Sometime in the last ten or twelve years, the stereotypical image of the Silicon Valley programmer has shifted from socially awkward, Utili-kilt-wearing geek to something far more sinister, and fratty, and sexist. Mother Jones reports on the trend following on similar stories from Businessweek and Jezebel pointing a finger directly at Path exec Matt Van Horn who recently gave a talk at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. The 28-year-old Van Horn used terms like "gangbang interview" to describe an interview-by-committee, and talked about landing a job at Digg by sending the founders a nudie calendar he'd made at University of Arizona a school known more for training people in keg standing than in C++ threads. As you might imagine, the female journalist from Mother Jones walked out disgustedly and tweeted angrily from the lobby.
Granted, Van Horn is a biz dev guy, not a programmer (as satirical Twitter persona @Brogrammer is quick to point out), and biz dev guys are often douchebags. But the trend in the tech culture is clear enough: they go to the gym, they drink protein shakes, they try to talk cool. And it's often sexist.
Also, fewer women are pursuing jobs as programmers, perhaps as a result? There were never many females in this line of work, but the article says the percentage of women in the "computing workforce" declined 8 percent in the last decade.
Basically, jobs working the back ends of tech startups are a lot sexier to recent college grads than they were a decade ago, programmers party more these days, and there's been a perfect storm of dude-dom invading the ranks of the techiest of companies and tech conferences. And going into finance obviously isn't so cool anymore. Thus, this is not the last time you will hear the term "brogrammer."
