Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

This largely reportorial volume covers many aspects of today's computer-programming trade. (Or profession? As far as I recall, Thompson never mentions the terms systems analysis or software engineering.) Different readers will probably be most interested in different aspects, such as "blue-collar coding" or how open (or closed) the trade is to women. I myself most liked the parts about pro-privacy white-hat hackers (aka cypherpunks) and the idea that the hugely abusive practices of today's Big Tech companies could possibly be stopped by the activism of their own coders. If just one paragraph from the book is all you have time to read, make it the last paragraph on p 257.

As a sometime coder, I wanted to know about my tribe. Did I have one? Also, I sort of knew the author online (and his wife) though I don't think we'd ever had a direct conversation. Online life is like that. I was also surprised to find many other people I "knew" in the book. People like Mark Abene, Max Whitney, and most surprisingly Fran Allen who is the ex-wife of my NYU thesis advisor.

And yet I often felt alienated reading it. I almost abandoned it at times and here I am giving it 4 stars. Were I a logical person, as a coder should be, I'd find that discrepancy disturbing. I came the closest to giving up reading about an introvert pitching business ideas to Peter Thiel. What kind of introvert does that? I screamed (in my head). Do we show more use the word "introvert" differently? Also, I didn't want to read about Peter Thiel or people like him. I certainly didn't want to be in the same tribe.

Still, I'm glad I stuck it out. Despite cliches about coder culture no deeper than an episode of the TV show Silicon Valley, there were also surprising tribal traits I'd never thought much about before such as compulsive optimization. I'm (sometimes) a compulsive optimizer. That plus discussions of coal miner coders, the origins of AI paranoia, racist and sexist algorithms, Twitter's and Facebook's attempts to combat the misuses of their platforms.

Oh--one more thing. Clive declares there's no analogy of writer's block for coders. That's not true--I have experienced it (as well as writer's block.) I think coders just don't talk about it while writers like to talk about everything. show less

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 show more more, but I stopped reading when it became clear that Thompson's dearth of clue is bottomless, before I got 100 pages in. show less

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.

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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 show more 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. show less

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

How low has journalism fallen. Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine it is not. The author is uninformed on the subject matter itself and uncritically regurgitates interviews, news articles and other people's opinions with zero insight. Most of the book has nothing to do with software engineers and is a cacophony of random complaints against social media, personal political views and tiresome anecdotes from people he knows.