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Just picking out this particular area of your comment, it amazes me when intelligent people (like you) actually repeat this odd myth in the year of our lord 2025. What you're talking about as "sane" in the programming profession is exactly what you're decrying elsewhere as opaque vibes based sorting. Programmers acting like slobs might have been rebellion against corporate life, or reflected a genuine lack of interest for social norms, twenty or thirty or fifty years ago. Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent. When professors and executives wore suits, choosing to wear a t shirt meant something. Today, it is just another form of cultural signaling.
Sam Bankman-Fried is our prime example, but there are millions more. SBF's appearance and behavior wasn't based in a natural untutored naiveté, it was a carefully cultivated performance for investors who superstitiously believed that this was what a genius startup founder was supposed to look like. He didn't play League of Legends during investor calls because his professor parents never taught him basic manners, he did it because he wanted to demonstrate to the crowd just how "above it all" he was. And venture capitalists ate it up, believing that the performance of Aspie disdain for social norms could substitute for actual genius. Sequoia Capital put it on their website! as an example of how cool SBF and FTX were, and how Sequoia was the hip company that could understand these kinds of geniuses, who could understand their vibes.
We've seen this for centuries in the arts, where the antisocial behavior of brilliant artists becomes a touchstone for young poseurs and strivers. The artsy kids I grew up with imitated the gay drug addicts in Rent and strived to die of heroin overdoses in New York City, who were written in specific imitation in both art and life of the alcoholic painters of La Boheme and strived towards dying of consumption in Paris gutters, who themselves were based on a novel whose real life examples probably imitated Rabelais or something. A real artist is depressed and deep, so the artsy teen wears black all the time and feigns misery and misanthropy. So many great artists are alcoholics, so young artists drink themselves into a stupor. Great artists abuse their sexual partners so must I!
Legible aristocratic or middle class standards of appearance and action, actually looking good in nice clothing and speaking properly, is much easier to learn and imitate, and a much better test of intelligence and conscientiousness, than is performatively spurning those standards. What suit to wear, and which type shoes to match with which belt, and what color tie, is all learnable and teachable. And learning all that, applying resources to acquire the knowledge, and exercising those skills, are all examples of that skill of "holding one million variables in your head and making decisions." Knowing when to wear tweed and which fork to use and which glass to pour which wine into may be frivolous and wasteful effort, but at least it is legible and trainable, and shows some degree of intelligence and training at a glance.
Excellent comment overall, and I may reply further on other aspects, but this in particular stood out to me, as an example of how Vibes Based sorting is so insidious and difficult to rid the brain of. Humans are very good at striving to imitate the appearance of doing something, even when they aren't.
I've got friends who were very early FTX employees. SBF probably cranked his performative autism dial to 11 at certain points, but based on their testimony it always lingered around a 9 even when he was totally in his element.
What starts off as performative becomes internalized as personality given enough reinforcement. It's how frat bros are minted and why Mar-a-Lago face is contagious among MAGA.
SBF is a child of 2 law professors at Stanford with no indications of social-dysfunction in how they present themselves. He, like other autists could have learned to mask his autism and would've coopted the elite culture around him. ADHD kids need to be taught executive function, Elite sportsmen need to be taught financial restraint and autists need to be taught social behaviors. It's standard upbringing. Yes, he was more susceptible to peak autism. But so are millions others, and most of them turn out alright.
SBF ended going down an autistic spiral and that tells me his parents failed in raising him right. Parents didn't teach him coping mechanisms. And his behaviors were likely reinforced by the hyper selective spaces he found himself (MIT, Jane Street, mathcamp, stem prep school). Just the terrible sleep + stimulant abuse would explain half of his autistic spiral in his adult days. Add in hyper hedonism (esp. the orgies), EA psychosis and the insane amount of money in the mix, and it ended up in a predictable place.
Alex Karp of Palantir is a good example of an autist undergoing a autism reinforcement event well into his 50s. Look at any of his old interviews, dude was great at giving the appearance of normal.
Also,
In what world are 2 tenured Stanford professors considered upper middle class ?
This world. Upper class is the people who have names on buildings, not the people who work in the buildings.
