Sometimes nerds can get on your nerves.
They don't necessarily mean to, but they can have a particularly unfiltered mind that's connected to particularly unfiltered vocal cords.
Which can lead to the odd awkward moment.
Here, for example, was a conversation I blundered upon. It involved someone at Microsoft[1], someone at Starbucks[2] and someone who might want to consider his filters. (And may now have.)
Naturally, the conversation was on Twitter. I don't get to eavesdrop anywhere else these days.
Microsoft senior cloud advocate Chloe Condon saw a tweet that she wanted to applaud. It read: "We once hired a former barista in our #DevOps team. Our dept always had epic coffee."
Condon, amidst a bevy of handclapping emojis, tweeted her reaction[3]: "Hire folks with non-traditional paths to tech."
This seems like an expression of wisdom. Don't you want thinking that's not fomulaic? Don't you need an outside perspective to tell you that, just perhaps, you're not all that? Don't you want someone who doesn't think they know it all?
Oh, but Condon's sentiment found a detractor. Or, at least, a apparent sneerer.
Thomas Zeman, whose Twitter bio declared he's "scaling pods at daytime, working on a docker based raspberry pi router at nighttime," mused in reply[4]: "Depends a bit what tech you are talking about. When doing machine learning for cancer recognition on medical images I am sorry but dont believe baristas will crack it."
Ah. Oh.
Why would you dismiss someone's abilities so readily? Just to make yourself sound superior? Just to make yourself feel superior?
And this is Twitter, for goodness sake.
Oddly, Zeman's comment received what might be termed a reaction.
Randi Harper, founder of