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Hope for the Valley's Single Men
Anonymous Coward writes "ZDNN is running an article about how a good geek is hard to find. " The American Singles group is holding its annual convention in the Valley, because of the sheer amount of good men that are availible. Dear Lord.
As a geek girl, who has and is dating a geek man, I have but to as what do they think they have to offer the attractive geek man?
Sure they may have looks - maybe - and they may be women, perhaps for some lonely man that may be enough, but what is a geek man looking for?
And what about the language barrier, she speaks Martha Stewart, he speaks in C, C++, Perl, VB, and Java.
I know exactly what a geek man wants because as I geek girl I want the same thing.
A bit of understanding when he works 18 hours straight on debugging on little bit of code, and is at his wits end. He smells of sweat, and is still in the same clothes he put on a couple of days ago. He is wrestling with Gollith, he is strong, he does not have time for that little cocktail party, or to anwer whether or not mustard yellow would be a nice color for the bathroom. He wants to know that you understand, and care about him, and you think he is intellegent even if he can't find the logical error in that nasty bit of code.
What happens if the cute couple's aniversary comes in the same week that a project is due. The project is more important - a non geek woman may not understand that.
Perhaps these girls should prep themselves with a few programming classes, I recomend C.
Men find C very sexy.
C is just so versitile, with a bit of training in C, you can figure out Perl and C++, and once you have c++, you can figure out java with ease, and perhaps then they can understand a bit more of what the geek man is saying.
He's so cute when he's implementing a hash table!
He's so sexy when he uses a stack, just look at that smile on his face when he pops and item off of the stack, he's like a kid in a candy store!
I digress.
Just my opinion, but after a long, and I mean long day, don't you think the geek man would like a girlfriend who understands what her boyfriend is saying, instead of a girlfriend who stare blankly and then proceeds to ask if she should rag roll the living room walls.
Perhaps not all geek men want a geek girl, but I am sure almost every geek man would prefer an intellegent woman, who understand computers and is not afraid of them, or worse yet ignorant of them.
It is also very important the prospective mate understand that work is involved, and sometimes to leave work is to leave a train of thought behind at risk of losing it. A geek man may not be around much, but not to worry, the computer is not your competition, you could never compete with the computer.
I found myself a geek man, and although he's a network guy, and I am a programmer, we speak the same language.
My last two jobs have been in cities which are known, or at least said, to have more single women than men by nontrivial margins. Now, in my geeky jobs, this has never been apparent to me, basically because geeks just don't tend to frequent the kind of places where this imbalance would be apparent. I've spent a few years working in these two cities, and remained steadfastly single throughout, not through intention, but just because that's how it's turned out. And so have a lot of other geeks I know. Admittedly, in some cases, some strong-willed and generally determined woman has done the modern equivalent of bopping them over the head and dragging them back to her cave and they've both ended up happy with the end results, but I rather think that this kind of thing is something that geeks hope to happen across, rather than specifically going out on the razz to look for. Not to mention the fact that quite a few of us wouldn't know how to go out on the razz, and don't care either.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't bother going to pickup joints or specific Places Where Singles Go looking for geeks because on the whole, you won't find them there. After all, why would you want to waste time in some singles bar when there's hacking to be done? This is probably a fault of the geek personality, but elementary human mating rituals can be as bewildering to your average geek as sendmail.cf is to a non-geek - often it's just not apparent where to start.
The best bet if you really want to grab a geek is to be one yourself. Either that or become one, but I think it might be a bit of a culture shock...
(Besides, here's a little secret that the article's author missed. We aren't all that rich - don't go looking around universities for rich geeks, 'cuz you won't find any)
Mike
Hey, I'm a geek, who goes dancing every weekend, and still nothing. While most geeks do spend a bit too much time not socializing, generally it takes most women till they get a bit older till they realize that geeks are accually a good catch. But a geek in his early 20s really doesn't have a chance.
