Why “Normies” Hate Programmers and the End of the Playful Hacker Trope
If programmers wish to rehabilitate the image of what it means to be a programmer, then we have to step way, way outside of our comfort zones and…talk. to. people. By Jared White
I've been trying to wrap my head around this.
As the discourse around generative so-called artificial intelligence reaches ever higher zeniths of stupidity, one of the threads of conversation which has been emerging more frequently is the ambient take that programmers suck so thank god personalized AI and “vibe coding” can kick ’em to the curb.
There are a variety of reasons why, presumably, programmers suck. (Keep reading to learn what they are.) More astoundingly, some programmers themselves seem to have bought into aspects of the suckiness that is being a programmer.
Legitimate question: is this really about how awful the people who are programmers are as people, or is this more about the seeming inability of a programmer to improve society around them?
Put a pin in that for later.
And if programmers are so, so terrible…why was the Playful Hacker trope so prevalent in movies and TV shows of the 90s and well into the 2000s? Ofttimes they were the plucky upstarts…the misfits, the rebels. Yeah, sure sometimes they could be dicks. Maybe they played too many pranks on the non-nerds around them. But at the end of the day, they were mere clever keystrokes away from Power to the People!…upending the evil corporate conglomerate or taking down nefarious government agents or inserting a computer virus into an alien spaceship OS to disable its shield.
So what happened? You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Is that it?
I'm going to attempt to break down what I think is going on, and why programmers who want to fight back against genAI also have to fight the rot at the heart of Big Tech/Silicon Valley corporate culture and stand in solidarity with labor (yes, including blue-collar workers).
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Blame HBO’s “Silicon Valley”
I have no way to prove this, but I feel like there was a before-Silicon Valley and an after-Silicon Valley.
Before this hit TV show came along to skewer, lampoon, and otherwise eviscerate the culture of Big Tech, a lot of people had good feelings about computers and the Internet—and particularly the startups driving this revolution. Yes, there had been moments before when tech companies were in the cultural crosshairs; most notably, The Social Network kicked off the 2010s with a surprisingly early take on the weirdness of Mark Zuckerberg and what he'd really been up to as the boy genius behind Facebook.
But when Silicon Valley came along in 2014 (only two years before the rise of Donald Trump, if you can believe it!), it ripped Big Tech a new one. Sure the zany and oft-ribald humor was dialed up to 11 and the characters were obviously caricatures, but what made Silicon Valley special was how…real it felt. It provided a permission structure for (some) programmers and other close observers of tech to finally admit to themselves or even publicly to others: “OK, yeah, these tech CEOs and these venture capitalists are kinda shitheads aren't they and our industry is kinda fucking garbage isn't it.” 😬
And perhaps most damming, guess who allowed this industry to get so bad in the first place? Erm, the programmers who benefited from the asshattery with nosebleed salaries and ridiculous perks. 🤦🏻♂️
But was it really their fault? That is, well, the billion-dollar question.
Another cultural touchstone: I remember the sensation of feeling like us programmers were the victims of corporate stupidity, most famously illuminated by the cartoon strip Dilbert. Dilbert was of course always at the mercy of the idiots around him, which occasionally included other programmers but more often everyone else in the corporation (bosses, consultants, HR, you name it).
One wonders if perhaps the inability of the Dilbert character to become self-aware enough to realize that, uh, maybe he was actually part of the problem to begin with has a great deal to do with what went south later in our culture. (It's more than a little ironic that Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, went off himself into MAGA-brained conspiracy theory nuttiness and got himself canceled. Hmm…)
The Visage of a Programmer
So Silicon Valley might explain how pop culture started to sour on the idea that the world of Big Tech is this amazing magical place filled with rainbows and unicorns which will save the world, but what happed to make people revile programmers in particular?
Here are a few paths I think this may take.
- The programmer as a wizard. And who doesn't love a wizard at first? They wave their magic wand and recite their secret incantation and poof! something incredible appears before your very eyes. The problem with a wizard is they can also be capricious and unreliable, and make you feel like an idiot. And after decades of “normies” trying to explain to annoying wizardly nerds what to build, and then getting expensive, substandard software that's buggy and hard-to-use in the end, some folks are just tired, man.
- The programmer as an enabler. Instead of technology truly making the world a better place to live, providing most people with new opportunities and more leisure time, programmers seem blind to the results that non-programmers are left with…that is, a society with as many problems as ever before. And the solution to that—according to some programmers it would seem—is more software! Software to fix the problems created by software. And then more software to fix that software…the cycle never ends.
