Normies v Nerds: The end of an era?

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Small_Editor_3693@reddit

You’re about 15 years late to this realization

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idspispopd888@reddit

Try 30 years late. Some of us were tech nerds before some of you were born…and yes, we had our own communities on systems you’ve never used.

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Team503@reddit

Oblivion 2.0. Door games. FIDOnet. Usenet. Arf!!

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idspispopd888@reddit

I SO miss FIDOnet and Usenet....particularly the latter...so confusing at first, but ah...the Flame Wars make todays toddlers look like kids in a sandbox!

CP/M and OS/2 for me were the stalwarts for a long time...BYTE Mag a favourite read with Jerry Pournelle and his Big Kat (which I think was a Kaypro?). Yeesh....oh...and Gopher.

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Team503@reddit

OS/2 Warp! Loved it! And what was the super thick one, Computer Monthly or something? Used to love getting that and just paging through the ads!

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nerd culture on the diy side has gotten flattened out by "fandoms" in the last decade or so which imo are like sharecropping on corporate "intellectual property"

flip side i think it's more healthy to have all walks of life in the sector

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its_all_one_electron@reddit

We really need an /r/sysadmincirclejerk subreddit for this shit

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Only-An-Egg@reddit

r/shittysysadmin

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Yes you're right. I did this for years as well. Putting in an additional 4-6 hours a day either on actual work or self study after my normal shift. No more though. I realize that lack of work/life balance impacted my own priorities negatively. That's not to say I'll ever go above and beyond, but either the building has to be on fire or it has to be preplanned. It's ideal to think someone will recognize your overwhelming work ethic, but that very rarely meshes with reality.

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RhymenoserousRex@reddit

Been doing this for 20 years and I’d rather chew glass than have to fuck with server configs in my spare time. Everything in my house is dumb as shit because I don’t want to troubleshoot why my lightbulb can’t reach the internet on a Saturday morning.

Also in 20 years of retrospect if I could have every hour I wasted in a MMO back I’d take it.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

Everything in my house is dumb as shit

Yes absolutely - the shoemakers' children go barefoot. Ubiquiti hardware, MacOS/iOS for all family members except me, I have an iPhone that's 2 generations back at this point. The only smart stuff I'll use is the kind I can isolate from the network at large and have it be set-and-forget.

I'm surprised when I hear people talk about hosting their own mini-ISP data center on a rack of equipment in their basement that they hand-roll the configs for.

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MyOtherAcoountIsGone@reddit

It's really not that bad. Most things are set and forget these days. I got a mini datacenter but I barely touch it. It just does what it needs to.

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theinfotechguy@reddit

Hey, stop attacking me! 😅

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bucketman1986@reddit

You had me until the last line. My wow guild has been a steady presence in a rough sea over the years. We all met online when we were teens and still hang out together to this day. We raid twice a week and it's nice having that to look forward to.

Just don't ask about my /played time

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So yes as I've gotten older my drive to do work shit at home has died but that's more of a result of me mastering my craft (it's a lot more fun when you're learning something new for the first time and can go hog wild in your home lab environment) but I do maintain something between a homelab and a home datacenter and what I do decide to spend my time on nets me a return on investment with time saved and/or joy.

All of my home automation is as locally controlled as possible to reduce those "why can't it connect to the internet" moments as much as possible and the time saving and consistency benefits of having automation outweighs any time sunk into troubleshooting. My jellyfin setup also has been a God-send during ISP outages in an era of "everything is on an internet streaming service".

It's getting harder to find niches like this to work in. Maybe night shift smart hands in a data center? Super low level kernel development or hardware engineering? I remember working in mainframe shops early career and some of those folks acted like they just slept between the racks. But there's way fewer slots for people to just swap tapes or manage print queues.

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No-Advertising3183@reddit

I'm going to leave this here.

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I can appreciate what you’re saying about passion for work because I agree many people dont have it. And the common narrative is “it’s having a life” or as someone commented here “I’m not curing cancer who cares”. I guess that’s one way to look at it. There’s also this other thing called taking pride in your work (regardless of what its purpose is), but that seems to be a lost concept honestly. Very few people truly have it anymore.

And even aside from that, if you truly have a passion for your field then your work will reflect that. Like, are you really, actually interested in tech? Do you actually find this stuff fun and cool and happy you get to do it for a living or do you just want the check? Id say probably 75% of people these days are the latter in our field. But I will say I think many more people have that when they entered the industry and it gets lost due to how common burnout is in our field. And how common it is for companies to overwork IT to death. That causes people to lose their passion for it which really sucks. I see the same thing happening to myself now…As some others mentioned, I have a homelab that I now barely touch cause I’m so burned out in my off time. So many home tech projects I wanted to work on that I never got to.

As far as background, I’m sort of a blend of the two sides. Growing up as a kid I played sports and didn’t necessarily “look like a nerd” at first glance but I also literally grew up on this stuff. My father was in the industry for 35+ years (just recently retired) and I think he showed me how to first connect two PCs with a crossover cable and give them IPs on the same subnet so they could talk when I was about 8. At 12 one of my favorite hobbies was writing apps in VB6. I fucked up and got pretty far off track for a while but deep down I knew that any legit profession I worked would have to be tech (either IT or Dev, I ended up going IT).

So, I know people from both worlds. I know the nerdiest of the nerdiest and love just geeking out on tech talk with them because I still have a huge passion for the topic in general. At the same time I know people that have a hell of a time just trying to send an email.

