
Beware the Pretty People - ldayley
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/
======
mc32
No one has or should have stranglehold on nor should claim to own an industry
(territorialism). Industries just are -they don't care who the constituents
are. People come and go. Does it matter what it once was, and what it's
becoming? No. Stop the provincialism and the bemoaning of the illegitimate
successors. Things change. They are meant to. People will always try to seek
success wherever it can be found, now it's tech, decades from now it will be
something else.

I really don't get this. Most people acknowledge there should be a more even
balance of women in technology. But, the diversity is only welcome if the
women are other nerds? If non nerds want to come to the party, that's
despoiling things?

No one owns industries. Yes industries have a history and there were important
people who started industries, but they mature and they become part of the
mainstream --stop bemoaning this. Accept that things which become mainstream
have to acquire aspects of the mainstream.

Of course, this is tech crunch and always wants to eat their cake and have it
too.

~~~
flycaliguy
"Accept that things which become mainstream have to acquire aspects of the
mainstream."

I guess my take away was that when weirdness becomes mainstream it becomes
nothing more than a toothless affectation. That you should beware of the savvy
newcomers who have learned how to adopt a style formed out of rebellion but
will use it to push traditional objectives. They will push out the rule
breakers while co-opting their mission statements.

So yeah, it's a pretty standard statement about any fashion cycle. The point
of the article then is to warn the weirdos, the divergent thinkers who birthed
this industry to not let the handsome dudes laughing at them get them down.
It's a cute narrative about larger issues. It's about the status quo's
tendency to prevent really weird and innovative ideas to take off out of fear
it will spoil their comfortable fun. The people who show up after all the
weird work is done weren't their in the start because they don't take risks
like that.

It's a decent read. It's called "Beware of the Pretty People" and it is
written for the freaks. Reminding them to keep on freaking people out, even
when it's no longer the standard game plan.

~~~
mc32
You hit the nail on the head. Some people understand that for something to
succeed, it has to become mainstream, but there are others for whom the
original otherness _is_ their identity. It separates them from larger society,
so when larger society takes on those signifiers, they feel threatened. Like
the fashion cycle.

This article preys on people's weaknesses --like feeling that their values or
lifestyles are being co-opted -as if that were bad in and of itself. If you
have solid beliefs, what others do or don't do are irrelevant to you.

I don't think tech crunch really believes in what they say but rather they
believe that what they say will resonate with their audience and will result
in more income for them. They couldn't possibly care any less about the
principles of technologists --whatever alignment there is, is coincidental.
Let's ask this, have they ever run articles which would drive down their
readership? They may run something with some ironic distance, etc. but that's
just a form of co-opting their audience.

~~~
rezendi
"tech crunch," believe it or not, is not a hive mind with a single view point.
(OP here.)

~~~
mc32
I hope the irony isn't lost when tech crunch is one of the organizations which
is not too different from the so called interlopers it decries. In other
words, if not for tech becoming mainstream and significant tech crunch would
not have much interest in reporting about tech. so it's not that they care
about tech, they care about tech insofar as it affords them economic
viability.

Do you see a 'tech crunch' of the mortuary industry? If embalming became the
next big industry affording millions good earnings and made millionaires out
of many, you'd see the same thing. And you'd see publications making much ado
about nothing for reasons of self interest. Some times some of the things they
would raise would raise valid questions but for the most part those
publications would just ride the wave and decry the "posers" coming into the
industry who didn't have to put up with decades of irrelevance and stigma
--taking advantage of people's fears and weaknesses.

Just let people try and make a living wherever they see fit. Sure, they bring
'disruption' to the old guard, but so what. That's life.

------
swatow
Funny how the nerd stereotype is used in different contexts.

In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by White
males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side, and it is important to show
that you don't have to conform to this subculture to succeed in tech.

However, in the context of the corporatization of tech, suddenly the nerds are
the good guys. And funnily enough, nerd culture was actually part of the
counterculture movement. The old guard of cyber-hippies need to stop the slide
into corporate monotony.

~~~
yummyfajitas
There is an important thread connecting the two:

 _In the context of diversity in tech, nerds are a subculture dominated by
White males. This culture has a misogynistic dark side..._

This is a popular and powerful attack line used by "pretty people" seeking
power in tech. It's used to demonize the old guard. When the old guard tries
to intellectually dispute it, as is their custom, one can then attack their
person directly ("creep", "racist", "nerd").

It's a fairly general purpose attack that can be targeted at almost anything.
One of the more dangerous places is in hiring and evaluation; witness how
objective and meritocratic nerd hiring practices (e.g. hire-by-github, death
by brainteaser) are now attacked. Similarly, the idea of an individual
contributor is also under attack ("you can't have a 10x programmer, you can
only have a 10x team"). Once objective measures are eliminated, we'll just
descend into petty politics of the sort that "pretty people" are very good at.

