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 management—are just pencil pushers who don’t truly produce anything. (Ooooh, the marketing folks say they’ve increased the firm’s “mind share.” The coders will sit, unimpressed, arms crossed, asking: Can anyone really prove that’s true?) From the perspective of a really linear-minded coder, people who are involved in so-called soft-skills work are constantly hiding behind PowerPoint presentations because they can’t actually demonstrate that they’ve accomplished anything of merit. They’re just slinging buzzwords. This attitude can be a particular hazard among younger programmers fresh out of school, who haven’t yet realized the value of all their nontechnical colleagues—the others who are frantically selling and organizing and keeping the company from falling apart. (“I remember as a young programmer going to staff meetings, my eyes glazing over as some big-shot leader with whom I would never directly work showed chart after chart of numbers that I believed to be completely irrelevant to me,” as Chad Fowler, a longtime coder, wrote ruefully in his book The Passionate Programmer. “My teammates sat together, looking like a row of squirming children on a long car ride. None of us understood what was being presented, and none of us cared. We blamed what we felt was a complete waste of time on the incompetent managers who had called the meeting. Looking back on it, I realize how foolish we were.”)