Regardless of how accurate this portrait of programmer culture is, I must say that I welcome the attempt to create some positive PR.

Our fellow nerds, doctors and lawyers, somehow got star treatment by hollywood, while our kind is usually portrayed as unattractive, awkward, laughing stock and at best a passive character in an assisting role. This tragically reflects on our perception in the real world.

That picture made me cringe. Who sets a cup full of coffee right next to their laptop keyboard and phone?

There's a lot of fantasy in this article. Most programmers today do very little actually - we don't wield major influence. We basically glue together a bunch of Free Open Source offerings. The most critical skill is that ability to move fast by practicing with our Free Open Source offering tools. We pay (MS, Google, or Amazon) to host our applications. And we perform maintenance on these applications for years. Nothing special, anyone can do it. More and more people enter the work force every years. Since all things are becoming automated there will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future. We get to wear nerd clothes and act smart but generally all one has to do is be able to read documentation and use a computer. I would reckon that the average 13 year old who has a good reading comprehension can do what most programmers do these days. It's like playing a video game. They would probably be better at it too.

The building where I work has a rather large cubicle farm full of software engineers. Most of them are perfectly normal people. Men, women, black, white, Asian. We got all kinds. But there are a couple who are different.

- One guy I call "hoodie guy" wears a hoodie all the time. I live in Central GA where its 90-plus degrees and 90-plus humidity in the summer time. Hoodie Guy is still wearing the hoodie zipped up and hood up. Hoodie Guy doesn't talk to people.

- Got another guy who wears the same clothes all week. Asked him about it once; he said he bought 5 sets of the same clothes so he wouldn't have to choose in the morning. Like a uniform I guess.

- Got another guy who has a duplicate of the computer they work on at his house; this is not a PC. Its a purpose-built piece of mil-spec hardware that we put on airplanes to process data. We didn't give him one so he could code at home. He built it from doodads he picked up at surplus sales and trash heaps. Dude is hella smart.

But most of the people in cubicle hell are pretty normal.

I've been coding professionally for almost three decades, and the pursuit of elegant solutions makes up about 1% of my paid work. The rest of the time I'm fighting constraints: time, money, available resource, risk, all the usual. Very rarely does professional software engineering leave room for art, IMO.

I don't know why, but I find it amusing that people are so attached to their macbooks that they will even carry around full sized keyboards to replace the garbage keyboards on them instead of just buying a better laptop with a usable keyboard.