I think there's a very particular historical reason. Originally programming was done almost entirely by women. Pair programming? Standard practice for a decade. Then, with the explosion in demand for programmers back in the 1960's, IBM created a "programming aptitude test." But they had no idea what would indicate aptitude for programming, so they built a test for who they felt a programmer should be: an awkward white male. Thus began the first great sea change in the discipline and the beginning of the idea that programmers were socially awkward.
Then during the microcomputer revolution, all the marketing was aimed at adolescent boys. It's kind of the same thing as we see with video games today. So we have the second great sea change where the boys who grew up thinking of themselves as the entitled center of computing on microcomputers get to a workplace where being socially inept is expected of them.
And then the Internet, where the lake of immediate social cues and cooling off periods can easily lead you into a flame war, and where the next generation of programmers grew up being mentored by the geeks of the previous generation, but this time with no in person social cues at all.
And here we are, with that historical baggage.
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I think there's a very particular historical reason. Originally programming was done almost entirely by women. Pair programming? Standard practice for a decade. Then, with the explosion in demand for programmers back in the 1960's, IBM created a "programming aptitude test." But they had no idea what would indicate aptitude for programming, so they built a test for who they felt a programmer should be: an awkward white male. Thus began the first great sea change in the discipline and the beginning of the idea that programmers were socially awkward.
Then during the microcomputer revolution, all the marketing was aimed at adolescent boys. It's kind of the same thing as we see with video games today. So we have the second great sea change where the boys who grew up thinking of themselves as the entitled center of computing on microcomputers get to a workplace where being socially inept is expected of them.
And then the Internet, where the lake of immediate social cues and cooling off periods can easily lead you into a flame war, and where the next generation of programmers grew up being mentored by the geeks of the previous generation, but this time with no in person social cues at all.
And here we are, with that historical baggage.