I think with everything the way it is now, our industry has become more attractive to people who previously maybe never considered it, but I also think there’s just a general lack of care for quality of work and that really is true in all areas, not just IT. With the AI craze, people have made it clear they favor quantity over quality. So i think you’ll start seeing quality of work go down in many areas - we already have - and it sucks.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Ya tbh I'm somewhat scared and excited at the same time in what ai will do to industries. Some things I know can be made better.. other things... Well we'll see won't we?

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

I guess one question I have is this - does your employer give any indications to people working there that they reward the whole "nerdy passion" thing? Because I'd say the vast majority of employers don't these days. Either they're plotting how to get rid of all knowledge workers except the executives using AI, treat technology as a cost to be minimized, and/or reward the backslappy extroverts explicitly. You might see pockets of tech investment in big tech, think tanks, hedge funds, etc...but even there it's treated much more like a job than a sacred calling.

Ok_Tap7102@reddit

pdp10@reddit

like make up your own jokes already

Memes and jokes are entirely different from one another. They're not the same thing, just because you're under the impression that one supposed to laugh at both of them. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

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xjeeper@reddit

He may sound insufferable, but that's only because he is insufferable.

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Jerkface0079@reddit

A lot of that culture was the standard tech space when I got my first helpdesk job in 2004... it's kind of cliched and overdone. If someone references the IT crowd I just politely laugh. Sometimes you gotta grow up, diversify your interests, realise that society is changing and adapting and it's healthier to update your personality and interests too. There's a lot of core concepts in the geek stuff I like, like I love cyberpunk as a genre and instead of liking 'anime' in general, I'm more into a specific era of retro mecha. But it doesn't define who I am, and I have no interest in making it my identity.

As the world's gotten weirder I've gotten more into sociology to help me understand it, which in turn has led to political philsophy and economics.

Instead of letting my body deteriorate with computer time, I hit the gym more instead.

Instead of playing games, I met my wife and we share interests instead.

I reckon I could stand toe-to-toe with anyone on nerdery. You know that “do not cite the deep magic to me” meme? Thats my nerdery. Literally.

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putoopin@reddit

gif

You have successfully blocked my schwartz.

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KeyHalf6609@reddit

Oh, you got some real nerd credentials? Prove it. Slap your nerdiest credential down on the table for us so we can be thrown into the weeds. /s

Seriously though, you're spot on with monoculture killing creativity. The more diverse backgrounds and nerd interests people have the better. I've come up with ideas my colleagues wouldn't think of because of my interests and vice versa. If we all had the exact same interests and nerd facinations we'd be throwing ourselves at a wall when we need to start chucking ideas around.

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jaredearle@reddit

Ok, just for fun, let’s nerd out. I was working at Games Workshop when 40k came out. I left and started my own RPG company with friends and we got bought by WotC and started their UK office in 1993. I judged the 1994 Magic: the Gathering world championship. I was the one who walked the UK offices of TSR after we bought them to decide which computer assets were worth bringing across with the staff. The RPG I worked on won an Ennie and most recently I helped a mate out (we worked on The Terminator RPG together) putting the Planet of the Apes RPG together.

Oh, and I was one of the nerds (there were a few of us) that advised Graham Linehan (before he went fucking weird) what posters and nerd shit to put in the office of The IT Crowd.

And that’s just the 1900s.

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jort_catalog@reddit

Thanks for acking the Graham Linehan weirdness (transphobia)

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KeyHalf6609@reddit

Man, I was just joking, but you weren't kidding about blowing us to the weeds. Those are some actual championship heavy weight nerd credentials.

I don't even think I got anything I could count as nerd credentials comparatively lol.

Still though that's pretty cool, maybe one day I'll get the opportunity to earn some heavy hitting nerd credentials like that.

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DisappointedSpectre@reddit

I mean, if you want to play that gatekeeping game, I think you’re going to be surprised by how you are a “normie” to some.

For example, I always wonder if people like OP know how many furries work in tech.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

To me a "normies" isnt someone that's doesnt know about certain things. It's moreso someone who follows trends instead of showing interests in the subculture itself. It's people that will read a book about a subject but won't read a second. It's the loss of passion and self expression that I don't like. You used to open up scripts and see comments about how many hours they spent on x or y or see interesting nomenclature for objects but now you open it and you often just see code. That self expression is often gone. Instead it's 9 to 5 and I'm onto the next thing.

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Significant_Win_345@reddit

The fact that it’s a 9-5 for many of us now just means that we learned at some point to put in healthy boundaries.

I hope that newer generations did, because for a long time I didn’t. From 18-32 I worked tirelessly for hours on end, whether I was getting paid or not. I was obsessed and passionate, and I had absolutely shit boundaries. Companies loved me because I would always go the extra mile, but they didn’t respect me for the same reason.

Now I’m nearly 36, I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and I’ve built my life into a manageable amount of work and enjoyment. I treat work as work and I understand that it’s only work. I work to live, I no longer live to work.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

I don't have anything against the idea of work life balance. But I do think work is meant to be enjoyed. Having self expression at work is important in my opinion. You can be 9 to 5 and have drive during that 9 to 5. There are people who try to be proactive and people that are more reactive. A lot of people these days seem to be more reactive than proactive. Which sure, sometimes that is because of a lack of time to do things but sometimes you will see people choosing not do anything.

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Mindestiny@reddit

The fuck does that have to do with anything? You wrote a two page rant about how you don't want to hire people who aren't obsessed with World of Warcraft.

