I dunno about his assessment of Brogrammers. Engineering departments have always had a sizable Bro contingent. The typical male Stanford CS student could very well be the paragon of the programming Bro... and they are usually pretty good at what they are doing.

Maybe he's getting Brogrammers confused with web dev scenesters. Awesome Tumblrs, lo-fi keytar side band, scruffy hair, interesting glasses, polaroid cameras. I don't know if those guys have a name yet. Hipster is too easy...it's never really been "hip" to have a desk job.

Sounds more like the ex-Zynga poster on reddit is an anti-social person who likes finding ways to categorize people into groups he can disparage on.

The more I read through it, the closer I moved to this conclusion as well.

I think that might be what he was getting at. In my mind both the groups sort of meld together as "non-engineers".

If you can't handle a pointer, you have no business being near a compiler. If you don't know why you (usually) don't want to handle a pointer, you have no business calling yourself an engineer.

I guess my comment reads a bit snarky but i didn't mean to be disparaging about anyone's engineering relevance, just that they are different kinds of guys.

I didn't read it as snarky. I'm just a snarky old crusty sailor.

WARNING JOKE FOLLOWS

Real "engineers" of course write in Fortran and have no truck with this la di dah hippy pointer stuff :-)

Sucks pipe and leans back in the rocking chair :-) actually ratfor was a very good pre-processor for text.

Though I did work on a big billing system for Dialcom systems that was mostly written in Fortran 77.

It isn't a new term but here is an even funnier description of the phenomenon: http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom...

In my definition, "brogramming" involves shots and beer pong.