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Programmers Ain't Gettin' Any
Szoup writes "Wired has online a piece (no pun intended) under their culture news about how the sex life of tech employees -- mainly programmers -- suffers due to the demands and amount of time their work takes away from them. Like I needed to be told this?" Update: here's another take on the subject from newtimesla.com.
Heh... of course it's different, as long as you're coding for yourself!
When I'm not busy programming for work, or *ahem* socializing *ahem* with my fiancee, I'm usually writing my own software. Right now, I'm developing an Intellivision emulator for Linux. :-)
(That is, as soon as I unpack the computer. We just moved into a bigger place so that we can move the computers out of the bedroom and have more room for both computer and bedroom fun.... ;-) )
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I think a lot of geeks are like me - rather frightfully keen on finding women, but without the tools it takes to locate them. I'd say I know less than 20 people who live in the same city as I, since I spend most of my time typing stuff in an office with few people in it (and no women at all).
Between 1987 and 1991, I ran a local BBS that had matchmaking features. Although there were about ten men for every woman, I managed to date and meet a decent number of girls. Life was good. Sadly, the world of the Internet seems to have made us closer to people in other cities and states than ones on our own back yards. For instance, I created Wonderful Women of the Web [ http://www.wonderful-women.com/ ] to showcase the talents of interesting women on the web. Naturally, I did manage to get close to a few women that way, but all of them were thousands of miles away. Through mailing lists, I managed an intense flirtation with a very shy but sexy girl in Canada, but she vanished abruptly before I got to meet her.
So online flirtation used to work far better than it does now. The Internet's great for information, but lousy for anything requiring physical meetings. In theory, with more women going online, things should get better. But in practice, physical distance winds up keeping people apart.
I think another problem is that we don't get well-rounded views of people - we're all in our little niches here on the net. We can discuss geek stuff here, digital video on my digital video forum, etc, but there's no place where we can get together as people.
Thoughts? I got the resources (T1 line, etc) to set up something if I had some good ideas as to what it should be.
D
----
being a CS major, there's like 5 girls in my whole class at Va Tech... and 4 are ugly... :-( damn... well, at least i'll have a good job.. even if it means i'll be single the rest of my life.. oh well, it's a compromise, i guess...
;-) please dont call me pathetic.. u know you were thinking it, too...
Maybe if i'm famous like Gates (or Rich like him) women wouldn't look at me as a 'programmer', but rather as a 'moneybags rich guy'. eh, worth a try..
I can't be the only techie who works normal office hours. I'm out of the door every day at 5:30PM. I've only done overtime once, and that was grudgingly. I don't live to work.
When I saw the subject ``Quote from Hackers'' I thought it was going to be ``I hope you don't screw like you type.''
I believe that a widespread lack of social graces would lead people to think that we're not as well rounded as other people
And precisely WHICH social graces would these be?
OK, here's where I'm coming from. I'm female, first of all, and I'm also bi, and from college onward I haven't had any real problems with getting a date (other than the occasional crushes on gay men and straight women, but that's neither here nor there). My boyfriend (student-geek-in-training) and I are about to celebrate our one-year anniversary at Pennsic.
I did get the "chance" to see "how the other half lives," and I don't like it. I don't call the truly BAD pick-up lines I've received in the past from less "geeky" sorts "social graces," I call them rude behavior. I also don't see a whole lot of "social grace" in an older guy taking an underage girl to the bar and getting her drunk in the hopes of "getting some" later.
Not to say that meaningless sex and/or sex with someone who is "just a friend" and/or one night stands are inherently bad (I've experienced all three). But from my experience, most tech-types that I've known don't want something superficial, and some of them haven't figured out how to invest the energy in something that won't be superficial. And I don't call picking up chicks and watching football "social grace." Far form it.
In my experience, "geeks" have MORE class, not less. A pickup line that actually worked on me was "Do you mind if I flirt with you for a little while?" I didn't mind, and we're still together. "Nice boots, wanna fuck?" would not have had the same effect.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I'm not a programmer, I'm a techincal writer. And I'm damn good at it. I may or may not go back to school for some programming "stuff" eventually (there is a nearby program in Computational Science that looks nifty and interesitng).
I'm not "hideous" looking, but I am also NOT AVAILABLE. I'm also young enough to be the daughter of the average staff engineer that I work with. And lemme tell ya, nobody has coddled me. I wouldn't put up with it.
So there.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
If all you want is sex, just act like a dumb jock and drink lots of beer. Intelligence seems to frighten the tee-hee girls. Remember Barbie? "Math is hard!"
If what you want out of life is a deep meaningful relationship with a female geek, just shoot yourself in the head right now. Odds are you won't be the geek guy that hooks up with the one-in-a-million geek girl.
There were about 3000 people at DEFcon this year. About 100 of them were female. Of those women about 20 were geek girls with their boyfriends. The rest were just tee-hee girls that discovered geeks have money.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
Actually, you'd be surprised... used to work at MS as a full-time employee... my sex life was never fuller...
;-)
... of course, those Jazz drives tend to chafe after a while
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Do they care to comment? How about care to get a cup of coffee?
:)
Heh... its been my experience that geek women tend to live anywhere other than where I'm living.