The article says last year they went to Alaska, and made the mistake of coming during hunting season when the men were nowhere to be found. Are there any Linux conferences in the valley we should warn them about?
Communication is only possible between equals
They obviously decided this without researching their destination; did we not see on these very pages a while ago that the reason all these nerds were single is that they're too busy making money and doing hackerish things?
"Wanna go to Colonel Sanders?"
"Mmmmm... kernel..."
I hope that American Singles has contracted a studio to film this momentous event. This could make an excellent nature-style documentary.
Do geeks guys usually go for geek girls? Most the folks I know prefer more normal women. :)
:)
I mean, you've been slagging it away with code for 18 hours. Do you really want to come home and discuss it?
Personally, I'd prefer to come home, and have a girl who's just happy that I'm back. Not someone who really wants to know the details of why heap corruption is happening on the PPC build of whatever I'm working on.
Life just gets so one-dimensional when you're dating a geek. You're a geek at work, you're a geek at school. Do you have to be an egghead when you come home, too?
I think it's just nice to have someone who reminds you that code is not EVERYTHING. It's nice to have a life that has nothing to do with computers.
--
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#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Now granted first, I am no hacker. I am close to what could be considered a larval stage, but I am just not that passionate about coding, its just more of a hobby. I am however a hardware geek (just ask me how I hooked up a component CDPlayer, using my VCR as the reciever). I don't find the social interaction to be a problem.
I guess I have learned some lessons over the last few years. Bear in mind that several of these are from my job-now-near-career of Tech Support (end user).
(1) Work is not always the best, nor the only place to look. As I said, I work tech support, so there aren't many women, and the ones that are here are attached or, well... (not to sound mean..)
(2) Work cannot be your life. You cannot live at work, no matter what the company tells you.
(3) People don't normally bite... much. They, unlike dogs, actually seem to prefer a good conversation.
(4) What it all comes down to... Find a place that you feel comfortable at where people congregate (for me, it's the local Starbucks) and make yourself at home. Chat with strangers, or just the people that work there. I have been hanging out a Starbucks for the better part of a year and I have found things to be quite interesting. All the people that work there know me and will openly chat with me (and a few of them are some intelligent and beautiful women). Many of the regulars know me as well and are not afraid to talk. Bottom line, you have to communicate F2F sometimes.
I'm not saying it works for everyone, but for the cost of coffee, it's worth it.
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
I was generalizing, of course. :)
In actuallity, if I was not dating a fellow computer geek, an engineer or mathematician would be just as attractive to me. Maybe even a professor of philosophy - logic, of course.
I find Bertrand Russell's writing very - mmmmmm - stimulating.
I am joking again.
Although geekdom is only one aspect of my life, I am very devoted to my work, and I agree that another intellegent person, be they a programmer, or what ever, would be just as compatible, I am just doubting the man hunrgy women who are seeking the wealthy programmer will have much luck.
There is a certain class of women who work in offices, and consider themselves quite capable on computers although they call tech support to tell them the internet is broken when they get a javascript error on the page when trying to look at www.marthastewart.com - these are the women who I see in that little trip to Silicon Valley.
This type of woman may be physically attractive, or not. Perhaps for the truely superficial, she'd be an ideal trophy wife, some men want that.
I see more men wanting a partner, a mate they can talk to, share ideas, ideals, dreams, and much more.
Perhaps a couple will capture themselves a geek man who likes talking about interior decorating, and does not mind that his girlfriend doesn't understand computers. Even I like to escape from computers completely from time to time.
I just see the vast majority prefering a woman who has more to talk about than dried flowers, rag rolling walls, and dinner at the neighbour's place, and boy didn't their living room look fabulous.
These dependant little sucklings will be decending upon the geek world like vultures, seeking a man to care for them.
Are you ready?
Well if they have a web page and can BTO I may just consider it....
