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3 Nerds from the Baixada and Other Places “Since I was quite a nerd, I spent most of my time in the computer lab,” said Mauricio, talking about his high school years while answering my question about how he became a programmer. The word that Mauricio used to describe himself was a borrowing from English, just like many of the other Portuguese words related to software. When written, this word is spelled in Portuguese just like in English: “n-e-r-d.” When used in speech in Rio, however, its pronunciation is normally adapted to the phonetics of Carioca Portuguese, resulting in a sequence of sounds that would likely be unrecognizable to most English speakers: “NEH-jee,” with a somewhat harder “H” than in English. It has roughly the same meaning as its English cognate, though with a heavier connotation of computer use and often a more derogatory feel. When I asked Mauricio to explain what he meant by “being a nerd,” he seemed puzzled by my question and replied with another English word: “geek,” this time pronouncing it just as in English. He liked computers a lot, he explained. He then added: “I wasn’t a very social person. I spent more time installing programs than doing other things.” For Mauricio and for many of my interviewees, “nerd” is a basic concept and my questions about its meaning were quite often met with a degree of disbelief. They must have been particularly puzzling coming from an interviewer who knew how to program and gave many signs of being a nerd himself. Surely I would know that nerds are people who are not very social and spend a lot of time with computers. As suggested by Mauricio’s example, this simple term often appeared to carry in it a seemingly simple answer to the question of how one becomes a software developer. For many of my interviewees, software work is simply a natural career choice for a nerd. But how does one become a nerd then? For many developers, this seemed to be silly question too. One does not become a nerd. It is just something you are, something you discover about yourself 72 Chapter 3 in childhood. Some developers argued that nerds are actually born with different brains, perhaps with a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome. Looking at developers’ stories more closely, however, reveals that becoming a nerd is best understood as a process of a gradually deepening engagement with a world of practice. I explore this process and the eventual transition from being a childhood nerd to a software professional in this chapter. Even though being “not very social” is a key part of many developers’ definitions of being a nerd, the process of becoming a nerd (and later a developer) cannot be understood without considering the individual’s engagement with other people. Talking about his nerdy high school years, Mauricio told me the following story: Mauricio: He [the teacher] would come, give a class, and let people go and the class would go to play soccer. The whole class would leave and we would stay there in the lab. The thing is that Doom came out, so . . . The big thing to do was to get a mouse and break it to make a modem cable. To play Doom against . . . [each other]. [. . .] The mouse had the right connector— serial. [. . .] It was cheaper to get a mouse, break it and make a cable. It got to a point that we had so much practice with this . . . We would pull it out of the mouse [picks up an imaginary mouse, rips off its cord and removes the imaginary insulation with his teeth], connect the wires, attach . . . It took less than five minutes to make a cable. Mauricio presented the story as an illustration of the idea of not being “social.” (He later explicitly contrasted this to the “social” pastimes of his peers: “playing football, going to the beach, dating.”) Yet, he repeatedly talked of “we.” Mauricio’s learning how to convert a computer mouse into a do-it-yourself serial cable may seem like an example of “not being social” only if we ignore the fact that he and his friends practiced this skill in order to connect their computers and play together rather than individually. Growing up as a nerd is not the only way to become a software developer and I explore some alternative pathways at the end of the chapter. This particular path, however, is not...

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