I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company… - Ellen Ullman

Then, just when it seemed that only the barest of bugs survived, there would be a new version of the software. And with that, a fresh opportunity for introducing bugs.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

There, in that presumed paradise, the engineers were stranded in the company of an infantile mentality. They created artificial smartness, made a simulacrum of intelligence. But what they talked to all day was little more than a mechanism that read bits off a disk drive. If a comma in the code was out of place, it complained like a kid who won’t tolerate a pea touching the mashed potatoes. And, exhausted though the programmer may be, the machine was like an uncanny child that never got tired. There was Karl and the rest of the team, fitting the general definition of the modern software engineer: a man left alone all day with a cranky, illiterate thing, which he must somehow make grow up. It was an odd and satisfying gender revenge.

Is it any surprise that these isolated men need relief, seek company, hook up

This is not to say that women are not capable of engineering’s male-like isolation. Until I became a programmer, I didn’t thoroughly understand the usefulness of such isolation: the silence, the reduction of life to thought and form; for example, going off to a dark room to work on a program when relations with people get difficult. I’m perfectly capable of this isolation. I first noticed it during the visit of a particularly tiresome guest. All I could think was: There’s that bug waiting for me, I really should go find that bug.