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'Two accomplished professionals with a touch of the 'Tism that's sufficient to give them professional success but not go overboard produce children a bit further out on the spectrum' is superduper common. My mom spent 20 years teaching at a school for essentially bottom-tier autistic Children and other learning difficulty havers, and the rate at which the parents would be dual high-flyer doctors, surgeons, academics, engineers or whatever and then the child just gets too much of the secret sauce... It happens. Without even going into the whole 'the parents were born into more typical households in a better socialized environment whilst the children got born into the internet era with permissive enlightened avant garde parents' aspect.
An interesting aside is that there are other significant risk factors that have nothing to do with parents on the spectrum. Specifically, lack of vitamin D during development seems to increase the risk manyfold as observed in children of immigrants with much darker skin tone who moved to Finland: https://www.laakarilehti.fi/tieteessa/alkuperaistutkimukset/maahanmuuttajien-lapsilla-on-suomessa-paljon-vaikeita-autismikirjon-hairioita/ (article in Finnish, feed it to google translate or something).
Couldn't this potentially align with the immense Somali autism rate in Minnesota and struggling children of certain diaspora being more likely to be diagnosed with medical issues to explain their academic issues?
Possibly the first although Minnesota is significantly more south than Finland. Helsinki is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage (winters here are truly miserable when there isn't snow) while Minneapolis is about as north as Milan, Italy.
The second isn't the case in Finland as the diagnoses were made while the children were small kids due to developmental delays, problems with language acquisition and such (iow not just "a bit of a loner").
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That's the core thing to go into though. My grandmother was left handed, until the nuns beat it out of her.
A weirdo kid who is taught to not-be-weird and raised in a culture where weirdness is punished might not turn out "normal" but will just be a little weird. A weirdo kid who is raised in a cultural setting that doesn't just allow him to be weird, but actively honors the weirdos around him as the highest examples of humanity, will cultivate his weirdness and become even weirder.
Plus the filter of the ones that manage to have children of a given cohort of the light-moderate autistic are likely going to err towards the shallower end of the spectrum and then it's a whole new roll of the dice with their kids.
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In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
I've been in the programming workforce for close to 30 years and I have never seen actual slobbery nor any betrayal of social norms there. Peoples clothes (including my own) have ranged from shorts and band t-shirt to straight pants and a fancy collared shirts and I've even seen one or two guys wearing a suit (due to intentional personal style). That is to say, people have dressed exactly as other men of similar age in non-public facing (*) office jobs that don't have status games attached to looks.
The only actual flaunting would be to dress in a business suit with a tie (unless you work in the financial sector) because you'd then be essentially signaling that you're trying to hide your lack of technical substance by over dressing .
*: The one time I ended up presenting a product at an industry trade fair my attire was black jeans, black dress shirt and black leather jacket which was chosen because it was my normal style at the time and also happened to blend in perfectly with the other industry people.
When people say 'tech' they mean silicon valley FANG/startup culture. Just as 'Media' was LA culture, 'Finance' was Manhattan culture.
Ofc, a lots of people are employed in these industries outside their hubs. But, the hub defines the culture.. For ex, NYC tech is post-hipster Brooklyn culture. Boston tech is humble-brag math-wiz culture. Seattle tech is REI-culture. But no one cares about distinct cultures of the satellites. It's all about the mother ship.
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Shorts are sportswear or middle school uniform. (The rules are different in the tropics, but so are the shorts, hence "Bermuda shorts"). T-shirts are traditionally sportswear or underwear, although I agree this had already shifted by 2000. This isn't Sand Hill Road business casual we are talking about. When I started my career, T-shirts with obtrusive logos (including band T-shirts) were acceptable in approximately zero white-collar workplaces.
You are claiming that turning up at the office in the same clothes you would wear to the gym is not performative slobbery. If so, this is a very recent social change. It would have been considered performative slobbery well into the 21st century, and it absolutely was performative slobbery at the point programmers with well-paid corporate jobs started doing it.
The thing about internet and this site is that it's international (as my flair says I'm in Finland while @self_made_human is an Indian living in Britain) which means the norms differ between countries. Where I live "shorts and t-shirt" is normal summer attire when it's hot and "band t-shirt" is simply what a lot of guys would wear in the late 90s and 2000s. Hell, I've had most of my bosses dress occasionally in shorts and t-shirt on hot summer days because why wouldn't you when it's hot outside and you work in an engineering department where nobody cares about it?