You can like sports or theatre or writing and not play video games and still be driven to do good work while at work.

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IT hasn’t been a subculture since 2007 or so.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Depends on the level you're in imo. I've had people on my team that developed Cisco firmware and that dude was definitely part of a subculture.

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Alert-Foundation2009@reddit

The change has been even bigger in cyber security. Two decades ago, sitting with pen testers in a pub the conversation would 100% be about conspiracy theories, Satanism, and other wierd shit. Now people talk about football and cars. I miss the wierdoes.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

I think a lot of people think the security space is black hat stuff or doing physical pentesting parachuting onto a building rooftop Mission:Impossible style in a black ninja suit. It's much more about compliance and risk now. Operating systems are starting to take security a lot more seriously...so best practices develop. There's still a ton of weirdos doing exploit hunting but most of those are barely seen in public during daylight hours, let alone a regular IT job.

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black_caeser@reddit

Well, isn’t it also way more about compliance than actual security nowadays? Pen testers ticking of checklists while running Nessus et al. Script kiddies, really.

The old style pen tester moved up, developing the tools the new “pen testers” run, most often probably without really understanding how it works.

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Alert-Foundation2009@reddit

Architecture, risk management, operations and incident response, and threat ops/hunting are all still things off the top of my head. Decent pen testers still need to know how things work but there does seem to be an increasingly large number of mediocre ones.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Same. This is the culture shift I'm talking about that some people don't seem to get. Some places are more silod though and you don't actually "make friends" so guess that's also part of the issue.

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I wonder if the Big 4 have scouts going to these.

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timbotheny26@reddit

accounting clubs (yes, they exist)

That makes me so happy for some reason.

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serverhorror@reddit

Need!

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Thoughtulism@reddit

Yeah I think for us elder millennials many of us were into computers before it was "cool". Most people in high school were worried about friends, I was learning how to write kernel drivers for BSD and Linux

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Whole_Task_924@reddit

This isn't the 80s or highschool. Just hire whoever can do the job.
Also nerd culture is popular culture now so it really doesn't matter that much.

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HarmonicSniper@reddit

Agreed. Hire whoever does the job best and fits in with the team. No need to feel superior over 'normies'.

Although of course, if the team is full of nerds already then a new nerd will naturally fit in. It's all about the culture fit.

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I don't think it's ruined either, but it does make the connection that people had a bit harder these days. It used to be that if you know about x or y it meant you were really into that thing. Now many people just float around different subgrenres based on whatever is popular. Sorry if I came across as snobish I didn't really mean to I just somewhat miss the subculture that used to be there more and how you could easily tell. Now people are into so many different things instead of being targeted on a single niche.

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HarmonicSniper@reddit

Well, like the other commenter pointed out, a lot of what used to be niche ('nerd culture') is becoming mainstream popular culture now, if not simply for the fact that film/game companies began to realise the potential financial opportunities in making them more accessible to the masses.

You'll have to look into something more niche or with a higher barrier to entry (due to cost/language etc.) these days to find a group of fellow passionate people to belong to. And I don't think it's associated with the IT industry any longer as soon as PC became more available to everyday folks, unless you're looking for very specific niches. Not every programmer or network engineer has to no-life a video game, for example.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Nah I get that but I feel the passion and personality that used to be there for things has been loss over the years. When I used to program games or make scripts it was quite common to see funny comments in the code or interesting nomenclature for objects. Now a lot of that subgenre and self expression seems to be gone.

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HarmonicSniper@reddit

I don't think it's gone; it's just more hidden these days, and you can certainly still find them in niche communities. But yeah, a kid who grew up playing Fortnite or Roblox probably aren't doing those things because it's simply a different culture and era of Internet compared to what we had back then.

What I'm saying is the times are evolving, and it's easy to get trapped in the nostalgia when we didn't have access to pretty much anything at your fingertips, but 'kids these days' can still be very weirdly passionate about things - it's just that 'normies' have always existed, and it is unlikely that you'll encounter the 'nerds' from things like media franchises these days. If you look into something like the gamedev or modding communities, that creative and expressive spirit is still very much alive from my observation.

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cmack@reddit

Culture change....and not of just the people within the culture that many are talking about here; nerds v normies. More coding is being outsourced to either Asians or AI. They don't have the same culture.

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jort_catalog@reddit

Time to go to bed fam

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HarmonicSniper@reddit

Gatekeepers gonna gatekeep.

It's frustrating to talk with these people because you're not in their 'exclusive club', when the club isn't even that exclusive. I mean, Blizzard games? EVA? C'mon. These 'normie' stuff can easily be out-nerded, but I'm not a fan of snobbery. Let people enjoy things.

It’s not that anyone expects them to be taught every single concept. The problem is you expect them to know every single concept to be qualified on the topic. If someone says they’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve decided they’re really not if they don’t know about whatever war. When it comes to IT, the industry is changing constantly. They might not need to know every single thing when you hire them. They just need to be willing to learn, find some answers on their own and trainable.

I had an interview with the IT dept at a large state university and in part of the interview they gave me a laptop that wouldn’t connect to the internet and asked me to figure out why. This was in 2017 and I couldn’t do it because my job at the time had switched to SCCM years before. When a computer was infected we would just wipe it. No time for old fashioned troubleshooting. I also wasn’t allowed to google any answers. After I couldn’t get that done, they asked me random questions like where I got my tech news. I didn’t get that job and if I had I would have declined it.

You're complaining about someone saying they like Star Trek and referring to the most recent movies when they say that instead of 20+ year old TV series.

