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i'm sick of all this "we are the geek subculture" thing. reminds me of teenage kids and their goth or emo fascination.

The thing is, It's not a celebration of a subculture in itself, which has it's upsides and downsides. But the work that 'geeks' do has a special nature. The reason a lot of software development projects have major issues is, in my opinion, that they are handled like every other project in a corporate environment, and by doing this you ignore that software development has a totally different set of rules and dynamics.

And to comment on the 'fascination on our geek subculture'. If this helps people form a identifiable group where they can belong to, which improves their morale and in turn their efficiency at work, why should you let people have a fascination ?

> The thing is, It's not a celebration of a subculture in itself, which has it's upsides and downsides

read slashdot sometime if you want to see a celebration of the subculture. it's one of the most disfunctional sites on the iternet from a social perspective.

> If this helps people form a identifiable group where they can belong to

why do we have to indentify with a subgroup? it's rubbish. on the technical front, i tick every box there is. i spend 50-60 hrs a week programming and doing research into computer science. yet, there's no way i want to be regarded as a "geek". in a previous job i was known as the "uber-geek". it's nastiness used to put people in a box and the geek thing holds people back. it's used externally as a derogative, and internally to justify bad social habits. noone needs this.

> which improves their morale and in turn their efficiency at work, why should you let people have a fascination ?

it doesn't improve anyone's morale or efficiency at work, and i defy you to show otherwise. the best programmers who work for me, by a long shot, are people who have a healthy work/life balance. and that means getting away from computers sometimes.

and i'm not trying to stop anyone from having a fascination. you and others can have all the fascinations you want. just don't try to label everyone working with a deep interesting in computing.

I can't second this enough. The mentality that expects we be treated as a 'special' group of the company is the same mentality that doesn't consider us as equals in their company. This might go to show why some companies consider IT a 'necessary cost' as opposed to another tool for a company to utilize to maintain a competitive advantage. Perhaps the issue isn't that we are a special group to be given special needs, but that we have been too self-selective in what IT defines as good IT. Maybe we should stop looking for people like ourselves and instead bring in diversity to help us realize we're not any MORE special than anyone else...

Frankly, the current up/down vote (7 up, 1 down as of this post) just frightens me that we aren't bright enough to understand we're killing our own industry by thinking this way.

"Catherine Devlin stated: Given a choice between spending an hour doing a task manually, or spending three hours writing a program to do it automatically… a geek will write the program, every single time."

Nonsense.