- The programmer as a thief. This one hits especially hard for me. I recently wrote a rebuttal We Are Not The Same to the idea that programmers inevitably take jobs away from other people and hurt the environment in the process. (Bizarrely, that is seen as a pro-AI argument: you can't critique genAI tools for harms inflicted if your career as a programmer has been harming others for decades! Hypocrite!) Yet if I take a step back and look at the history of computing over the past 30+ years, has the legacy been to inflict pain on many other industries? Well, if we're being completely honest…yes. I've tried not to do that personally…but if I haven't fought it hard enough in the past, I wonder if silence is complicity?
- The programmer as a means to an end. This is perhaps the newest entry in the list thanks to the claims of AI. Code is often seen as something transient, something accepted begrudgingly as a conduit between the things that really matter: ideas & specifications on the one hand, working solutions on the other. In an ideal world, we wouldn't even need code! Computers would be “smart enough” to interpret what people need directly. You'd ask the computer to do things and it'd just do them for you, Star Trek-like. In this scenario, a programmer who speaks up for the importance of understanding and respecting coding practices is a sneering gatekeeper, a villainous obstacle to a brighter tomorrow, a lurking Luddite ready to smash the new AI looms! (Just conveniently forget about all those programmers who sought diligently for years to de-mystify this career and make it more diverse and approachable for all.)
Taken altogether, if programmers are seen as jargon-loving gate-keeping egotistical enablers of corporate greed who directly benefit from the misery of others outside of Big Tech, then of course programmers are bad! Hell, come to think of it, I don't even want to be a programmer anymore! 🥺
Eww! Gross!
And yet…
ResistanceNet ✊ to the Rescue?
In a previous installment of Cycles Hyped No More, I wrote about the bifurcation of the Internet into two separate global networks which are compatible mainly at low technical levels but otherwise share little commonality in terms of purpose, culture, and financial models. I labeled these ResistanceNet (that's the good one), and EmpireNet (that's the bad one) respectively. 😉
Now I don't want to fall into the very same trap I outlined above. The solution to Big Tech's failure is…more software? (And then more software to fix that software? Will the cycle never end?!)
Yet there's a certain truism that if we're surrounded by bad software (along with the people who create this bad software either knowingly or ignorantly), the solution has to be grounded in part in the pursuit of better software. I emphasize “in part” because we've already established that software alone isn't the answer.
If programmers wish to rehabilitate the image of what it means to be a programmer—as I fervently do—then we have to step way, way outside of our comfort zones and…talk. to. people. 😱
If there is such a thing as the mythical 10x programmer, then here's what I believe such a programmer engages in. (Note that NONE OF THIS has anything to do with code per se!)
The Liberal Arts
I took Steve Jobs at his word when he saw Apple as uniquely standing at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. Did he still get things wrong and act like a jerk? Obviously. Apple as a corporation has never had “clean hands”—yet I do believe Jobs was onto something.
The sad reality is that, according to Wikipedia, “modern statistics suggest a Liberal Arts degree offers graduates a considerably lower income when compared to science and technology graduates.” This might explain why so many people in charge of technology decisions today—especially in the AI field!—seem to be quite stupid when it comes to questions of ethics & morality, political history, cultural anthropology, arts & crafts, literature, and other important aspects of humanity outside of Capitalism™.
Intersectionality
Yes we're going there. Woke. Critical Race Theory. Or as I remember from back in the 90s, Multiculturalism.
It's strange to recall now how many of the hippies of the 1960s and 70s ended up working in tech. Some of them lost all touch with their roots and turned into greedy capitalists, but others found ways to pull on those threads for the better. I have a lot of problems with the Open Source movement at this point, but there's no denying that many of the principles undergirding Free (Libre) Software are rooted in collectivism. And for good reason! That's why so many corporations hated the very idea of Open Source until they eventually discovered ways to EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) it…the most recent example being GitHub’s “pivot to AI” as it gets assimilated by the Borg I mean Micro$oft. I kid you not…just listen to (former) GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke: “Resistance is futile!”
But I digress. It's time to go full hippie once more and own the fact that software must serve the marginalized first and foremost. To the degree that software benefits the powerful over and against the powerless, that software is evil. Programmers need to be willing to admit that technology is not neutral. After all, the purpose of a system is what it does. And if a system frequently perpetrates evil, it is a system built to be evil.
As a programmer, you must be continually asking yourself the following questions:
- Will this software harm ethnic minorities & native peoples?
- Will this software harm LGBTQ+ people?
- Will this software harm the poor?
- Will this software harm the disabled?
- Will this software harm children or the eldery?
- Will this software harm the natural environment?
- Will this software harm the digital environment?
- Will this software harm civilians in the theater of war?
- Will this software harm local communities & livelihoods?
