Project 01 Reflection

The manifesto is essentially my exact feelings about computer science as a whole, though a little amped up for dramatic effect. It isn’t so much a war cry as it is a catharsis of pent up frustration regarding the industry and stereotypes perpetuated both about and by tech people. People either embrace and perpetuate these stereotypes or they silently reject them, keep their heads down, and keep working. I fall into the latter category and feel like someone needed to put it into words and get it out in the open so we can talk about it honestly.

I agree with some of the basic ideas in the portrait, mainly that the average Notre Dame CS student is closer to the average Notre Dame student than the average CS student. Although I do believe there is a bit of a divide between students that are really into CS and ones that enjoy it enough to make a career out of it, but have other interests as well. Between the two groups, the first probably is involved in more academic and technical extracurriculars, whereas the latter is probably more involved in athletic or purely social extracurriculars. In general, it is hard to summarize the group as a whole because there are definitely smaller subgroups you could group us into that have very different portraits.

Stereotypes heavily influence how I view the world, but mostly in how I view people who believe certain stereotypes. I hate energy drinks and I own like one hoodie, but those are part of the stereotype people try to put you into when they find out you’re a CS major. I understand the want some people have for a manifesto or portrait to help clear up certain stereotypes, but there is never going to be a manifesto or portrait that perfectly describes all of us, and any attempt to generalize us as a whole will create a new stereotype that some of us won’t fit into. We aren’t all nerds that got made fun of in high school rising to defeat our bullies when we graduate and they end up working for us, even though that is a stereotype I heard not too long ago. I don’t feel the need to be defensive about what I do or feel like I need to justify why I’m not like the stereotypes people expect from my profession. That is why I like to emphasize that developers are just workers, we aren’t some special class of workers held to different standards. We punch in and out like everyone else and get our work done. I don’t get why we are the ones with such strong stereotypes. Nobody gives you shit if you’re in marketing or operations at a big company, but whenever the developers are mentioned everyone jokes that they keep them locked in a dark room to code for days. The software world is much more diverse these days and especially when pushing for more diversity it just hurts the cause to keep perpetuating outdated stereotypes that drive people away in droves.

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