Just ask them if get like TNG or DS9 specifically if that's what you're wanting to know.

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adrianhalo@reddit

I am 44 and therefore ancient/crumbling, so I kinda get where you’re coming from…but really, this is your time to shine then, no? You can always teach what you know of the old skool stuff. You never know who will be interested. At the same time, just because someone doesn’t live and breathe computers in their spare time outside of work (and odds are, these days they won’t), doesn’t mean they’re unfit for the job.

Hell, I might have gotten into IT sooner if it had felt more welcoming and less…gatekeeping, for lack of a better term. Never mind that it’s generally been a boy’s club for decades, which sucks and can often make for a really weird vibe. :-/ Honestly, there’s a lot about the “stereotypical IT Guy” that I don’t think is really relevant anymore anyway. I’m kinda sick of this trope of IT being a bunch of antisocial nerds. I HOPE that stereotype changes.

Also nerd culture is popular culture now so it really doesn't matter that much.

Living through this transition has been a crazy ride.

I read the Witcher books as they were coming out. I remember actually waiting for the last two. Now it feels like everyone with any online presence or any sort of media consumption at least heard of Witcher for one reason or another.

Dune was always great but very niche. The Lynch movie has its issues and never reached the 'normies'. The 2000s miniseries was not that popular. Now everyone watches the new Dune.

I read and owned the first Polish edition of the major Tolkien works. I recall that the vast majority of the audiences at the cinema for the LotR movies was what one could call 'alt' nowadays i guess - metalheads, people already deep into fantasy. Long hair and black clothes dominated among the public. For the Hobbit movies, it already changed to pretty much everyone. Right now fantasy shows and movies are a-plenty and it seems like everyone knows and likes at least some.

Video games? We were nerds for spending time in front of games. Maybe it's just my bubble but now it feels weird if someone my age or younger says they never played anything and had no interest in them in their entire life (including chill mobile games).

I always felt the same. You can't imagine the mind fuck when I was fixing a system in the maintenance shop and those guys where sitting around talking about their WOW guild that was running heroic dungeons in WoTL

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BoredTechyGuy@reddit

Try explaining MUDs and door games to other high school kids….

Not to mention the dark arts of IRQ and DMA just to get a modem working…

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fresh-dork@reddit

Living through this transition has been a crazy ride.

in HS, anime and nerd shit was hidden. now it's everywhere. where women used to turn their nose up, it's now something (some of them) openly get into. which is nice, but it's an adjustment.

Now everyone watches the new Dune.

now you have to explain that chani was always 100% team paul

There were no board game shops or cafes and major store chains or common stores never carried any.

it's nice now - my city has a giant store for board games and a cafe attached that does pickup games

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fearless-fossa@reddit

where women used to turn their nose up, it's now something (some of them) openly get into. which is nice, but it's an adjustment.

Back in my school days (and I'm pretty much ancient now that I'm 30) it was more the guys who were turning up their nose on anime and it was mostly us girls watching them. It was just that the guys who did watch anime took it up to eleven and were obnoxious as fuck abut it. And also were hard into the ecchi shit.

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Yeah theres people who make a crazy amount of money playing games.

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cmack@reddit

/whoosh

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Little-Math5213@reddit

I'm still a nerd and a geek.

As a old school sysadmin, that have had server installers since NT 4.0 server.

All the way up to Server 2019 server iso.

Now it's Sunday. And I enjoy geeking out in my M365 E5. Playing with seing how secure I can make SharePoint, with Purview, conditional access and more. Just for fun.

I don't learn this mainly for skills to bring to work, but it's for fun!

If this isn't a nerd geeking out, I don't know what is.

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hornetmadness79@reddit

You know it is normal to be nerdy about more than one thing. I've also learned over the years that putting in 14 hours a day at work just to push a rock a little further that normies dont cares about isn't all that exciting and leads to burnout.

Also cooking, woodworking, sex and other cool engineering stuff is way more fun than building some elaborate CI CD pipeline and alike that only matters to other nerds.

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bill696@reddit

AI will destroy it all anyway, well just all be dumb equally and unable to do anything without it

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

I see plenty of qualified candidates who just want a solid job, leave at five, and have hobbies outside their screens, which is fine, but they rarely bring that same obsessive energy.

Outside of a startup or some very niche cases, this is what most companies should hire now. I started in the mid 90s and even then it was getting rarer to find tunnel-vision nerds. The field has matured just a bit, computers are everywhere now and the IT side of the job selects for good troubleshooters and fixers. People aren't willing to put up with cantankerous wizards because computers are still hard, but not sorcery anymore.

I keep weighing whether to hire the old school weirdos who actually care about the work itself or just go with steady professionals who treat this like any other career.

Where are you finding the actual nerds these days? Even development doesn't have as many as it used to. Also, you can be good at this job and still have a life. And it's not like I'm some brogrammer know-nothing who went to DevOps bootcamp because TikTok told me I'd be rich working in Big Tech. I've been doing this 30 years and have seen the same thing you have...the field is just growing up which I see as a good thing. The nerds don't last long in external facing roles now.

