As with a lot of terms, “brogrammer” is one that initially referred to something progressive but got co-opted by the kind of people whose value add is “shady games”.

There’s a breed of elite hackers now who understand power dynamics, the importance of optics, the value that accrues to which parts of the apparatus, and daydreams while outmaneuvering anyone who ever contemplated an MBA, which is an admission that you can’t hack it when the distributions go non-stationary or the wire-to-wire latency target at 7 nines is below a mike.

I don’t generally like to call attention to this, but my friend and former colleague Antonio Garcia Martinez of Goldman, Cal applied physics, Silicon Valley, and many other kinds of fame was very gracious to me in a NYT best-seller about a great many things but among them how I was a kind of synthesis of the kind of people who (as stereotyping would have it) were either basement-dwelling geeks or glib salesmen with Anglican/Presbyterian-sounding names.

Buy the book if you care. Nick Schrock had found my photograph on the Internet and made it a Facebook cult classic at least a year before I joined in the Palo Alto office. Which is pretty early that I was #336 on the SWE staff.

There is a lot of scope for value-add from the kinds of people who the ignorant and prejudiced stereotype as “nerds”: those people in my experience are generally kind, humane, humble, and brilliant.

I’m just humane and brilliant, and I’m going to personally salt the Earth where people who talk like you do once stood.

And I’ve got no compunctions about leveraging my appearance or height or dress sense or glib vocabulary, or ease in dominating a meeting to do so.

Selective pressures have produced a breed that is simultaneously the prom king and likely to end up with a Turing, and do it all without pillaging the commons or appealing to connections.

And if any of this rubs you the wrong way, we can step outside and handle it there. You don’t want that.