I don't fit the stereotype and am okay with that: I wear dresses and heels instead of hoodies and sneakers, I keep a regular sleep schedule
I dont remember that being the stereotype for hackers. I would be interested to hear from other people about what they think? But to me it has been someone who is intensely interested in computers and is very good at it. What they wear (wow really shallow much) hasnt really ever factored into it.
What they wear is (and has always been) a huge part of it. Here's a bunch of comments from years ago about suits at interviews, for a specific example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639740
I think it's pretty common. As concrete sources, Eric Raymond's edition of the jargon file not only bothers to cover dress in quite some detail, but is pretty insistent what it includes as well as excludes:
Certainly for me, that entire section of his website (and also his hacker-howto.html) was something that I took seriously when I was in grade school and first learning about hacker culture. Even today I doubt there are things on the web with better claims to defining and documenting the hacker stereotype as Eric Raymond's writings.
Clothes aren't shallow, how you dress reflects how much you care about presenting yourself to the world; whether you care at all. Someone who doesn't wash or shave is the obvious example of someone who's just 'zero fucks given' in that regard, but that's an extreme. Clothing is just a more subtle form of it.
Growing up my stereotype of 'hackers' was of unfit boys with an almost monk-like isolation and dedication to their projects surrounded by fizzy drinks. ... Which, for all that I liked programming, wasn't something that made me identify with that role.
Perhaps an unfair characterisation. If you want to be among the best at anything it's going to demand a massive amount of your time, which necessarily has to be drawn from time making friends outside of that area and engaging in other more widely pro-social activities. And things always appear more extreme from the outside than they actually are. I don't know. I just know that, looking back, I can't think of anyone who identified themselves as a hacker who had any friends that any of us knew about.
I dont remember that being the stereotype for hackers. I would be interested to hear from other people about what they think? But to me it has been someone who is intensely interested in computers and is very good at it. What they wear (wow really shallow much) hasnt really ever factored into it.