Why are so many techs liberal?

Here | Now | Me

[Still Thinking]

I'm reading (for the second time) Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code, the saga of part of the development of Chandler, an open source cross platform PIM. In it, he refers several times to the general liberal orientation of the programmers there (Al Gore even puts in an appearance), and I've noticed this in other software teams and in other types of engineering as well. It's not monolithic, there are certainly numerous conservatives, but it's always been somewhat of a paradox to me. I always felt that you had to be fairly intelligent to be a good tech, because technical issues are what they are and respond only to fact based approaches, and that you pretty much had to have a room temp IQ or less to be a liberal, so I would have expected those professions to be almost exclusively dominated by conservatives. So what gives? Anyone thought about this before?

[mlocher]

I have not noticed what you have noticed, and I have worked in the telecom industry and the IT/Insurance industry. Taking your premise, however, I will offer an uneducated guess. Large SW project require a huge amount of teamwork, and often times decisions are made in committees and groups. Perhaps SW folks get a little bit desensitized to the importance of individualism. Perhaps as a result, they unconsciously buy into Hillary’s, “It takes a village to raise a child.”

[new cruelty]

Many of us have no use for the Sarah Palin wing of conservatism.

Your virtual girlfriend made you say that.

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

Anecdotal.

Presumes as fact that which is not in evidence.

[dayglored]

> because they are by in large social deviants that ar fat, sweaty and stinky.

You're making a false (and grossly unfair) generalization from the character of network programmer Dennis Nedry in "Jurassic Park".

The folks I work with in SystemAdmin/IT represent a range of personalities, body types, etc. but none who match that characterization.

I'm sure there are some somewhere that do, but your comment is nothing more than gratuitous slander. Stow it, please; crap comments like that demean this forum.

[Porterville]

Get over yourself. What is that smell?

[amchugh]

Programmer's may be liberal, but most of the IT guys I've worked with have been libertarian. However, they often feel that the Republican party is as great or greater a threat to libertarianism as the Democrats.

[uglybiker]

Why are so many techs liberal?

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