Protective Social Incompetence
When you purposely take steps to make yourself look and act nerdier than you actually are to prevent having conversations with people or to prevent yourself from distraction from members of the opposite sex. This is done to deflate one's personality to the stereotype of the typical Hollywood engineer for whatever purpose they see fit.
Brian: Ever since they moved the mobile dev team in the biz dev building we've been surrounded by beautiful girls. It's so distracting. Joe: I'm going to wear oversized career fair swag and metal rimmed glasses to nerd overcompensate. That way they'll be repulsed by me. Brian: Perfect, if we nerd overcompensate and act like complete stereotypes they won't even look at us and I'll be able to focus on pushing this new log in.
GoogleEngineer over 9 years ago