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lnxrootxazz@reddit

I work 9 to 5 and continue at home doing IT stuff until midnight sometimes.. Its a hobby for me that pays. That's perfect. I was never a nerd in that sense because I never like Star Trek, Stargate, Doctor Who and all that stuff. But I'm still fully into Linux, BSD, Networking, Automation, Homelab, RPis and MCs etc.. Not everyone has IT as a hobby, so many people treat it just as a job. As long as they do it well its fine. But sometimes you need to stay until 8 to troubleshoot a P1 incident without complaining. And that's rare nowadays

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sir_mrej@reddit

LOL normies (specifically dudebros) started infiltrating tech in the 80s, more came in the 90s, even more came during the dotcom boom. Woz was a nerd paired with a charismatic businessman. Bezos wasn't really a nerd at all. The shift happened before you were born.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

I mean bezos definitely had that nerd look and voice in his earlier years. I mean he sold books for a living.

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Cum_Dad@reddit

Ive been in the field since 2007 and ive only ever known 1 nerd like that in the field. And I tjink he was mostly trying way too hard to be liked and just had that assumption of people.

Honestly I used to wanna be one of those guys until I started working with them. These dudes that gotta make it their personality are just sad. You should partake in hobbies for fun, but some of these guys seem like they're doing it for approval of their peers.

And you know what? Seems the users agree with me. They're always scheming for ways to bypass the "obsessive" dude and contact me or the director directly.

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structured_obscurity@reddit

I think ai will bring this back

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asmokebreak@reddit

With the sheer amount of work I do and the fact that the consumer tech industry has gone so anti consumer: I have no urge to ever take park in a “nerd” hobby ever again.

I turn off screens at home, outside of my ereader, and won’t touch anything.

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AverageMuggle99@reddit

I like the variety of people. Some of the “nerds” I’ve worked with are super on the spectrum and have little to no people skills.

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Euphoric_111@reddit

OMG. Dude. Just No.

It's called life. Live it before you don't have any left.

I learned so much in Tech from 1993-1997 when I graduated HS that put me in the tech field and I was lucky enough to have a large group of friends who liked to do stuff with computers as well during that time before I grew into being someone who works in I.T.

We did the following with about 40% Tech and the 60% Life.

Rebuilt them - Stack of 3.5 Floppies for Dos & Win, CD's FreeBSD 2.X & Red Hat
Upgraded them - transfer from 3.5 850MB to Bigfoot 1.6GB IDE, SB16, Riva 128
Gamed with them - Doom, Duke, ROTT, Diablo, Dune, C&C, Warcraft
Networked - 28.8 to 56K using NetCom & BBS & with BNC networks and IFITL Fiber DSL.

Biking, Rollerblading, Snowboarding, Skiing, Tennis, Softball, Football, Basketball, Fishing, Camping, Hiking, Movies, Clubbing & more.

We figured out early that Tech is a tool and it shouldn't be life and yet you could still be passionate about it, which is why quite a few of us are successful.

Best advice I ever heard from someone doing I.T. before I really started working in I.T.

"Don't forget to be a person outside of I.T."

No, it's the just me being polite

You seem to have a very odd world view. Maintaining Work Life balance doesn't stop you being a nerd, geek or any other label other than exploited

Having manager in your flair is worrying if you expect this

I've been a manager many times and would never expect my team to work beyond their hours unless they wanted to or were properly compensated

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Depends on how much more and how much is expected from me. I don't complain about my pay though because I was the one that accepted the rate for the job.

Not-ur-Infosec-guy@reddit

Been in tech field since early 2000s.

Used to be the type to be hooked to screens after work but found that it speeds up burn out symptoms for me. Additionally, cancer diagnosis was a shock to the system and I realized that I wanted to change how I was living. Thankfully cancer free now.

When I started around 15 years ago you were required to actually be able to troubleshoot to work on our helpdesk.

Big_Arrival_626@reddit

What are you even talking about

usps_lost_my_sh1t@reddit

we still exist... shoot half the people at the nerd gaming places here have Lincoln's and Mercedes.. engineers and admins.

nerds who grew up. but there is so much muck in the field now it's crazy

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mods_are_lame1@reddit

I have a homelab, I enjoy working with systems. I hate The IT Crowd and most anime. I like sports and have never played D and D. The two most competent people on my team are myself and a guy who obsesses about his yard like Hank Hill. The least competent person is a dungeon master.

People are allowed to have their own hobbies. Monoculture sucks, and “nerds” are not inherently better at this career.

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_Do_The_Needful_@reddit

You may be confusing nerds with company loyalty. I used to genuinely enjoy my work, had a home lab, occasionally would stay on late to figure out a problem just out of curiosity.

I'm older now and have other priorities and hobbies. I turn the laptop off at 4pm sharp. Electricity got expensive and I don't want a warm home server room anymore.

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badtz-maru@reddit

I think another aspect is that 20-30 years ago, the work environment was also the only place you could get hands on experience with a lot of tech, but now it’s so cheap and ubiquitous. I don’t need to spend the extra time digging in at work when I could replicate it at home more easily. I say “could” though because yeah, things change - I’ve got a family and a home to take care of so working 16 hour days powered by the thrill of tech isn’t a thing any more.

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kentrak@reddit

Depending on what you mean by "tech" I think the problems actually been the opposite for a long time now. It used to be a bunch of people cut their teeth on twiddling with various open source projects to achieve something not readily or cheaply available in the market, and in doing so exposed themselves to a bunch of more advanced things.

Back in the day is you wanted a DVR/media player better than you could buy you got a server, but a bunch of drives in it, figured out RAID (software or hardware), figure out the networking, and put an OS on it (often Linux), and then had to download (maybe even compile) and configure a few different open source projects together. Then you had to keep it running, troubleshoot it, and update it.