Which is to say that there is nothing "performative" about shorts and band t-shirt around here. Frankly the vast majority of engineers just don't care about signaling in the first place and who would you even be signaling to when the only people who see you in the office are your coworkers who also don't care. You dress in shorts and band t-shirt because it's convenient and that's how you'd dress if you eg. went out for drinks with mates on such day, not to "stick it to the man" or to flaunt anything.
Sure, it'd be different if you dressed in some tight gym shorts (that you wouldn't use elsewhere outside gym / sports either), "programming socks" or similar ridiculous things that are actually outside the social norms in public - which is why people don't do it here either (barring perhaps some rare socially maladjusted exceptions).
You mean everything my Swedish and Danish friends said about uptight Finns is wrong? I am shocked, shocked.
Swedes are all gay anyway so why would you ever believe what they say? And for Danes that's of course a moot point because it's not like you can understand them in the first place with their potato-in-mouth speech impediment.
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You're right, I was probably being insufficiently precise.
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Thanks :*
I am happy to accept that any legible marker for competence (or perceived competence) will be eventually gamed. It's not like turbo-autists are particularly good at gatekeeping or status games. Normies beat autists, normies are beaten by sociopaths, who are in turn kept in check by autists.
I'm familiar with SBF's performative actions. However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
In other words, I think it's simultaneously true that the world of computers has a higher tolerance for off-kilter behavior and a significant number of people insincerely stealing that culture as their costume!
I'm sure HR and management would prefer someone with people skills who looks presentable, all else being equal. But the sheer tolerance is nigh unprecedented! You'd have to descend to the back of the kitchen with the line cooks before "is warm body" and "can do job" become the prevailing concerns.
Why the initial tolerance? The usual theories that struck me as plausible included a high prevalence of autistic traits, a less client-facing environment, and comparatively legible performance metrics. If you have a code goblin, then the additional latency from running fiber to their segregated basement is worth it. You didn't hire them for their good looks.
But you're right that this creates its own failure mode. When the signal becomes "looking like you don't care about signals," you get poseurs who carefully cultivate dishevelment. The difference, I'd argue, is one of substitutability and testing under load.
In a truly vibes-based profession (consulting, say, or certain flavors of academic humanities), the poseur can coast indefinitely. There's no moment where the rubber meets the road and reveals that beneath the performance there's nothing there. Your PowerPoint looks good, your references are impeccable, and by the time the strategy fails, you've moved on to the next gig.
In programming, the compile button doesn't care about your aesthetic. The production system either works or it doesn't.* Yes, you can hide in a sufficiently large organization, you can take credit for others' work, you can fake it in meetings. But there's still a baseline floor of actual competence required. SBF could fool VCs with his League of Legends schtick, but he still needed actual programmers to build FTX. The fraud wasn't "Sam can't code," it was "Sam is embezzling customer funds." His technical team was apparently quite capable.
The point isn't that programming is immune to status games or that all programmers are autistic savants who only care about code quality. The point is that programming preserves a direct link between competence and output that many other professions have severed. You can fake the culture, but you can't fake the merge request. Well, you can try, but eventually someone has to read your code.
This makes programming comparatively more meritocratic, not perfectly meritocratic. The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing). In contrast, in fully vibes-captured professions, you can game all the way down. There is no compile button. There is no production server that crashes. There's just more vibes, turtles all the way down.
Your point about aristocratic standards being more legible is well-taken, though. Knowing which fork to use is indeed trainable in a way that "act naturally eccentric" is not. But here's where I think we diverge: aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school. What you can't buy (as easily) is the ability to pass a hard technical exam.
The ideal isn't "no standards" or "eccentric standards." The ideal is "standards that correlate maximally with the thing you're actually trying to measure, while being minimally gameable by irrelevant advantages." Standardized testing, for all its flaws, does this better than holistic admissions. A programming interview with live coding, for all its flaws, does this better than "did you summer at the right firm."
The clothing and manners debate is orthogonal to the core question of sorting. I don't particularly care if our elites wear suits or hoodies, as long as we're selecting them for the right reasons. My objection to aristocratic sorting isn't the aesthetics, it's the inefficiency. If your system selects for people who know which fork to use, and knowing which fork to use happens to correlate 0.7 with having rich parents but only 0.2 with job performance, you've built an inherited oligarchy with extra steps.
*I am aware of concerns such as code readability, good practices such as documentation, and the headaches of spaghetti code. But programming is still way closer to the metal than most other professions.
