How Silicon Valley Came to Be a Land of ‘Bros’

How Silicon Valley Came to Be a Land of ‘Bros’(nytimes.com)

11 points by nbmh 8 years ago

montrose 8 years ago |

This article is a good example of how urban legends get started. Now in addition to the one about how boys liked microcomputers in the 1980s because they were only marketed to boys (when in fact early microcomputer marketing = "16k of RAM!"), we have another where the entire flow of programming jobs was redirected by a pair of psychologists no one seems even to have heard of.

I wonder how many people reading this article will unquestioningly accept this explanation, and how many future articles will retail this story as if it were an established fact.

patorjk 8 years ago | |

I found that baffling. Not only had I never heard of that story, it doesn't seem to pass the sniff test to me. Companies going out of their way to hire anti-social people? I think it's the other way around. A company might keep a good programmer despite them being anti-social, not because they are antisocial.

gaius 8 years ago |

So they hired these two psychologists, William Cannon and Dallis Perry, to come up with a personality test to screen for good programmers

Who is “they”? I have been programming as a hobby since the 80s and professionally since the 90s and have never heard of them - and I have been sent on several courses on interviewing by several companies, and interviewed hundreds of candidates.

michaelt 8 years ago | |

Googling for Dallis Perry found me: Dallis Perry and William Cannon, "Vocational Interests of Computer Programmers", Journal of Applied Psychology 51, no. 1 (1967); and also "A vocational interest scale for computer programmers", Proc. fourth SIGCPR conference on Computer personnel research, June 27 - 28, 1966

It seems they worked for "System Development Corporation", which Wikipedia says "was considered the world's first computer software company"

Unfortunately the text of the article isn't available online.

gaius 8 years ago | | |

Right, but zero relevance to any company operating today or over the span of time over which I have been programming. Weren’t the claims of MDMA-fuelled sex parties also debunked?