I'm no expert and I've mostly been in Europe with marginal time in the US, so I don't know the frequency of occurrence.
I think what's slightly more common is homogenous teams within companies that form an overwhelming culture, rather than entire company cultures. Teams do form their own ways of working and their own cultures, and this is fine: it's human and it can be positive. Healthy teams adapt to new members and vice versa.
But I have occasionally seen teams develop an impenetrable culture and reject anyone that wasn't a perfect fit for their existing culture. They also tend to reject any company-wide initiatives for change & improvement, not even engaging with the process or contributing to the discussion. Typically the way to solve such a team is to rebuild it by removing at least half of the members, after which everyone usually goes back to working normally.
So is "frat house full of brogrammers" just a meme then? I have always wondered since I first heard the term, as it seems so remote from the reality I experience.
And yet, it gets punted around so much you wouldn't think that it would be hard to find a brogrammer shop. On the contrary, going by the 'reputation' you'd think they would be so numerous as to almost be hard to avoid.
Yes, it's a meme. It's a quick and easy way to dismiss a of predominantly/exclusively white male team in a way that will get most people to say "Ugh, yuck!" without having any substantive criticism.
After 10 years hopping between Austin and San Francisco, hipsters with impressive beards and flannel seem at least 100x more common than brogrammers.
It's socially acceptable to hate / slander fraternity members (see the rolling stone rape case,) but it's not socially acceptable to hate hipsters, only to casually poke fun at them.
Just an observation, frat houses do focus very heavily on mob mentality, while hipsters are just a trend group. No one is going to get lectured by their fellow hipsters about being insufficiently loyal to the hipster brotherhood. Hipsters don't organize and intentionally seek to forge mob mentality and loyalty obsession. That is a significant difference just considering human psychology.
I agree that this isn't common and the use of a memified word was not useful. I think the mental image of "brogrammers" is often literally coding jocks, which is inaccurate. It is often badly used to equate to a homogenous and closed culture within a team, often young and male. However same can indeed happen with other group of people. The example of alpha-maleness I can think of is Paypal:
https://twitter.com/SaddestRobots/status/1184885797419401216
A better way of describing the problem from the original article is that infleixible & homogenous teams make it harder for people who don't fit a personality type to contribute to the work & work culture.
The linked post literally accuses PayPal employees of being too big of nerds to talk to (and therefore hire) women. And that's supposed to be an example of alpha-maleness? Maybe it's just bad writing, but if they "could and would" wrestle over disagreements, it sounds more like doing it on a lark rather than "alpha-manly" escalation of disagreements into physical violence. I don't practice combat sports, but - as I understand it - two people sparring for the hell of it is fun. Might as well have said they solve disagreements with a round of Rocket League.
That text is all over the place. They go from not hiring someone because they play basketball, to having wrestling as a meditation tool.
I'm not going to make assumptions about their wrestling motivations but he openly admits they were gate-keeping based on an internal concept of male "alpha male nerd" culture. This doesn't fit the view of a healthy workplace for those who think diversity brings resiliance & strength to a company.
In the 80s and 90s (and to a slightly lesser degree now still) nerds were generally portrayed as effeminate and unmanly. However they would still retain similar toxic ideas about manliness while dismissing "jocks" or anyone too popular or outside their culture. Basically the "while you were busy partying and having sex I studied the way of the sword" meme but played straight.
This means that e.g. "girly" hobbies might be fine and only earn you some mild mockery but being openly gay or seriously empathising with women could easily render you an outcast because you're disrupting the peace unless you "keep your head down".
The idea of solving disagreements through competition is an example of this. Instead of trying to get to the root of the disagreement and resolve a conflict through mutual understanding and dialogue, it determines a "winner" who comes out on top and the "loser" has to roll over and be humiliated for even daring to speak up.
A "play fight" or a round of Rocket League may not result in physical injury but it's still an aggressive display of dominance rather than a cooperative exchange. It's easy to see how this fits in with other ideas of "bros being bros" (or "boys being boys").
Of course nothing in this has anything to do with manhood. You can be a woman and utterly "destroy" someone at Rocket League or wrestle a man into submission. But not only is this behavior "male coded" (i.e. we're socialised to look at it as masculine rather than feminine) but a woman behaving this way would still stick out simply by being a woman and even more so if she doesn't fully commit to performing masculinity in every other way too (i.e. if she ever isn't playing along as "one of the guys", she'll stick out as an outsider again).
TL;DR: being male doesn't mean you think solving disputes through silly competitions is a good problem solving skill but doing so can be comforting if you feel insecure about your peers judging your masculinity, even if you're all nerds.
>A "play fight" or a round of Rocket League may not result in physical injury but it's still an aggressive display of dominance rather than a cooperative exchange.
Spoken like someone who was taught a “lens” to read everything in the world. We can just as easily invent the opposite meaning: that they were both insecure about looking bad at their job, and punted on the question of which design is better and settled the question of which design was used with competition neither of them would mind losing. Armchair phsycoanalysis that assumes all men are still 16 year old boys is lazy and insulting.
