I think TLC might have finally gone off the deep end with this one... 

So you think engineers just sit in a dark room all day, slamming down colas and coding till dawn? "Coders and Crowns" will challenge all your preconceived notions about what it takes to be a hotshot engineer in today's highly competitive world.

"Coders and Crowns" is a 15-episode unscripted drama in which 16 engineers, including everyone from Stanford PhDs to savvy tech entrepreneurs with no college education, will endure rigorous tasks each week while living together in a hip San Francisco loft apartment. 

These tasks will test both their coding abilities as well as other skills, like cooking a gourmet meal for eight (judged by famous celebrity chefs Alice Waters and Cindy Pawlcyn), learning to dance the mambo and performing it in front of a crowd of thousands at salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, and designing (and modeling) a pageant-worthy gown for the Miss USA organization. 

Each week, you, the television viewing audience, will vote off one of the engineers until only one is left standing -- the "KING (OR QUEEN) OF SILICON VALLEY", who will be granted a lifetime supply of Red Bull and $750,000 in funding from the legendary Y Combinator to get their dream company off the ground.

What do you think? Has the "celebrity programmer" craze finally gone too far?