~~~
hackuser
Discriminatory behavior (sexist, racist, etc.) often persists, in my
experience, because the perpetrators don't realize what they are doing. It's
not that they think, 'I want to exclude women from tech jobs'; they blindly
follow old patterns of hiring and other behavior. Humans naturally are very
egocentric and have to work to see things from others' perspectives. When they
do, they change; most people don't want to be sexist.

So of course many think it's meritocratic; they don't see the obstacles
because they never experienced them. And of course some think they are victims
of persecution; they don't see what they are perpetrating.

Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our
society, if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a
population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the
38% group has controlled power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years,
and still does in most other situations (governnment, non-tech business,
etc.)?

[1] U.S. population is 77% white, so I estimate 38% white male.
[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

[2] Wild guess at the % of SV tech workers that are white male.

EDIT: Minor rewording for emphasis

~~~
swatow
_> Here's an intellectual way to approach the problem: Stepping back from our
society, in some meritocratic system why would 38% of a population[1] produce
90%[2] of the winners? And is it coincidence that the 38% group has controlled
power, wealth, and privelege for hundreds of years, and still does in most
other situations (governnment, non-tech business, etc.)?_

That is actually the least intellectual way you could approach the issue. You
are relying on people self-censoring (and we may see some downvotes to provide
some real censorship). But I will give you the uncensored answer. There are,
in fact, a number of possible reasons apart from the one you have in mind.
Here are some.

1) Tech is meritocratic so it attracts men who are less physically attractive
or socially capable, because they mainly need technical skill. This in turn
makes the field less attractive to women.

2) Tech is a monotonous job with low social status, and so it attracts people
driven by ambition and desire for money, who tend to be male.

3) Women are fundamentally less interested in technology because they prefer
fields with human interest (though this doesn't explain the gap between
programming and, for example, math or physics).

I have only really addressed the gender issue above, but I think that's enough
to critique your original way of phrasing the problem.

~~~
sago
"I think that's enough to critique your original way of phrasing the problem."

Then I don't think much of your thinking.

Making up scenarios that are trivially refuted by a moment's thought is silly.
How about

4) Aliens come down every night and surgically remove the bits of women's
brains that are used in programming tasks.

There, now I've _really_ addressed the issue. See why 'making stuff up' isn't
actually some mark of intellectual superiority?

Or how about

1) How many jobs that are known for attracting socially adjusted, good looking
men can you name where most of the winners are women?

2) How many high social status, well varied jobs can you name where most of
the winners are women?

3) You defeat your point in your own parentheses.

You've addressed nothing. You've made up some nonsense and pretended to be
smarter than the person you're responding to, but you've directly avoided
addressing the actual point.

~~~
sago
Right, so even in fields you've been able to pick, you've not been able to
show that women are the majority of the winners. You can say they're a little
less frequently trumped by men. But you still have minorities in both cases.

Where are all these competent women who are eschewing tech because of the lack
of hot guys? Which fields are they dominating?

~~~
krakensden
Health care- nurses and new doctors (still more legacy male doctors). Although
the strict quotas on doctors distort things.

------
Animats
The headline didn't match the rant.

My first thought, reading that, was of Shai Agassi, the founder of Better
Place, the battery-swap electric car company. Years ago I went to a meeting in
SF where he spoke, and saw that that he was very good looking, spoke very
well, and had a business plan that was total bullshit. Several heads of state
and many investors were convinced by him. In the end, he burned through about
$800 million and only put about a few hundred cars, built by Renault, on the
road, before the bankruptcy.