My last job interview featured a set of technical questions related to the job- I remember being asked about the labeling of specific wires on a walk-in and one set of pressures on r410a, a couple of other things- but also had a bunch of questions that were just obviously about cultural fit, mostly looking for how I phrased particular concerns. People want to live and work around people that 'know how to use the right fork'. Literally, obviously- think about how uncomfortable you'd be if you had to share a table with Zohran Mamdani at a publicity stunt. But also in everything else. How do you communicate? How do you treat the boss- with extreme deference or as a basically-peer who happens to have a leadership role? Do you expect to be friends with your coworkers, or merely friendly? What do you think is acceptable water cooler talk? These things do matter.
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Even when range-restricted within a supposed vibes-based profession such as consulting (as consultants tend to be quite smart relative to the gen. pop. in the first place, although not as elite as say, HFT quantitative researchers), IQ and competence are positively correlated.
Whether it be a management or economic consultant (or other front office corporate position), just from a slide monkeying perspective, a more cognitively able consultant will be better at spotting potential numeric errors on slides, that numbers on Slide X may be inconsistent with numbers on Slide Y, that qualitative messaging on Slide J may conflict with messaging on Slide K, that Slide M's contents may conflict with what was shown in previous versions of it, that Slide F's contents may be problematic for future versions of this slide with the current client or with future ones.
And then, from a presentation standpoint, being able to withstand and address any questions articulately from key stakeholders. All else equal, more cognitive ability is better on this front too, in understanding the analyses that fed the slides in the deck and being able to answer questions in real time.
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As a very wise friend of mine recently said:
Dressing neatly in a clean and appropriate suit and tie doesn't strike you as a cognitively demanding task, or even really in this day and age an indication of wealth outside of branding, just as a chore to learn and a cultural heritage to pass down. But it does serve as a filter for baseline intelligence and conscientiousness when widely understood as something we can screen for. There are people that are too stupid to dress themselves properly, or insufficiently conscientious to do so neatly.
By building a culture where this is a well known expectation, we create a culture where we can look at someone and (as @pbmonster said in the SSS thread) have their IQ tattooed on their forehead. There's obvious spirals of fashion and veblen goods and in-group signaling that are bad, but culturally expected dress codes don't need to be focused on that. The broad concept of "appropriate" dress. does not need to veer into wasteful or extravagant dress.
Basically, yes, you shouldn't judge a book entirely by it's cover; but damn wouldn't the book store be more convenient if book covers told me more about the content in the book? And this seems entirely within the control of the publishing industry.
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I don't think any of those would be tolerated in any of the workplaces I've ever been involved with. Sure, worn jeans and an old metal band t-shirt don't even get a second look - that was practically a uniform some 10-15 years ago. Same with combat boots and camo pants. Business as usual.
But straight up "WTF is this shit, that guy is weirding everyone out, what is his issue?"-eccentricity? No. The boss would have a Talk with them.
SBF types are basically reverse signaling the same thing the same way that overpaid hype consultanst in fancy suits are signaling to the upper management. Both are trying to use looks and behavior to convince someone who isn't technically competent that "Trust us bro, we're so good that we'll totally deliver you massive benefits".
I've gotten the impression from some older comments here that such gameability was almost the point. That by having the money and acting like you were old money, in a generation or two you'd be considered if not actual aristocracy, at least upper class.
I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company and we did have a programmer who wore a fursuit. Programming socks? Hadn't realized they were called that but I've seen them worn at Google. If "blahajs" refers to the Ikea stuffed shark, you'll definitely find those and similar in software engineering offices.
I think an Ikea soft toy on your desk would be acceptable in a bank, unless you are in a role where you regularly meet clients at your desk. I had a FIMO vampire squid called Lloyd on my desk for several years and it attracted 90% positive interest.
FYI, Blåhaj isn't exactly a regular small stuffed toy (which would be decoration like any other) but a 100+ cm long stuffed shark that's the same size as a preschool kid.
Yeah, in software development offices they tend to get hung above the desks. The stuffed sharks, that is, the kids squirm too much and the wire won't hold them.
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Yeah, that's very different from just a "programming company". California woke tech-adjacent culture is its whole own microcosm which cannot be generalized to the entire programming profession, particularly in international conversations (what with self_made_human being an Indian in Scotland). To put it slightly less charitably, the vast majority of programming profession isn't filled with cliche autist weirdos to even remotely the same extent as that particular subculture of it is.
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