do you do for a living," they can find other friends.
There are a lot of people in this world - no need for me to waste my time with
ones who follow routine social interaction protocols. Suggesting this is
elitist is a little silly. We are all elitists. There are 7 billion people in
this world - we choose who we spend our time, and always reject others. Not
actively making that choice is a recipe for an unfulfilling and frustrating
existence.

I'm not saying you shouldn't know what your friends do, only that I don't want
relationships where my first impression or their first impression is based on
employment.

------
assistant_tube
Pretty much just a sensationality ragepiece designed to mine clicks.

Just some quotes from people unhappy with their sex lives used to incite the
implication that tech workers are somehow destroying a city.

~~~
pjbrunet
That crossed my mind too. But I see an ounce of truth in this. I can speak
from experience, when you're young and consumed by technology, you might have
difficulty conversing with women, even if you're attractive physically. My
dating life improved after majoring in art ;-)

In general, I think it's hard to find people that can keep an interesting
conversation going, and in your 20s you don't have much life experience
anyway, especially if you moved straight from a classroom to a cubicle.

As far as talking about yourself on a date, it's not necessarily a problem,
it's just a different style of communicating. If she's talking about herself,
that's a strong signal she's interested. Then I can respond with information
about myself--that's perfectly acceptable and possibly the desired response.
In a conversation, you can change the subject, what a concept ;-)

------
mililani
This is exactly why I hated living in the SF Bay Area. We've all heard the
jokes: Man Jose and Man Francisco. This article just reminded me of the
terrible time I had trying to meet a nice gal there for nearly a decade.
Although, to be fair, I've read the census and it seems that the entire West
Coast is afflicted by this problem of more single men than women, whereas the
East Coast has the opposite problem.

Anyways, to offer an opposing point of view, I found girls like the author
equally unpalatable and boring. Sorry, it works both ways.

------
dang
This post has been locked in a mortal battle between upvotes and flags from
the moment it appeared. The flags prevailed. They do however wish to be
gracious in victory so we have unkilled the post. Carry on—just not on the
front page.

~~~
pjbrunet
How many of the flags came from Amazon employees/investors?

------
phazmatis
I'm proudly one of the insufferable "brogrammers" who wears that new employee
backpack everywhere. I spend my free time learning new web frameworks. I go to
tech meetups. Strike up a conversation with me and recoil in horror at my
ignorance about everything outside of tech. I'm racing against imposter
syndrome here, and a reduced sex appeal isn't going to stop me.

------
kvcrawford
I try my very best not to talk about work unless specifically asked. And when
people do ask, they will still get bored very quickly. _Even_ if they are
asking for advice on how to learn programming or enter the field—of which it
seems only 10% of those asking the question are genuinely interested in doing
so.

If a date (or prospective date) asks you about work, it's probably best to
just tell them you slay dragons and steer the topic towards something else.

------
Gravityloss
Everybody complains. There's too few men. There's too many men. The men are
too random. The men are too predictable.

Are there some good examples somewhere, something which someone could build
something upon? I realize that maybe there's no incentive to write anything,
if everything's okay....

------
dang
We changed the title in a vain attempt to make it less linkbaity.

------
jack-r-abbit
> _The odds may be good, but the goods are odd._

Hmmm... never mind that she referred to men as _goods_... what is wrong with a
little odd? After I met my wife for the first time, she told her friends back
home that I really wasn't like the other guys she had dated. Like not her
usual type. One of them had the good sense to remind her that there was a
reason she wasn't dating any of those other guys anymore. :)

~~~
wcummings
It's a saying, a play on words, I wouldn't read into it too much.

------
MichaelGG
What seems strange to me is, if she's found a strongly predictive indicator,
why does she not simply filter before going on a date? Have Amazon's employees
run off all the "weirdos"? She even mocks them in the last paragraph, saying
how easy they are to spot. So why continue to date them?

>but high on his newfound power drank four or five “special” drinks from the
craft cocktail bar, Canon, ordered the foie gras, and racked up a $200 bill in
less than two hours.

This part seemed the most curious to me. Is having a few "special" drinks a
bad thing? $200 seems quite reasonable at a higher-end place. 5 cocktails
alone could be nearly $100. Foie gras is like $40 or so (I didn't see it on
Canon's menu)? Another few drinks and some food and you're there. Or is the
subtext that he ordered in an arrogant way?

I wonder because I'd easily do this and certainly not in an arrogant way, but
hey, life's short, and if a restaurant seems good and has interesting food and
drinks, why not try them out? It's only money.