That's what I was thinking when I read the title.

~~~
jkuria
Everything you say about Better Place is true but give the man a little
credit. He emerged from the hacker culture in Israel and was a programmer
himself for a long time before moving to the US in '96.

------
adventured
I find the overall attitude to be fascinating, and self-defeating. They refer
to the pretty ivy league people elbowing in, basically; taking over.

Well what use do I have for those people exactly? They can't stop me from
building what I want to. They have no say in the matter, no influence over me.
They only become part of my equation if I allow it. For $30, or $50, or $200
per month I can build _almost_ anything I care to in the software realm. Today
my biggest limitation is time.

The tech industry is lacking in (or no longer dominated by) geeks, nerds,
weirdos? Even if that's true: 1) who cares 2) it has no impact on me 3) that
would be the fault of the geeks, nerds and weirdos that are allowing
themselves to be told what to do.

I'm going to build whatever the hell I please. If I allow one of the so-called
pretty ivy league type to stop me, then I have nobody to fault but myself.

I don't _need_ venture capital. I don't need pretty ivy league types with
freshly printed MBAs. I need sales, and a product worth paying for that makes
sales possible.

Customers provide growth capital. Anything else - including allowing the types
dreaded by this article to be on the playing field - is optional.

------
brianberns
I've been developing software professionally for 25 years and it's always been
a business. The suits have been exploiting the nerds for a long time. Welcome
to capitalism!

------
salgernon
Apropos this article, today I received a box of "vintage" hardware and
software manuals. It's a hobby, ok? But amongst them was an original photocopy
of this article from psychology today, circa 1980:

    
    
      http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac
    

In which the LOTS user "gandalf" bemoans the isolation and singlemindedness of
the typical Stanford hacker, and the rebuttals from those he describes. It was
an interesting bit of the social story that underlies the "weird" folk
tradition.

------
rpcope1
It's funny, this article seems to be rather full of irony. At the beginning of
the article, I started miss when a lot of the tech scene was a little more
grass roots, but maybe that's just rose colored glasses. Obviously, things
have gotten more sophisticated since the days of simple computers like the
TRS-80 and while it's not possible to totally grep everything in a modern OS,
I do miss some of the hacker ethos that may have waned when the web went big.
That being said, I find it a rather perverse juxtaposition to take about
governments and Wall Street abusing the tech industry and then hold up he
examples of Uber and bitcoin as movements counter to this. While there may
have been some inefficiency in the Taxi medallion system, Uber seems to thrive
on skirting labor laws and relying on the perhaps misplaced hype surround the
"gig economy." Bitcoin is also not a terribly appropriate choice; while the
idea of the blockchain is novel, the technology is kind of wasteful (all of
energy required to move the blockchain along, probably coming from non-
renewables), it's built on arguably shaky financial grounds (nothing like a
sovereign to back it, it's often theorized to be a Ponzi scheme), and Wall
Street is getting into it big time. Both of these seem to be part of the "pop
tech" the author is rallying against.

I would rather see kids encouraged to hack all things (not just web sites and
walled garden mobile app) to keep the old school tech culture alive, and I
certainly feel the need to make sure things like GNU continue, as it, amongst
other things, have provided the means to rally against big corporations
controlling access to the interesting bits of technology (like being priced
out) back in the day. I personally feel as though copyleft is important from
this perspective, though this is probably a somewhat controversial opinion.
One thing the author doesn't mention as something we should focus on, is if we
want to keep the tech industry from locking us out of technology as we know
it, I think we should also work to make sure tech giants and other
corporations don't strong arm standards organizations and force development
into walled non-free gardens, especially like with Google and Apple's
threatening moves with regards to the internet (i.e. iOS locking out competing
browsers, Google trying to completely lock out others from gTLDs like .dev).

EDIT: Just to be clear, I also find the equating of "pretty people" and the
use of "nerd" around a lot of the culture surrounding technology both click-
baity and ad hominem.

~~~
nostrademons
It's actually a _lot_ easier to get started hacking now, in the age of
Javascript and the web, than it was 25 years ago. I remember begging my dad to
buy me Think Pascal when I got a computer so I could learn to program.
Computers cost about $2500 then, and the compiler itself was about $200. Now
one of the best languages to learn, Javascript, comes free with excellent
developer tools in every web browser, which comes free with a computer that
can be bought for <$1000. If you want to play with server side stuff you can
put it up on Heroku, again for free.

I think the big problem is that this has reduced the barrier to entry to
nothing, and so standards have gone way up. To do a professional-seeming
webapp, it's not enough to hack out some HTML as a high-school student. You
need a professional designer, and professional front-end engineer, and
professional back-end engineer, etc.

~~~
michaelmrose
Rasberi Pi 2 $35 crummy usb drive $6 Keyboard from thrift store $2 Mouse from
thrift store $3 Monitor from thrift store $10

A functional computer for $56. Not the best but probably a lot faster than the
one you paid $2500 for.

------
jmduke
There's a deep, wonderful irony in someone writing on _TechCrunch_ about
possible disturbances in the sanctity of software development.

------
tarp
"But we still tend to measure their success wholly in terms of millions
raised, billions in valuation, revenues, profits, and timeline to IPO. That’s
not genuinely subversive. That’s not truly disruptive. That’s establishment
talk."

------
jonnybgood
I don't actually hold this opinion, because I don't know the truth of it, but
I remember reading a comment about women in tech that entertained the idea of
why there isn't many women in tech. The opinion was that women are more
socially aware than men. CS/tech with its mainstream stereotypes of nerds
wasn't something that most women wanted to be associated with. If I
entertained the thought put forth by this TC article, I can perhaps predict an
influx of women in CS/tech due to it becoming more "socially acceptable",
because of the changing stereotypes.

An oversimplification, but entertaining nonetheless.

------
thomasfoster96
I'm still not sure what the title has to do with the actual contents of the
article, but the basic premise contained therein isn't exactly ground breaking
- people want to make money from tech, regardless of how much they care about
culture or product.

The last few paragraphs are a bit more interesting. Understandably, lots of
people are now seeing that you can gain things from your work or financial
input into something that aren't just financial. For some people, non profits
will provide greater rewards than for profits.

------
tux
LOL What an article. "Now that the tech industry is cool, the pretty people
are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social
graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of
the way." Good luck with that :) Don't judge the book by its cover! "While we
do, though, we need the weirdos, the rebels, the counterculture, to be
gathering together and founding companies." Not sure what misfits and weirdos
they mean maybe "Pretty People"

