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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson is, for lack of a better term, an anthropology book that looks at the history and cultural events that created the coders subculture. Mr. Thompson is a writer for Wired Magazine.

I don’t agree with several of the author’s picks, but I’m not going to write my own book about my experience so I defer to Mr. Thompson. I also enjoyed the author taking a look at what it takes to code and the misconception of a “lone genius”.

The book, like many others I read about the history of technology, is written for non-techies. While coding is a creative occupation, I wouldn’t compare it with writing poetry though, or any artistic endeavor at all. It’s us, the grunts and “code monkeys” who can make big ideas happen through hours upon hours of labor, meticulously making sure that everything works as desired.

When I entered the field, in the mid-1990s, I didn’t realize that it was the beginning of the “bro coder” era. I admit that on the East Coast, working for a huge company, I didn’t notice many of the issues the author talks about that happen in the incubators of those pushing technology to its limits. While I realize there are issues in the industry, like almost every other one, in my experience there is much diversity (but it’s not perfect).

Maybe I know too much but it seemed to me that Mr. Thompson forgot he was writing a book, and kept writing magazine articles. Issues are mixed to create a false narrative at times on subjects like algorithms, and the solutions do not make sense to me.

I did enjoy the book though, I didn’t learn as much as I thought but I did live through, and participated in the era and industry. Tech culture is fascinating from the inside and even more fascinating reading an outsider’s view of it. ( )

Lot of good ideas in the book. ( )

I loved this book! Great recommendation from my mom. The author interviewed so many people, and told so many great stories. Would be interesting to read again in 10 years and see how much of it stands the rest of time. ( )

While Thompson clearly wishes he understood his subject, there are just too many howlers in this book for it to be taken seriously. Seriously, you shake this book and showers of ridiculous fall out.

For what it's worth:
- nobody argues about "why bubblesort is so awful". Honestly, this is not something people talk about.
- there is no "classic dilemma in game thory" called the "Secretary Problem". Thompson clearly means the Stable Marriage problem (yes, the name is problematic but that's what it's called).
- the field has mostly moved on from lionizing the shouty arrogant self-important douchebag as the model of the "extraordinarily good programmer", and has settled on the notion that programming is a social activity.

I'm sure there's more, but I stopped reading when it became clear that Thompson's dearth of clue is bottomless, before I got 100 pages in. ( )

Spectacular in every way a great piece of journalism should be. Studs Turkel's "Working" for the age of software. ( )