That's all exactly what many admins do at work. It was easy to interview people and figure out if they had some base level of skills you could tap into or whether you'd have to train every aspect of the job into them.

These days, whenever you want to do something like above, you just pay $30 for a tiny Dingle sized device that does everything you want, because it's hard to justify the work when the problem is mostly solved. Even if you are going the do it yourself route it's only a fraction of the effort because all the projects have matured to the point they just make it easy.

I actually find it extremely hard to hire younger people with pre-existing admin skills that haven't already been doing the job. The developer people that do have some minimal experience in the shell don't have as much but also are already usually on a different path. You can hire them for devops... Which is one of the reasons why the world is shifting that way. That's where you can hire people.

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Herz_aus_Stahl@reddit

Yes, age changes that.

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Practical-Battle7420@reddit

The real question is what problem are you actually solving with a hire right now. If you need someone who'll dig into weird edge cases at 2am during an outage, sure, hire for obsession. If you need reliable coverage, hire the steady professional. It's a staffing question not a culture one.

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TheGenericUser0815@reddit

I've been in IT for almost 30 years, but I feel guilty. IT is my job, and I think I'm good at it, but I always had a life outside of IT, like I have a second career in music, which I have much more passion for than for IT.

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whatdoido8383@reddit

IT as a whole has changed and burned a lot of us used to be "techies" out. I used to love to learn, homelab, go to tech groups etc.

I gre up as a nerd and work in IT. Played WoW and EverQuest. Still hope for a reboot of Stargate and a firefly

But my IT job is 9-5. That's it. I'm gone. I have a life to live.. work lets me afford it but work isn't my LIFE.

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Hefty-Strawberry-762@reddit

If you actually talk to your coworkers you'd find most of them still play games and have interesting hobbies.

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germanpasta@reddit

Bro, there are nerds who can behave like normal humans.

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KeyHalf6609@reddit

I saw in other comments you're only 25, so I'm curious if you've actually talked to and gotten to know any of the old head nerds you're describing.

Because my dad was one of these "nerds" and so were his colleagues during the .com boom in the 90s. So I've gotten to know a lot of old heads during my life, and what you're describing is more surface layer than anything else. None of them were nerds because they played MMOs or quoted shows, they were all nerds because they had a deep fascination with learning how any kind of tech worked on all levels. From circuitry all the way to top layer OS, programming, and networking.

Half of them were ham radio operators before they got into computers, all of them were ham radio operators afterwards. They weren't setting up lan parties because it was nerdy, they were doing it because it was really cool to be able to all play the same game together against each other at the same time. Shoot, some of them always left the tech nerdiness at the office and were big nerds in other areas, like wood working, math, physics, agriculture, etc...

There's absolutely nothing wrong with people not being "nerdy" enough for a specific type of career, especially with people just wanting a steady check and having boundaries.

You're looking for a romanticized surface level culture of nerds without actual substance to it, especially since what was once considered nerd culture is now main stream in terms of popularity.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

I started off in "tech" by browsing the Internet and forums. I had a bug on a windows xp machine. I wanted to fix it. I ventured into a forum which talked about how to do it made a couple posts and someone linked me to a chat. I then learned a little programming in that chat. Then I started looking at the games I played differently and ventured into game hacking and exploits. I made a couple mods that many downloaded as well as a few scripts. And switched to game development and graphic design. I started designing assets and maps and even started making money doing it. Some things were simple other things were complex. I did everything from designing my own communication server with checksums and etc to eventually forming my own team of developers. I paid them between 17-25/hr. Sure that isn't amazing money today but back then some of those rates were unheard of in smaller communities. Some people even did it for free. I got quite a bit of donations and purchases from my games so I spread it around to the devs that had creativity to come up with some things I never thought of. Designed quests, levels etc etc.. as far as the old head thing.. well I talked to quite a few of them. Even hired some of them for on off things. Also in the communities I was a part of a lot of those people would now be "old heads".

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Klutzy_Scheme_9871@reddit

Its called getting older maybe? And that companies generally don’t give a shit about you like they used to back in the good ole days. Why should I continue grinding away after hours for you for free? Some of us are tired, burned out and have families or other hobbies. Hacking and IT is stressful and not as interesting as it was back then when things were simpler. You’re not paying me any extra so keep dreaming of finding that nerd from the mid 90s. And yes I played StarCraft when I was a teen when it came out but one day you just grow up…

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idontknowlikeapuma@reddit

Dude, it is still Normies v Nerds. Some people have home labs , and actual passion. The Normies just want a paycheck or to become the next billionaire entrepreneur.

The normies want to collapse the distinction. They can’t.

My CEO was a preppy jock in high school with a rich dad. My position as well as my lateral manager is to be his nerds. He comes to us to ask how we can do something, we put together the solution and deploy it, and the CEO markets himself as a tech genius displaying our work.

Before entering management, I was involved with teams over the years. The normies did the bare minimum.

Ok, so I have two guys I talk to most often. On Mondays, we often have the “what did you do this weekend?”

The aforementioned nerd and I talk about stuff we are prototyping, stuff we deployed, things we made, shit we 3d printed. Like, his son can’t have his phone at school, so he built an MP3 player from scratch, and we would talk about that as the project was being put together, because he would come to me for suggestions.

The other guy would just say, “I went to Maine to visit my family”, or “I ate at the new restaurant downtown.”

He straight up said, “why do you guys work on computers in your free time?”

Because we enjoy it? But that dude only used a computer work work purposes and his phone for everything else. He also depends on AI way too much.

