It's amazing how a person's perception of others is reflected in their idealized selfs.
We know who Brianna Wu really is, and the comedy comes from seeing her build a shallow identity around herself and going into a narcissistic rage when other people see through it. She can't even listen to advice on dog-raising without getting peeved, because what kind of simpleton needs to be told how to walk a dog? Other people need that kind of help, not the great Brianna Wu
We know what kind of fictional person she wants to be. But she keeps failing. Because to Brianna Wu, what a person does with their time is not as important as what they signal to others. She's trying to be the type of woman that she idealized going back to John Flynt's comic days. Bold, independent, self-sufficient and a genius. But those women were cartoons, they didn't have lives beyond some shallow character traits and passing mentions of hobbies within a few panels. They didn't have struggles, encounter real problems, grow as people, or face their own shortcomings like adults.
Which sort of reflected how he saw women and people in general. Not as people, but as parts of people. They have hair, clothes, sassy one-liners and obscure references to nerd topics. They don't do work, but have occupations, they don't have accomplishments, just titles.
Brianna assumes that being a software developer is about having a title and tweeting about nerd subjects all day, because her idea of a developer doesn't go beyond what she saw in the media. Time magazine interviews with Silicon valley titans aren't technical and don't go much beyond listing accomplishments and dropping some altruistic-sounding quotes. That's all it takes, right? It sure as heck doesn't involve watching mind-numbing 3-hour tutorial videos about obscure APIs. It doesn't involve realizing you wasted an entire afternoon debugging because you spelt a word wrong. It doesn't involve having to rely on a heavily-accented gross indian guy for help all the time. It doesn't involve having coworkers and students younger than you explain to you why your code is bad, even though you have a degree and they don't.
Nope, computer programming is all glamour and accolades.
