So we had to go to the Valley for a funeral this morning. We were early, so we stopped at a Starbucks near the freeway exit, to sit and relax for a little while before going up to the memorial service and burial.
When we walked in, I immediately noticed two Latino kids sitting at a table arguing heatedly. They were dressed in Full Thug; baggy jackets, low-cut t-shirts, identical watch caps; and each had various words in script tattooed up their muscular necks.
My threat assessment went from yellow to orange, as I watched them and started to follow their loud argument, and violent gesturing. The argument was being held in Spanglish, and while I understand Spanish pretty well, and given some warmup can speak a fair amount, this one had some words that took me some time to mentally translate.
pointer?
set?
thread?
damn, theyre arguing over how to write a computer program in C.
Two years from now, theyll be wearing polo shirts and Dockers and sitting in a cube somewhere.
And thats what I love about this country.
Well, if they are wearing Dockers and in a cube, they will at least have made Coding Drone…if they are REALLY lucky, they’ll have succeeded in becoming Rock Star Programmers, and will be dressed even more extremely 🙂
I”ve had Gothic, Hippy and Redneck Rock Stars on my payroll before, and had an extremely large client rejoice when a freakish consultant walked in, as the legions of Dockers Wearing in-the-box drones had been of no help finding the fix to a particularly nasty bug.
Of course, savvy Fortune 500 clients do not expect much progress from the Khaki Clones, and view them as being padding on the rate charged for the real thinkers.
But I digress, and I”m really glad to see some sign of Hispanic coders arguing passionately, when I did some work in Mexico during the Boom, there wasn’t very much Hacker Culture down there (Miguel of the Gnome project aside), and a case of it in SoCal warms my heart.
The more perspectives I can get on a problem the better, as Steven DenBeste of the USS Clueless will attest.