Yes, there are geek girls. This particular one carries quite an impressive resume: I started Carnegie Mellon University in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a double major in Cognitive Science. My final degree, though, is in Mathematics, with a concentration in Biomedical Engineering. In December 1995, I received a Ph.D. in the field of Neuroscience from Northwestern University. My thesis is entilted ``The Role of the Plant Properties in Point-to-Point Arm Movements: A Neural Network Approach''
I'm pretty fortunate myself. My fiancee is into computers (and likes to sysadmin, too), although she's a Geology major. (I'm an EE myself, but honestly, I'm really just a software jock. The last hardware I built used 7400-series TTL.) You can look outside your major and outside your career, you know. Just remember, if you're not looking, you won't find anything, and if you're looking but not finding, you need to change your search space or your search criterion!
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Looks like egon might end up getting laid after all.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There's lots of them. One of my best friends is one, but she is getting married in less than a month, so another one bites the dust. ;)
Speaking as a different than normal geek (I was in a frat. and played football in college) MOST girls are hornier than hell if you care to find out. The thing to do is the exact same thing as when trying to figure out a system, trial and error. Practice makes perfect, or at least gives you a better chance. Taking the first step makes the second a lot easier, ad inifinitum.
+&x
"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that composition. Females. Though some hackers led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much more /important/ than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."
"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?'"
My girlfriend and I live an hour apart, and see each other only on the weekends. We go a week between 'encounters' and then have plenty of opportunity to make up for it. That's the disclaimer.
;)
Now the point. Techies, with their long hours and cranial leanings, are no different in the relationship department then any other cerebral-oriented discipline. Scientists, college professors, engineers... We all have better things to do than each other. For that matter, artists (arguably the most passionate profession, second only to that which is oldest) would rather create than procreate.
Why does the media seek so desperately to make us into asexual deviants, simply because we prefer to think about things other than sex. The average male thinks about sex what? 80 times a day?? What about above average? Do they think about it more? Or like us, do they think about it LESS???
We try to live lives of contentment, of productivity and of benefit to the community. We get gratification out of coding, seeing a system come together, and the occasional 'OhMiGawd!'.
Let's not be judged by the standards of the average politician - after all, WE don't expect THEM to think rationally, and WE don't GET interns.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
From the LA Times update:
Top Ten Reasons Why Working at Microsoft Destroys Your Sex Drive:
5) You're afraid to get involved for fear everyone just wants free software.
I imagine this is being tacked on RMS's wall somewhere as we speak...
--sugarman--
Read down to the bottom of the NewTimesLA article, there you will find...
"Hey, Don, Head of Security! I don't give a rip about your stupid orders: BILL GATES' OFFICES ARE LOCATED IN BUILDING 8 ON THE SECOND FLOOR IN THE CENTER OF THE EAST WING FACING SOUTH. Damn that felt good."
ObOnTopic post
When you first start working 90+ hour weeks in this industry (any demanding industry), you have to sacrifice your sex life.
Later, when you mature a bit and get your life balanced out, you learn that spending money on women is much more fun than spending it on ALL the latest geek equipment. Balance means you buy some geek equipment, and spend some on the women.
I would say my sex life has steadily increased over the years. Now I have enough money to keep the women happy, and the social life is properly balanced between partying and geeking. Only sometimes do I miss having a 100% geek life, usually when I watch some young kid right out of school hack circles around me. But he doesn't have a girlfriend, that's my pathetic response.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
While this is a nice idea in theory and may manage to get you a gf, you'll never be truly happy because you'll have to continue pretending to enjoy these "other activities" you pursued in order to keep your gf. Worse case, you'll eventually quit doing these "other interest" out of boredom and your gf will leave you because you "changed" and "lost interest" in her.
Besides, geeks ALREADY have interests outside of Comp Sci. They're just not often "mainstream" interests.
TAKE THE RISK and actually invite girls to do the GEEKY thinks you really like to do. You'd be surprised to find that the offer to try something they've never done before will encourage a few girls to actually try it. Invite a girl to come and watch some Japanese animation (avoid the overly sexist stuff, of course). Or invite her over to drink tea and go swimming in your pool (geeks are often well paid enough to have these choices) listening to '80s girl rock. Invite her to come and see those '80s video game systems and games you've been collecting and challenge her to a game of Atari 2600 combat. Dates don't have to be the stock "dinner and a movie".
If she thinks this stuff is lame, then oh well, but if she likes you for who you are and likes to do the same things you like to do, believe me, that's a far preferred situation than forever pretending to like some grudingly selected "other intrests" that you really think is boring as all heck. Granted, the former case may happen a lot. Be prepared. But also be patient. Shakespeare was wrong; A life alone, staying true to your ideals, is better than finding a girl by becoming someone you yourself aren't happy to be. - The LasVegas Geek
That sounds about right. Get the women to buy you a beer first, it weeds out some of the gold diggers. I got snagged by a digger years ago, she cost me a lot of money, in return for some not very good sex. But it was fun and kept me away from computers for a while, and led me into new things.
;-)
My current GF comes from a very rich family. I didn't know it at the time I met her, so I let her buy the first meal just to be fair. For the first week or so we were together we alternated buying things. I doubted she was a golddigger, since when we first met I was in my hardware geek outfit, old jeans and sneakers, driving my old car. Later I drove my new car, and had the suit on, and it didn't impress her much more than the first look.
And this weekend I've got to spend with her and her 'rents. Ugh. Yassa, Daddy Warbucks, sah!
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I like being an amateur geek. I don't like being a professional software engineer. I find working with computers to be utterly joyless. Don't ask me why.
Once I've stuck this job out for two years (nearly half way through, yaaaay), I'm going to investigate getting out of IT and into something totally different. Then I will be a happy geek hobbyist again.