#0547: Return of the Brogrammer
Alright, I’ll start off by saying that ‘brogrammer’ here is intentionally incendiary but I’m in my DGAF era with my clickbaity blog titles and maybe I’ll make a valid point by the end of the post. Exciting, no?
Remember some time back in the early twenty-tens when we started making fun of Silicon Valley programmers because they got into microdosing LSD, lifting, working on treadmills, and all that? We called them brogrammers because it was as if everything was a flex: they were CRUSHING code, always shipping, slamming out features, and basically turning a stereotypically nerdy/geeky profession into something like a ‘Greek’ fraternity house.
It was at the same time where we started talking about sexism and software engineering lacking diversity, and the brogrammer was the caricature of the kind of culture we wanted to move on from. I myself got involved back then, co-founding Rails Girls London with the goal of introducing women to tech, hosting workshops that adapted the classic Blog Post in 15 Minutes tutorial that brought Ruby on Rails into the spotlight, and bringing Heroku into the mix so attendees would experience the joy of deploying their own little web app to the internet. We hoped it would give those women a foot in the door as the market for junior engineers was much more favourable at the time. There was a much stronger appetite to mentor newcomers into seniority.
It’s no surprise that I started my career as a similar way, because the London-based agency that helped me relocate from the north west of England cared about my potential as much as what I could demonstrate in an interview and code test. I got a chance as a junior and then I grew. It’s been almost 15 years and I still look back on that first gig as, essentially, an epoch in my life.
In some ways, times back then were good. Maybe even better. It was easy to get support for causes related to inclusivity or diversity and in my efforts to get funding for Rails Girls at the time, I didn’t struggle to find donations. GitHub were more than happy to offer a few hundred bucks here or there, and many of the startups in London were eager to host us in their offices and cover the food and drinks. It was mutually beneficial as it allowed attendees and coaches to mingle with the staff at those businesses and therefore helped with recruitment and marketing. Plus, can’t argue against supporting a good cause eh?
Yeah, I am sidetracking a little bit here but if you’re just coming into tech in the past few years, maybe post-COVID, you have to understand that the lay of the land was different back then.
What I observe now is a regression. We don’t talk about brogrammers any more, and the terms ‘rockstar’ and ‘ninja’ have mostly fallen out of favour. Truthfully, those terms imply or outright state a gender, and through another lens can be seen as derogatory or discriminative as a result. So it got rebranded as 10x Engineering and the frat-boy associations fell away.
In my mind, the 10x engineer is an evolution of the brogrammer. The fundamentals remain the same while the contemporary stereotypes have fallen away. The ego is still there, the flex is still there. The definition is more inclusive because there’s nothing to suggest a brogrammer has to be a guy or a bro.
Rebranding the concept doesn’t improve it, though. I maintain that the 10x engineer does serve a purpose but the scope in which they can thrive is narrow. The person who can get shit done and outpace the next-best engineer by a whole-ass order of magnitude will leave their colleagues in the dust, and likely the organisation itself will be caught in the fallout when they’ve had their fun and moved on to the next thing.
This is because the expectation of such a person is not to elevate the team and coach or mentor them towards a similar level, but to deliver. Or execute, as they say these days.
ChatGPT hasn’t launched yet, but startups have shifted from onboarding juniors to hiring seniors exclusively. There’s an appetite to bring people in who will just put their head down and get the job done. Because their effort is measured in comparison to their colleagues, they have ample opportunity to boast about their own performance and, basically, flex on social media and Hacker News and such like. “Why aren’t they performing like I am?”, and all that.
It doesn’t take more than a few years for AI to become ‘a thing’ though, not just with OpenAI launching ChatGPT, but in the accelerated timeline that follows where it becomes possible for someone to delegate more and more of their cognitive workload to an LLM.
Do you know where I’m going with this? Did you expect that I would bring this around to vibe coders and vibe coding? If you did, congrats! Have a gold star ⭐️
Vibe Coders are the third stage of a Brogrammer’s evolution. The frat-level hype is back. It’s almost as if a lack of engineering skill is now a virtue, with people claiming they don’t even have to read code any more because they can defer all of it to AI.
This is not the flex that they think it is but I wonder if it’s a sign of the times as literacy rates (particularly in the US) fall through the floor and the quality of education plummets. You’re not really a developer or a programmer if you cannot read, let alone comprehend, the code that an agent writes for you.
Is that gatekeeping? Probably, but we’ve already established that it’s not about elitism because introducing people on the margins into tech is a laudable goal. Doesn’t matter if it’s gender or socio-economic background or race or sexuality because none of that determines your capability to read and write code.
But, fuck me… the enthusiasm or the signalling around vibe coding looks and smells a lot like brogramming. It’s more obnoxious than modest. Maybe punching above its weight. Heavy on hype and ignorant on consequences or side effects.
And the thing is, I am categorically not against using AI to feel shit out, but there’s a big difference between a prototype that you have no conceptual understanding of, to a production ready system that blends the domain knowledge of the product’s requirements with the hard knowledge of building and maintaining production ready code.
I’ve had so much fun just building toy apps with AI purely to validate my assumptions about what we would need to do in a setup with much higher standards and strict accountability.
In that sense I see the revival of the brogrammer, but as a vibe coder who mixes lifestyle with ‘app development’ and basically makes it Instagram friendly. Not really a software engineer but an influencer looking for a new grift.
Do I sound judgmental as I write this? I probably do, I’m aware of that. I’m not sure that I care though.
What I care about and am interested in is the application of AI that doesn’t throw all the standards of software engineering professionalism out of the window. There is space for that, and it’s how I use AI.
Anything else is just slop. Albeit temporarily interesting slop. I don’t have the patience to look at or care about AI-generated content if it has not gone through a curation step with a human being. Anything less than that and it just feels like, “bro I did you a favour and asked AI to do this shit, but you need to check that it’s correct because I just wanted to flex about my prompting setup on Twitter.”
/mic-drop