[wei yau]

At my job, being a geek is actually an important factor. We're an online retailer catering to the geek market (and we do it quite well). However, we also have a corporate half of our parent company and this situation often creates friction between what is a geek and what isn't.

There's a lot of elitism and smugness amongst some of the geeks here. And while it's certainly not gender-specific, it shares some of the same tones mentioned in the articles linked in the OP.

I can see where it comes from, though. There's such a fear here that our geek culture will be lost or corrupted by business needs, that there's a backlash. We stress our geek creds so much that it ends up making non-geek people feel like that they have to put up their own, which of course they can't. So, they end up looking like poseurs or horribly out of touch with us.

The thing is, we should never have pressured them to do that. So what if they're not geeks? Are they good at their jobs? That's all that I care about with my co-workers. I don't care if they read Game of Thrones or Twilight, I don't care if they know Kirk from Picard.

Yes, those things are important for some of the jobs here, but largely not for the corporate side of things.

It's just ugly to see a bunch of geeks look down their noses and sneer at non-geeks. As if we're now the "popular kids" and are going to treat everyone else like they treated us.