so i work in tech as a tech person but im unsure if im a “tech bro” or just someone who works in tech. its kinda hard to judge because i kinda dont talk to what people probably consider techbros.
anyone got any ideas on a decent description?
Techbros think tech is a magical sector of nothing but fantastical improvement to the world.
Tech workers think tech is a miserable hellscape of a sector and have a more measured view on the good things vs the bad. They also recognise that conditions for tech workers have been getting progressively worse over time.
Phew I’m good then
I’m damn near a luddite, its a joke with all my friends that I’m a tech worker who never touches tech shit outside of work because I fucking hate it
Been sounding the alarm about surveillance capitalism via tech and the importance of privacy for ten years now, people are finally starting to come around.
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amen.
before “tech bro” was a term, my insult for these people–the tech evangelists who don’t actually know shit–was to say to them, “what, are you in [fucking] sales?” because i swear to god that was how it broke down every place i worked.
the underpaid people who fixed broken shit all day vs the clowns who pretended to know everything and over promised the world to get a signature. because their clients would call in and wonder why the technology they bought that doesn’t even exist wasn’t working how their “sales engineer” guy said it would. and we were forbidden from telling them their sales guy lied.
I would say that “tech bros” are predominantly characterized by their predisposition to accepting hype over new technologies and dismissal of socio-economic consequences that may come from those technologies in favor of naïve techno-solutionism. Tech workers, if they aren’t deluding themselves into believing they’ll be the person to do it, have often been the victims of bosses’ insistence on uselessly implementing one of these technologies based on an article they read, so not every tech worker is a tech bro.
I like to also acknowledge the “tech enjoyers” which are your average shmucks that work tangentially to tech (tech sales, PM for a tech company, etc…) and think their home automation is the coolest shit ever.
That said, I’m a tech worker that enjoys some minor homelab things like my media server and self hosted Nextcloud. I spin up a Minecraft server every now and then. However I don’t care about my phone controlling my laundry machine and shit like that.
ngl i would enjoy building a home network from scratch thats fun but i dont need it lol
Honestly never saw the draw to that activity. I’ve always kept the network as simple as I can get it. I don’t have any IOT devices, if I did there would probably be a reason to silo my network a bit more. Otherwise, I’m a huge fan of it just working, so I plug in a consumer grade wireless router, maybe a few APs, but that it for me.
There’s ways to do the home-automation thing in a non-techbro way. Home Assistant is an open source project that lets people control proprietary stuff without the official proprietary apps or online accounts or subscriptions or any of that crap. It’s a lot more DIY, with all the positives and negatives that come with DIY.
Yeah, I know about Home Assistant and would probably start there if I gave a shit about home automation.
Personally I just think it’s kind of stupid in most applications. The only time I’ve heard of a useful home automation was my BiL who put a smart valve on his water main because his water heater failed one time while he was out of town.
But I’m admittedly a bit a Luddite when it comes to tech things that only solve a self made problem.
Smart light bulbs are an easy and pretty cheap way to get around inconvenient lightswitch placement, and do basic stuff like turn the lights off when you leave. Smart outlets can serve a similar function for lamps and fans.
With that said I would never get either on wifi directly; I just zigbee devices with a single hub I need to trust.
I understand all of this, I don’t need to be convinced of the use cases existing. I know they exist, I just don’t think they are a necessity and don’t care about them for my own situation. I just remember to turn my lights off as part of my routine… if I accidentally leave them on it’s. It the end of the world.
in my head it’s more about making iot from scratch… I have no clue how to hook stuff into existing things but finding cute ways to do something that I can’t do easily like measure humidity or interact with a little gizmo I made on the wall would be very fun
Yeah fair enough. I’m definitely jaded and just don’t see it the way most people do. A regular old light switch has never failed me. Like I said in another comment, I’m become more of a Luddite as time passes lol.
This fits better with the derogatory way I usually see it being used. Like, a lot of my lifestyle and personality and skills relate to technology, but I don’t jump on every new bandwagon expecting it to revolutionize tech. I’d like to fall more into the ‘hacker’ group who know intimately computer systems and how they work, but I’m still working on gaining enough knowledge.
“Tech bro invent things” is a whole YT niche, or you if this is anything like you then you may have a problem lol.
Additionaly if someone is anything like mid 20-30s white male earning 6 figures and likes saying these words unironicaly IRL: Disrupt, blockchain, bootcamp, grind/“The Grind”, vision, start up etc. Very high overlap with the alpha male grifters too.