So we just delegate bullshit tasks to him to keep him busy. It isn’t like he’s not a good guy or anything, but he is definitely not a nerd.

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Perhaps this is a bit of an overgeneralization, but I've seen it enough to think it's A Real Thing.

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space_nerd_82@reddit

I really don’t care as long as they want to work and solve problems.

I came up through IT during that period and whilst I am nerd I also appreciate that not everyone is and that is fine.

I also don’t expect everyone to have the same interest as me.

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Yubbi45@reddit

Our newest hire they've paired me with has no drive. He'll just sit on his phone playing clash of clans (or whatever) when we've got a ton of P4 things to work on, or documentation to update, or hundreds of people to interact with.

He asked me if we could make some diagrams I was working on interactive, so I showed him our repo and my notes from the last time I tried to make it interactive with JS & Python, but I guess he found the fact that it would require actual effort on his part offensive, because he just sneared and plopped back down in his seat.

Now, if there's a ticket in the queue for something that's already been fixed, he'll get on it right away.

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ThoriumOverlord@reddit

It's interesting you mention that sneer because I've heard that more and more often over the past few years when people think I can magically teach them how to use Linux or scripting in a few minutes without having to read or even Google something. I swear one of my current co-workers experiences actual physical pain when he has to read whatever I send him whether it's a log, a KB article, whatever. Him STIG'ing a box for the first time was like watching someone agonizing in the pits of Hell.

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Yubbi45@reddit

tbh, if you don't know what to look for in a log file, skimming through them manually can be quite painful

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Yubbi45@reddit

They hired a new safety manager at one of the plants we support and, I kid you not, she told me she can't follow written instructions.
I hope she was making a joke about an ADHD accommodation or some kind of inside joke I wasn't in on, bc holy shit.

I had one guy that would tell me he had experience in something or had worked on a certain system before, then a couple minutes after I would send him to go work on ours he'd come back to me to ask what chatgpt on his phone (not our company approved copilot or SNow agent with access to internal docs) meant by the simple step instructions it gave him. TBH I almost prefer that to these new seat warmers, as u/thoriumoverload calls them, now

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pdp10@reddit

Opportunists. You're describing an opportunist.

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Yea the whole lunchtime debate if Goku could beat Superman in a figh,t have drastically dropped. LOL

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CapitanShinyPants@reddit

You got old my friend.

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

I'm only 22 lel. I'm a bit different though in that I worked when I was a kid. Owned a few game servers made a bit of money hired a bit of people.

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crazycanucks77@reddit

😅 😅 😂 😂 To quote Tony, Paulie, Chris and Richie- Get the fuck outta here.

You're 25? What do you know about the old days??

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Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

I admit I'm not that old but I literally been an active contributor since I was 8 and got paid money for dev work when I was 11. It wasnt amazing money but I was making more money than some adults at the time. Also wrote some perl code on forums that were used by millions.

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Game-Mason@reddit

Lol your post reads like a 55 year old insufferable, sweaty IT manager wrote it

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Kumorigoe@reddit

"Is it the end of an era?"

"I'm only 25 lel."

"I'm a bit different though in that I worked when I was a kid."

13Krytical@reddit

My boss is former military.. not into anything nerdy at all.. practically no hobbies even.

why I Refuse to read the dune books.

Read Dune, respect the art, forget that sequels were ever created.

Or actually, since Dune and superheroes are now the main corpus of popular culture, find some other great art, and do the same.

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ElectionElectrical11@reddit

I read the books, the underlying pedophilia is just too creepy for me.

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realgone2@reddit

I've been doing IT in some form or fashion since 2002. I was never into any of that stuff. I'm into punk rock music, degenerate art, baseball, and gambling. I think that makes me far more a "weirdo" than some geek that annoys his coworkers with lame sci fi movie quotes.

I'll never understand the need to be so close with your coworkers.

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bigpacks@reddit

Same. The 1st IT team I joined, it was just 4 of us and we became great friends talking about all the stuff OP listed as "nerd" shit. Then time moved on & one became my manager, another became all our bosses and being nerd friends wasn't great any more... So now 4 jobs later. I'm friendly with others in the IT department. But we're not friends, it's work & when it's done I go home

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Cynicism32@reddit

I'm just gonna echo what everyone else has already said. I'd argue that your take, and anyone who agrees with it, is more damaging to the industry and IT "trade" than anything else.

If getting your bag and leaving at 5 qualifies you as a normie then so be it. You don't get an award for obsessing over this stuff outside the workplace. It's a job at the end of the day.

It's great to have passion and interest outside of the work context, but it's nothing more than a hobby a lot of times. The people who care as much will continue to do so, and it shouldn't affect the workplace. Those "nerds" also got burnt out at some point and put the shit on the back burner so they could enjoy the other 95% of the human experience. Obsession and trying to shoehorn your "nerdiness" into a team of professionals with a shared objective make you a liability.

Culture has shifted and there's plenty of people with interesting passions that are more valuable than the nerds. Been that way for a while now.

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sphyon@reddit

So let me get this right. OP is a 25 year old complaining about there no longer being a work culture that only existed before he was in puberty?

I mean, I was that guy and now that I’m married, kids are past grade school, social circle is a lot wider than it used to be, I’ve taken a hard shift from screen hobbies because I spend all day on em.

I think this shift fundamentally happened a long time ago though,

I’ve found that regardless of their background/hobbies/culture/motivation, a tinkerer mindset is the biggest predictor of success and this is not all that hard to screen for. Harder to actually find.