I'm sure there are many other considerations I'm forgetting to mention, but we have to get past the stigma of focusing on these issues as if it's some sort of bleeding-heart liberalism acting as a distraction from competence or collaboration*.
* This is not a hypothetical. The founder of 37signals and creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, David Heniemeier Hansson, makes these sorts of supremacist claims regularly.
Political Action
Finally, programmers have to get off of their fucking butts.
I'm going nuclear on my industry in this section, so buckle up buttercup. Programmers have a terrible track record when it comes to standing up for workers and the middle class as a whole, politically. We're seeing this play out in the worst possible way with the second coming of Trump here in the U.S.
Big Tech has turned out to be one of the biggest corporate enablers of Trumpism, outside of perhaps Big Oil and the gun lobby. And while yes, there are plenty of programmers in big companies taking a public stand for justice, there are also plenty who continue to sit pretty in their cozy office jobs making the big bucks. We know this to be true because guess what would happen if programmers quit en masse?
What if y’all quit Meta?
What if y’all quit Google?
What if y’all quit Amazon?
What if y’all quit Microsoft?
What if y’all quit OpenAI? Anthropic? Perplexity?
I'm sorry to say this, but Mark Zuckerberg isn't the enemy. At the end of the day, he's a figurehead. He could be toppled tomorrow…if programmers refused to work for him! Same for Sam Altman. Same for Elon Musk.
I guess what I'm saying is oh dear, I just convinced myself. Programmers are the villains.
Fuck me! 🫠
.
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…Whew, that was quite the roller-coaster. Where was I? Oh yes, getting off of our butts.
As a programmer, I am speaking directly to you programmers out there. Don't let your privilege turn into complacency! Speak out early and often. Call yourself what you really are: a worker. Stand in solidarity with labor, even if that means uncomfortably confronting your übercapitalist biases. Learn more. Partner more. Mobilize more.
DO MORE. 💪
Listen, I know some of you have been. I know programmers who are in fact strugglingly mightily to pay the bills and take care of their families all while diligently working on open source software & protocols to help others in the ResistanceNet battle for freedom & equality. Heck, I’m not ashamed to admit it: I’m struggling! I haven't been this squeezed financially since I started building a new freelance Web Design business from scratch almost fifteen years ago. It's hard to think my skills as a programmer could have “made me rich” but instead here I am barely keeping my head above water.
But I don't regret a thing. I'd rather be a poor hippie who's trying to use my technical skills to make the world a truly better place to live for the downtrodden than yuck it up with Zuck. (Seriously. Fuck that guy.)
I've had a Come-To-Jesus moment in my career, and to the degree I might have unknowingly contributed to Big Tech-adjacent crappiness in the past, I'm having to reckon with that and think through ways I can grow and make a difference today. I wish the same for all the programmers I know. And if our industry has any hope for being rehabilitated in the eyes of non-nerds, I believe without a shadow of a doubt it will be because "coders" stop obsessing over pointless inanities like how to become more productive at "coding" and instead start focusing on…well, everything else.
(*gestures wildly with hands in the air*) 😂
Thank you for reading Cycles Hyped No More. Join Intuitive+ and support my independent publishing, and please share with a friend! See you here next week.
Jared ✌️
🤔🌩️ Things that make you think:
The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality - Ars Technica
AI assistants don’t have fixed personalities—just patterns of output guided by humans.
Unlike today's LLMs, a human personality maintains continuity over time. When you return to a human friend after a year, you're interacting with the same human friend, shaped by their experiences over time. This self-continuity is one of the things that underpins actual agency—and with it, the ability to form lasting commitments, maintain consistent values, and be held accountable. Our entire framework of responsibility assumes both persistence and personhood.
An LLM personality, by contrast, has no causal connection between sessions. The intellectual engine that generates a clever response in one session doesn't exist to face consequences in the next. When ChatGPT says "I promise to help you," it may understand, contextually, what a promise means, but the "I" making that promise literally ceases to exist the moment the response completes. Start a new conversation, and you're not talking to someone who made you a promise—you're starting a fresh instance of the intellectual engine with no connection to any previous commitments.
This isn't a bug; it's fundamental to how these systems currently work. Each response emerges from patterns in training data shaped by your current prompt, with no permanent thread connecting one instance to the next beyond an amended prompt, which includes the entire conversation history and any "memories" held by a separate software system, being fed into the next instance. There's no identity to reform, no true memory to create accountability, no future self that could be deterred by consequences.
Every LLM response is a performance, which is sometimes very obvious when the LLM outputs statements like "I often do this while talking to my patients" or "Our role as humans is to be good people." It's not a human, and it doesn't have patients.
Benj Edwards