Tech bros are realy a continuation of finance bros from the 2000s, quite the same type of people, white male 20-30s high middle class earning 6 figures who nepo baby themselves into dot com bubble fake job. They see themselves as creating the greatest amount of value in the world. The only difference is instead of finance sector and other winners of the early 1995-2008 era, it is the same people getting silly overpaid entry level jobs at a FANG company in the 2010s.
In essence they created the “learn to code” meme, people who are tech bros are the ones who realy believed everyone should just get get on a 8 week bootcamp to learn some shit coding language and they’d get 150k a year, so much so everyone should just do that because no other profession is worthwhile. Sure that happened to a very few lucky people but the culture remained until they became a parody of themselves.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Techbrodom is characterised by a few key behaviour traits:
- sweeping arrogance about the value of non tech fields, and the quality of their own ideas. Often manifesting as assertions that non stem education is pointless and that other fields are doing it wrong.
- Uncritical regurgitation of propaganda around the effectiveness of capitalism and markets.
- Misogynistic and racist attitudes. Western surpremicism.
- Social dominance oriented. People who can be taken advantage of should be, technocrats should rule by virtue of their programming aptitudes
- User hostility. The belief that any friction between designer/supporter and user is the result of inadequacies on the user’s behalf. A general desire to enforce their standards on users.
I think a defining part of being a tech bro is that you think society allocating a lot of resources to what you do means that what you do is inherently more important than what anyone else is doing. Society is clearly being rational by allocating resources like it does and you being paid a lot more than a janitor, so you’re more important.
tbh it’s just a word that means “techy person I hate”. which tbf, many (but not all) people in tech are highly hatable for similar reasons
to me it means a type of person who became shitty or had pre-existing beliefs about “meritocracy” confirmed by the tech industry boom that followed the 2008 GFC. the sort of people who became rich by investing in the right companies at the right time, or getting into a 6 figure job because they knew a bit of javascript in the days when it was rare, then turning around to say “I made it by getting with the program, therefore capitalism is good actually and maybe you’d have a comfy life too if you spent your time leetcoding instead of protesting for medicare for all and a $15/hr minimum wage”.
Tech bro is anyone who defends capitalism by saying that technological innovation will solve the current crisis.
Yesterday it was crypto, today it is AI and tomorrow it will be a combination of the two or something new.
Not to be confused with “jackass” or someone who belittles other people over their apparent lack of technical skill or knowledge, thats not just in the IT industry. CS has it bad because the field changes so rapidly.
Hmmm…
“Tech Bro” a lifestyle brand and self identity revolving around computer technology and networked communications.
There’s probably some overlap with the concept of “Cargo Cult”.
A “Tech Bro” might be a very well read and capable software/hardware/networking engineer but if isn’t a requirement.
hmm, do u mean like home server stuff or like more than that
If you want it embodied in a doodad it’s less home server and more those “AI” pin/pendant gizmos.
Yeah pretty much. There are actually legitimate uses for home servers, such as more convenient piracy. Not so much for the slop generator gizmos.
ik i host minecraft servers infrequently lol
“Tech Bro” a lifestyle brand and self identity revolving around computer technology and networked communications.
It was a late night comment and I can see it wasn’t all that clear.
hmm, do u mean like home server stuff or like more than that
Are you setting up a home network as a way to express your self identity? Are you going out and buying a network connect refridgerator, washer/dryer, toaster, oven just to say that you’re on the bleeding edge of technology? Then you might be a Tech Bro.
Are you setting up a home network because you actually have some need or project that a network can help with? Do you think its a neat project to see what a home network can do? Probably not a Tech Bro.
I guess another way to think about it would be the difference between “a person who playes video games” and “A Gamer”. I play video games. I enoy video games. But I don’t think my personal identity is intimately wound up in being a person who playes video games. I don’t keep up with the latest video games or hardware, I don’t really follow video game news, I don’t rush out to play the games that I hear the people around me are playing, I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not having a $2000 video card and a computer with a TB of ram or spending hundreds of dollars on old CRT TV’s and playing console games on the original hardware.
that makes sense, sadly this means I am not a tech bro as I have crashed my server by using all the RAM before after upgrading
Anybody who uses a text editor more modern than Vim or it’s variants is a tech bro
Question 1: Do you own crypto?
no but i wish i could work with other people to make silly little consumer electronics like CPUs/GPUs