I'm a man. I explicitly said this is not about men vs women but about performative masculinity.
That said, did it even occur to you that suggesting a dispute between two grown adult men should best be solved with wrestling or a competitive round of video games is in itself infantilising?
This doesn't resolve the dispute, it just uses a feat of strength to establish literally unquestioned dominance (even if that dominance is purely situational and would require re-establishing on the next dispute).
Resolving a dispute involves, y'know, actually talking and understanding each other's point of view. But that requires empathy.
>Resolving a dispute involves, y'know, actually talking and understanding each other's point of view. But that requires empathy.
History would disagree, and then hit you with a stick until you agree with its disagreement.
Resolving a reasonable dispute (aka, a debate) can be done via talking it out, but this requires both parties to agree upon the rules for "winning" this dispute. Typically, in regards to physical confrontation, resolving a logical disagreement isn't the goal. It's about imbalance of respect.
Two people wrestling things out in an agreed upon match, builds camaraderie. You learn to trust one another, and how to defend yourself at the same time. Which can be extremely beneficial for people working together on a team.
Also, take note. Nothing I said included terms like "man", "masculinity", or being an "adult". There's no need conflate these terms with this type of action. Women, and children, also exhibit these social mechanisms.
Holy shit, I can't believe I even bothered trying to reason with someone on the Internet who seriously thinks an impromptu wrestling match is a good way to resolve a disagreement at work.
You're either a troll or larping. "Wrestling things out builds comradery"? We're talking about a disagreement about a work issue in a software company.
Ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: kempbellt.
EDIT: I'm eagerly awaiting being challenged to a duel now.
You are sensationalizing and taking things out of context.
I said wrestling is an effective team building tool. If you are trying to settle on which version of React to use in a project, weigh out the pros and cons in an office. If you are looking to work more effectively with some of your coworkers wrestling, or any other form of grappling martial-art (I've enjoyed BJJ), is a valid option. In case you aren't aware of what this is, it's essentially playing three-dimensional chess with your opponent until someone ends up in a physical checkmate. It's fun, respectful, good exercise, and great for building camaraderie - as I mentioned. I'm not talking about scrapping things out in the parking lot like a couple of high schoolers. If you'd rather play actual chess, that's also a valid option. At a previous company, my team did a break-out room together. Do what works for you.
"Eagerly awaiting a challenge" from someone you are disagreeing with on the internet is inciting a challenge, in a very childish way.
Also, Google larping. It doesn't make sense in your sentence.
A couple notes I wanted to point out. First, the competitions do not have to be physical. Most commonly I see intellectual sparing. Attempting to be so quick intellectually that the aggressor pushes their idea through by not giving anyone else time to think is a very common tactic.
Second, play fighting is one of the quickest ways to learn how to check your ego and gain humility. I've met plenty of very smart people with egos so big it got in the way of finding the best solutions.
I'm not saying that domination can't be useful in subduing uppity individuals.
I'm saying that thinking workplace disputes are situations that should be solved through domination rather than understanding is emotionally immature.
Even if the disagreement is entirely irrational, the severity of the disagreement alone can indicate more deeply rooted problems with the current dispute just being used as a proxy war. It might not even stem from a work related problem.
As much as programmers (I'm one btw) tend to complain about managers, this is actually something a good manager is aware of. If a conflict arises or an employee is unhappy it's their job to figure out how to best resolve not just the current situation but also prevent it from recurring -- a bad manager would simply enforce policy and enact punishments, a good manager will try to improve the environment and working conditions.
"Competitive sports" (including team sports which really must be co-operative at the team level even if the teams compete directly) are good for gaining humility and building mutual respect, yes, but the PayPal talk wasn't about that.
It was about using domination (whether literal physical domination through impromptu wrestling or metaphorical) to resolve work disputes. The very idea evokes testosterone-fueled high school bullies, not fully-developed grown adults.
HNers tend to cheer for the idea of meritocracy but this is the worst kind of meritocracy: you're not even filtering for being good at the job, you're just filtering for being good at whatever mechanism you're using to establish dominance (whether it's physical altercations or as you suggest Ben Shapiro like dazzling).
'Brogrammer' started as a witticism and has become a social phenomenon that people discuss as though it was based on rigorous observation and not just a joke.
In college I knew a number of "brogrammers" (frat boys, who did fratty things, and banged their head against coding as best they could). None of them are programming today.
I think what's slightly more common is homogenous teams within companies that form an overwhelming culture, rather than entire company cultures. Teams do form their own ways of working and their own cultures, and this is fine: it's human and it can be positive. Healthy teams adapt to new members and vice versa.
But I have occasionally seen teams develop an impenetrable culture and reject anyone that wasn't a perfect fit for their existing culture. They also tend to reject any company-wide initiatives for change & improvement, not even engaging with the process or contributing to the discussion. Typically the way to solve such a team is to rebuild it by removing at least half of the members, after which everyone usually goes back to working normally.