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- Nerds and Geeks are Not the Same
- You Dont Want to Be a Nerd
- Put a Stop to Your Nerdy Behavior
- Go Ahead, Geek Out
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Put a Stop to Your Nerdy Behavior
Very few people are true nerds (i.e., exhibiting nerdy behavior in every situation we encounter). Most of us lapse into social ineptitude on occasion and walk away feeling like nerds. IT people should make every effort to identify their nerdy tendencies and limit them as much as possible. Here are some nerdy behaviors that I see frequently in IT people. All these behaviors can and should be eliminated:
- One-upmanship: Every IT shop has a one-upper, someone who always has a better story than every one else, regardless of the topic. If you wrote an application with six layers of abstraction, the one-upper wrote one with seven. This is just stupid. Don’t do it. Just keep your lid shut when this tendency arises. It only marks you as a nerd, desperate to prove your worthiness and be accepted as cool.
- Interrupting: I have sat in hour-long meetings where not a single sentence was completed before someone else barged in with their opinion, sadly destined to be incomplete as well. Interrupting, used sparingly, is a useful tool, but to be so it must be used consciously and deliberately. Otherwise, you’re just another inconsiderate nerd who can be ignored.
- Over-talking: This is the interruption gone bad. You barged in, in the middle of someone else’s thought, and they didn’t have the courtesy to stop talking. So you just keep on talking, oblivious to the fact that you’ve just reduced the meeting to a useless cacophony. If you don’t interrupt, you won’t over-talk.
Nerdy behavior limits your career growth in many ways, but most importantly it constrains your ability to network and build relationships that can turn into opportunities. Nerds spend much of their careers wondering why no one likes or admiring them, or even worse, falsely believing others do like and admire them.