~~~
jsolson
Canon is a pretty easy place to run up a $200 tab. My wife and I rarely make
it out of there below that, and I've done it myself on at least one occasion.

That said, five cocktails in less than two hours is going to leave all but the
stoutest alcoholics a lot worse for wear, and there are more and less flashy
ways of running up such a tab. Of course, neither of us was there to witness
this, and as I mentioned in another comment, I'm likely part of the problem.

Tangentially related, if you're ever in Seattle and want tasty small plates
and cocktails with a bit of showmanship to them (as well as a somewhat absurd
scotch/bourbon menu), I'd highly recommend Canon :)

------
GuiA
"When you see an asshole, you've seen an asshole. When all you see are
assholes, you're the asshole"

Our generation (and by that, I mean broadly "anyone from a western culture
currently in the first half or so of their career") has a serious problem with
seeing and understanding things outside of our own little world. When we see
things, people, events, that displease us, we always have to extract some
grand underlying theory and trend about it, about why the world is against us,
and why it's just not right. We're always the ones with the intelligence, the
burning passion, the openness of mind, the great understanding of the world-
it's always others that aren't enough. Of course, the author isn't an entitled
self-centered young adult just like the men she describes: it's the whole tech
industry that's even more awful than the law or banking industry, and just
can't ever be good enough for her! We believe ourselves to be individuals
imbued with uniqueness and intricate subtleties, and yet judge others as
merely the sum of the loosely defined groups we put them in.

(I have tons of female friends who are in committed
relationships/engaged/married to men from the law/banking/tech industry, while
themselves having graduate degrees in literature/philosophy/fashion
design/biology/etc, and they are all very satisfied. But I'm sure they are all
wrong and as vapid as their partners from those god awful industries)

This woman was part of the date with the "insufferable tech worker" as much as
he was. If she had a terrible time and found the date bland, chances are he
did as well.

As a non American, I do find the US dating culture hilarious to the point of
the absurd. It's a practice codified to the extreme, as boring as it gets,
practically a checklist of do's and don'ts and desirable attributes and
undesirable attributes. In an hour after work around a cup of coffee, the
average American expects to gain enough knowledge about the human in front of
them to judge whether they should see them again or cut contact forever. How
can you expect anything but abysmal success rates in that case?

In the culture where I'm from, you typically meet people through social
gatherings where your friends brought some of their friends, who themselves
brought some of their friends. You get to know people through shared
experiences and group discussions rather than awkward timed sit downs at the
local Starbucks. And maybe after a few of those events you realize that the
guy who spent the first 30 minutes of your first conversation talking about
his job actually is much more than that- because honestly, how reasonable is
it to issue a definitive judgement of someone based on 30 mins of conversation
with someone you've never met before?

~~~
KenjiCrosland
What culture is that? I'm curious.

------
agorism
My girlfriend is the only other person who understands what the software I am
writing is supposed to do.

She doesn't program at all.

------
gfodor
why is it suddenly A-OK to generalize men in tech?

------
fivedogit
By definition, only some people can be "extraordinary", yet most people in
this generation were raised to believe they are. Thus, widespread unhappiness.

And to think, our parents tried so hard.

------
a3voices
It sounds like normal guys acting like normal guys, and women having too high
of standards. You can't connect with anyone well on the first date, or at
least it's very rare.

~~~
crystaln
Funny how a group who can't accept "normal" socioeconomic or personal success
is ok with "normal" social lives.

