10 years ago they would have been on Wall St.
This is an emotional, somewhat juvenile, not particularly logical nor progressive response, but it's part of the truth for me.
Why do you want to feel accepted? What does that even mean? Come prepared. Do what you will.
* Of course, it would be nice to be able to show up for work without being creeped on by your bosses or co-workers. Not diminishing that. I've just never understood this wanting for acceptance. Write some C++. Boom. Accepted. You are a wizard. Fuck the mundanes.
However I too am self motivated and have built a successful tech business simply because I like getting good at the things I do. I absolutely love it now but I was pretty confused in college.
Not sure if this answers any part of your question. I certainly have no problem with frat culture but I in the past I enjoyed work environments that were not too focused on any particular culture.
Having worked at companies that employ tons of recent grads, I haven't found this to be the case at all. Pretty much everyone I've worked with who has a college degree (so almost everyone) is more "brogrammer" than "hacker" and didn't write code until they went to school. Many don't know their way around a UNIX environment and have never written code outside IntelliJ on a fancy macbook. They'll tell you lisp is scary because it has too many parens, and call software "apps". They don't use or are actively hostile to Free Software and uncritically consume marketing. This is the "frat boy monoculture", I find little redeeming about it, to say nothing of the bigotry.
I find the opposite is true of the weirdos, slackers and dropouts, who taught themselves for fun and were working when their better educated but less cultured peers were in school, but that is a small cohort.
i'm pretty sure you mean Windows. Developing on Windows is mostly driven by Wizards, IDEs, and other GUIs.
That's like comparing the type of women who like sewing and knitting with sorority girls.
One of the things that scares me about all of the outreach programs, networking events, mentoring programs, etc. is that I worry it's going to bring in a lot of people into the industry who don't really enjoy programming but are in it for the prestige, money, etc. Computer programming is the only productive thing that I've ever enjoyed doing in my life. I taught myself to program as a teenager, studied CS in college and loved it, and have been working in industry ever since. I don't ever want to manage people, or meet with customers, or do anything else - I only want to write code.
Say what you will about the "frat boy monoculture" - for all of its shittiness at least it's mostly made up of people who are passionate about code, largely self-taught and self-motivated, and enjoy what they do. And almost all of the women programmers that I've worked with (and it sounds like the parent poster as well) have been the same... maybe even more so since they have had to deal with so much more shit along the way and are still here. And I don't want that to change (the part about working with passionate, fun people.. The discrimination and bias part needs to stop).