~~~
bigtunacan
Techcrunch puts out so much garbage and fluff these days that I just don't
bother anymore.

~~~
DannoHung
I have personally long argued that TechCrunch should be outright banned from
HN.

------
mmaunder
Reminds me of something I heard Buffet say once in an interview with (I think
it was) Maria Bartiromo: On Wall St we get the innovators then the imitators
and then the swarming incompetents.

I think it's really this applied to the Valley - and I think what you're
seeing is people who don't have tech chops, but they've seen what tech success
brings and they want that, so they have to sell something else and in this
case it's charm, good looks or good taste in shoes.

------
snarfy
If non-technical pretty-people pass your technical interview, you've failed.

------
post-
There are a lot of problems with this article, but I want to focus on this
paragraph:

> What’s more, there has never been a better time to try to found a genuinely
> subversive company than right now. Consider Y Combinator’s new openness to
> not-for-profit startups. Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit
> Donate. [[http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-
> redd...](http://www.redditblog.com/2015/02/announcing-winners-of-reddit-
> donate.html)] It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out
> there. A huge audience. You might even call it a market.

I'm not sure that I trust Jon Evans' \-- or any one person's -- assessment of
subversion. The whole point of subversion is to overturn ("vertere") the
status quo from below ("sub"), while this article seems content to maintain
the current systems of marginalized nerd-dom (which has always been a suspect
category) and capitalism (which is interesting and because as a system it
preferences what's mainstream and marketable -- Evans has contradicted himself
again).

When Evans writes, "Consider the remarkable recipient list of Reddit Donate,"
in support of his call for subversion, he glosses over the fact that the list
includes some of the most mainstream nonprofits in the world (plus two well-
known psychoactive research organizations). I'm not saying that these
charities aren't doing good things -- I think it's fair to assume that they
are -- I'm saying that supporting them can't be viewed as an act of
subversion, and that assuming limited resources, support for them means lost
support for other _actually subversive_ organizations that mean to do just as
much good in the world.

"It seems to me that there is a hunger for real change out there." But change
doesn't mean patching what exists; change -- subversive change -- means
offering a replacement.

------
dba7dba
Oh my God. In 1996 or around that time, a friend who was a CS major at one of
the major US universities mentioned in a passing that he was seeing a lot of
Business School types in CS labs trying to do coding exercises. It changed
within 2 years in his view. He thought it was a sign that tech industry was
going to take off.

------
pnathan
Personally, I like the vast majority of nerd culture as I received it. Lots of
focus on text, do-o-cracy, intellectual games. ESR's "portrait of a hacker"
harmonized with me well when I read it - it did not influence my life, but I
found it to be pretty astute.

I am sad to see it passing, but I also know that Change Happens.

------
Animats
The "pretty people" thing may have started with Facebook. When Facebook was in
downtown Palo Alto, I'd see their employees come out at lunchtime. The men
were hunks and the women were hot. I suspected they were hiring based on
Facebook pictures.

------
crazy1van
"I believe capitalism is excellent … up to a point. (I don’t believe anyone
who has travelled in the developing world as much as I have can reasonably
think otherwise.)"

Is the author suggesting capitalism is doing good or bad things for the
developing world?

~~~
rezendi
Good. (Or at least that was the intent.)

------
jqm
It isn't a zero sum game. People looking to make a quick buck don't stop
misfits from playing with computers.

As if one must be a social misfit or physically misshapen to be involved with
computers in the first place, which is itself a ridiculous premise.

~~~
informatimago
This is a zero sum game to some extend: employers will prefer to hire
beautiful people even if they're less proficient than social misfits. On
average and a grand scale, this is catastrophic.

------
sombremesa
Here's an interesting Dilbert short I saw that seems to be relevant to the
headline:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzanWSGXqGc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzanWSGXqGc)

------
vtempest
This article went so many weird places randomly.

