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This is the same sort of objective pride that coders often take when they’ve got something working. On the flip side, it’s also part of what can render them arrogant and dickish. You can convince yourself that what you’re doing is real work, and everyone else—the folks in marketing or sales or ma…

The Niagara of money in Silicon Valley, though, has been bringing in a new breed of coder that cared considerably less. By the late ’00s, the example of companies like Instagram—minting so many multimillionaires by making something that Facebook or Google might buy—caught the attention of a new bre…

But crucially, nobody was telling them what to program or what not to program. They were the first group of coders who used the machines to do things that were simply whimsical or creative. They’d get the machines to play music by writing code that turned the vibrating speaker on and off at differe…

Code makes efficiency and scale easy, seductive, almost inevitable. That is also why programmers fit so easily into business building and part of why some slide so frequently into libertarian thinking. Their talents are torqued perfectly for capitalism’s central trick, which is, basically, “do some…

It is accompanied by its close cousin, a fierce devotion to efficiency. Since they have, at their beck and call, machines that can repeat instructions with robotic perfection, coders take a dim view of doing things repetitively themselves. They have a dislike of inefficiency that is almost aestheti…