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PickleAlly@reddit

I always hated when people assumed I watched Big Bang Theory.

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fadingroads@reddit

As a 'nerd' working with all sorts of people, I prefer normies to fellow nerds.

Connecting with nerds was fine when I was earlier into my career, now I don't care about mutual interests. If anything, it's an achievement to connect with someone that on paper should want nothing to do with you.

I don't crave validation and I don't need to be surrounded by people who think like me to get my work done. Embrace change, stop gatekeeping.

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UnknownGermanGuy@reddit

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/09/13/get-out-of-technology.html

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Moogly2021@reddit

This happened at least ten years ago btw

"Actual nerds" anytime I hear this i want to throw up. Why people want to gate keep.being a pariah is beyond me. I'm if anything more excited to have a broader audience to share the things I love with.

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richardbouteh@reddit

Filter for arch linux users

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The_Wkwied@reddit

When I started in ~2012, the company I joined was an IT office. Nerds everywhere. Optimus Prime was the file share and Soundwave was the print server. Metroplex was something I think. Internal names of all our stuff in offices was Star-named. Then we were acquired by bigger corpo and all of the silly names have eventually fallen to the wayside with rebranding and what not.

I agree, even shortly before COVID, it felt like my peers in the office were less of a tinkering techie nerd than I was, or others I had worked with in the past.

I don't know how they do it, but I need enthusiasm in my career. If I didn't like to computer, I really could not see myself spending 8-12 hours a day, every day, doing computer.

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MetalEnthusiast83@reddit

Man. Who cares?

Whole_Task_924@reddit

You don't need to hide that.
I'm really into manga for example. I got my komga server running and I could talk hours about this stuff.
My fiance is not really into it BUT she respects my hobbies and I tell her the synopsis of everything I'm reading. She's really into fashion, dancing ,drawing and art in general. Those hobbies are not less interesting. An open mind can go a long way. I met some "Jans" who were actually really cool.

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Bazzatron@reddit

It has not been my experience, and my experience shapes my outlook. Even just on raw probability it isn't worth trusting Jan to find out:

X	Cool Jan	Uncool Jan
Normie	Hired	Hired
Nerdy	Hired	Rejected

If blindly trusting were worthwhile, masking would not exist, or it would be innate instead of a learned defense mechanism to coexist with allistics. Sorry, it's difficult to communicate it meaningfully - maybe you understand?

Darkhexical@reddit (OP)

Honestly, sales/pm might be the better route. I know many people who went from tech to more project management and enjoyed it a lot more because it was more about the design and they could actually use their passion for networks rather than close a ticket about a printer jam.

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Valkeyere@reddit

Still feels like I'm on minimum wage. Sure the number is higher but the cost of living has increased substantially more.

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sakatan@reddit

I'll not try to answer the question and would like to point out that the first part of the post is the most generic cliche AI slop SEO garbleshit hook that I've read on this sub.

Today… I call my self a career geek… I am not in IT, but I would be propperly fucked if if was not that nerd…

I've worked in tech for 30+ years. The number of nerds I've met in all that time I could count on the fingers of one hand.

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DataRikerGeordiTroi@reddit

Diversity is good. But if you are nostalgic for the smarts & culture of it of the 80s, I have a solution for you. If you want nerds, dont hire the white tech bros. Hiire some women & POCs. They had to overcome some fammillial & cultural push back & confusion to be in tech, & self selected to be there. They are the "nerds" you seek from the IT crowd & Silicon Valley. Hiring them over Brandon & Brayden can help them break generational curses.

The nerds are there they just aren't white dudes with a 2.0 and a dad bought car. They look different, so you have to be a little more open minded.

You also want people who started coding earlier on their own, for love of the game. You could ask a question along those lines in hiring practice -- tell us about a tech project you're excited about, preferably one you did or are building - type question

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Unhappy_Clue701@reddit

I’ve been in IT for 30 years, all of it hands-on tech stuff (if you can include VMs as ‘hands-on’) and have never been even slightly interested in the sci-fi or fantasy gaming stuff you mention. I did like the IT Crowd though.

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TFABAnon09@reddit

Thays because the day-to-day BAU tech jobs are so far abstracted from the underlying hardware, that people generally dont need to be geeky any more. This is the generation who grew up with tech "just working" and never had to worry about finding the right drivers for their Voodoo FX card or Creative Sound Card

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surreal3561@reddit

I don’t really agree. This has been the case for like at least a decade that I’ve been involved more in hiring process.

People still have passion for technology, it’s not all driven by “TikTok” or salaries, but they also have hobbies and interests beyond their job.

I always hire best people for the job, regardless of their interests outside of work.

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Gnump@reddit

I am in the business since 1997 and I would say the switch from IT Nerds to „just another career“ was around 2005-2010 or so. Up until then you had to be a „nerd“ to even come in contact with computers in your youth and you had tinker with them to even get anything useful out.

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xSchizogenie@reddit

Your text shows, you don’t know what a nerd is.

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Zer0CoolXI@reddit

Your right. I also think its gonna get worse.

At least the “normies” had to actually learn some technical stuff before…get ready for the wave of non tech normies who plug everything into AI and treat it as gospel and have 0 technical or problem solving skills. Worse, they wont be challenged because no 1 around them will know any better, especially management.

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badaboom888@reddit

well the pool of talent is huge. The large salaries has attracted everyone else. The big change imo started around 10yrs or so ago

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b00mbasstic@reddit

id still have a preference for the nerd type if id hire someone.