If you’ve dated a software geek or just rifled through said geek’s clothing, you’ll invariably run into a stash of corporate wear. These are the t-shirts, hats, polo shirts, fleeces and various other crap adorned with company/product logos and tag lines.

Every geek has a stash. It doesn’t matter if they’ve worked in the industry for two days or twenty years. There’s a pile of corporate wear sitting somewhere gathering dust.

In general, corporate wear is just plain embarrassing. Whether it’s corporate logos a’blazin’ or obscure product code names, this apparel should not be worn outside of the mother ship. It was intended for one of two things: free advertising or as a token team building trinket. It was not intended for public usage and when it is worn, it only further the geek stereotype that we’re a bunch of boobs who don’t know how to dress ourselves. Still, we wear it. We keep it. We keep it longer than we should and they is a very good reason.

We keep it because it’s the only thing they actually build.

Software geeks are bit pushers. Their job is to constantly rearrange ones and zeros into interesting and profitable configurations. They have the added joy of having to do this under managers and architects who are constantly pushing them for bigger, better, and faster. Yes, they get lots of sexy hardware to do this bit pushing, but, at the end of the day, all that pushing bits around results in, well, bits.

Yes, there is often a useful product generated by all this bit pushing. Sometimes it’s a great product. Sometimes it’s generates lots of money and results in big gains in stock price. People get rich. People buy more stuff. The geek that started this whole thing might be lucky enough to get rich, as well, but what are they getting rich on? Bits. Ones, zeros, that’s it. This brings us back to the t-shirts.

For many geeks, corporate wear is the only actual proof that they did anything with their lives. Yes, they can drag their friends to Fry’s and point at boxes of their software to give they actually built something in the physical world, but the boxes aren’t what they built. They merely contain the media which contains the alleged product.

We’re not losing sleep over this. Living in a digital world means you taking the existence for most things granted (“I trust the person on the other side of iChat is who thy say they are” or “With this smiley, I am sure that every understands that I am being sarcastic”). Software geeks, of all people, are intimately familiar with this. They are also engineers, people who apply scientific and mathetical principles to practical ends. Translation: they like to build shit. Anyone who every touched a tinker toy knows that being able to touch what you create is where the gratification lies.