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Dude, get out and socialize. Mainly goto clubs (definatly try out any 80's nights you can find.. hehe personal preference), and coffee shops. I've had plenty of women in their late 20's early 30's who woulda jumped me if I hadn't been, so young. (I'm only 20)
Any woman can live with a geek if he's loaded.
.. and we all know that his coding abilities suck... :o)
Agreed. Case in point, Bill Gates.
(c'mon, you don't really think his wife is after his BODY do you?
Lisa,
You just don't get it. You can't quit your job and geek out all day in style unless your sugar daddy is a milionaire. Proper geeking requires a datacenter with at least 45 computers, 3 different processor architectures and 5 different operating systems. Admittedly there are a few mulitmillionaires around town, but they're all ex microsofties and would object to buying you an UltraSparc - espescially if they knew you planned to run FreeBSD on it. Get yourself a job with a company that has a huge datacenter and then you can roll around naked on a pile of ethernet cables between a Sun E500 and and Alpha GS 60. That's what I do at work - late at night when nobody is looking of course.
--Shoeboy
E500 Oops, that should read E5000. Scott McNealy is going to come to my house with a flamethrower now.
--Shoeboy
Oh, and BTW, you shouldn't use goto. It's bad style.
My Freakin Blog
More like something you tell them as late in the relationship as possible ("Well it is nice whether today, andsometimesIcodeinVB, don't you think? Did I mention how great you look?")
You wouldn't put recent bouts with foot warts in a personal add...
-
Good point. As always, we take woman==partener for granted. Unfortunately it will take many many years to move from this mindset .. it's far too ingrained in our culture, still. Maybe forever, but I hope not.
I must imagine you are in a difficult place - so many men around you in your workforce, but one wrong move and you could be in a very compromising position.
Hetro, gay supportin' geek,
SirSlud
"Old man yells at systemd"
I havn't had /too/ much trouble finding women, but don't go to them).
.. no matter how much you love computers, unless you're betting like the lottary, you actually have to expend some effort to go out and find one. Take a 2 month vacation from computers. Try not to use them outside of work. I'll try not to make it sound too material, but just like you have to spend a few hours getting that script done, finding yourself a soul mate also takes a little bit of deticated time and effort.
I'll tell you one thing
"Old man yells at systemd"
The "sexually uptight" morals of the Protestant Reformation, most extremely typified by the pioneering demes like Puritans, Quakers, Amish and the like, are not simply neurotic hold-overs from the tribes praised by Tacitus in his Germania -- they are the keys to progress.
Humans are continually striving to return, in the older parts of their souls, to their origins in subsaharan Africa where the three-tier concentric sociosexual circle of alpha males, concubines with children and peripheral beta males, is embedded so deeply.
This is why Margaret Mead, in a conversation I had with her in 1971, told me that the entry of women into the workplace mandated one fundamental compensating change:
An "incest taboo" in the workplace.
Subsequent decades have proven Ms. Mead far too liberal.
The flood of females into middle-management, coupled with the "glass ceiling" against their occupation of the executive suites and board rooms, has undone, within a single generation the painstaking creation of technological civilization's foundation and unleashed the three-tier sociosexual structure of pre-technological primates.
Importation of females won't solve this problem -- it will merely change Silicon Valley from a work camp to yet another urban area destined for a downward slide that will make descent into the so-called "dark ages" look like a picnic -- for this time, there are no pockets of isolation from this decay except, perhaps China.
Seastead this.
Well as I generally don't return from clubs back to the place I left from, its not a proper function. I guess I could say that I have home fuction then I operate friends house function which while ending operates club function, which both add to the value of my blood_alchol_level counter. Finally both fuctions end (only I honestly don't return to friends house function before returning home.. but thats a technicallity that is not noticed in the final outcome).
Sorry for not using proper programming notation in this I'm mostly just tech support with a little script programming.
How could you look for a sugar daddy and still want to support yourself? Or are you saying that you fantasize about it but wouldn't do it?
...
I'm confused
D
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