I just read an essay, Why I Cannot be Technical, by Dr. Cat Hicks. It’s a long read and it offers a personal view into her thinking, her work, and what it is to be Technical (and although she doesn’t use the phrase, I read one part of what she’s calling Technical as what I’d call “Bro Culture in Tech”, more specifically in software development).
There’s a lot packed into that essay and for anyone working in software, or working for a company that is focused around software, I’d recommend first a careful read with a view to deconstructing many of the overlapping topics there, then following those to her work on software developers and technical teams.
I’m not really sure how this post is going to go, but I expect it to have a similar number of overlapping topics. My apologies in advance if this also requires some diligent reconstruction.
I’m an outlier. I think a lot of people in software development have characteristics that a diagnostician would associate with autism, and I’m certainly one of those people. This has been the basis of much of my success. In particular, it’s allowed me to seek and thrive on the most inhuman of projects, the high-pressure tight-deadline, hero-or-zero projects that I’ve always enjoyed and delivered on. It’s also been the basis of my under-performance, my inability to integrate into a team well, my proclivity to speak the truth, to say “hey what about that elephant?” in meetings, the times when I state something I think should be self-evident, only to be met with a few seconds of silence and then “well Alan, why don’t you tell us what you really think?”, and my below-par performance when the building is not actually on fire.
For this reason, aside from a few brief periods where I was an actual employee, and until I got utterly derailed in my mid 40’s (more on that later), I’ve been a contract developer, or in modern parlance, “gig worker” for most of my career. I set up my first home office in 1981, when it was such a radical idea that many people couldn’t get past the cognitive disconnect the phrase inspired. Many of my peers (or more specifically my male peers) wound up moving to the US, to Silicon Valley, Redmond, or the Tech Triangle in NC. They set down roots, earned salaries that I couldn’t dream of, put their names on patents, and rose through the ranks. Mainly retired now, they travel the world, visit grandchildren, and so on while I still work to give my life any meaning that endures beyond the people who will remember me when I’m gone.
Even when I found long term contracts where I could be successful, my tenure was limited. I will digress into an example where shortly before I arrived a woman was parachuted in as Director of IT and proceeded to engineer the bro middle managers out. This company had a department of maybe 15 staff, and three, count ’em three middle managers. For context, we’re talking the mid-90’s here, well after most companies had thinned their middle management ranks to the bone, so this was borderline archaic. The manager I reported to had this incredibly complex system of spreadsheets that he used to explain why a ten minute change to a system would take three months to deliver. He was the first to go. Terminated shortly after the new director correctly determined that 85 days of that three months would be consumed by staff filling in forms and his tweaking those dreaded spreadsheets. He did not go softly, at the party thrown for his departure at a local strip club, a long-standing departmental tradition, he ranted about how incompetent she was, how the entire department was going to hell. Many male staffers in attendance agreed vigorously, causing the exposed breasts of the women sitting on their laps to jiggle. I may be a heterosexual male who is also fond of boobs, but I still can’t find words to capture my revulsion, my disgust at this display. The other managers and a bro staffer all took this to heart, found other jobs and resigned in short order. It was only after the third departure that one of the women in our department (our female ranks had doubled to two, thanks to new hires) suggested that maybe, just maybe we could have have her manager’s departure party at a place where she too could feel comfortable. What a radical idea!
I spent the better part of two years at that job, and wrapped up a major project. In the absence of middle managers, I reported to the director, like everyone else. When offered a contract extension, there wasn’t a critical project coming up, and I sensed I would get bored, under-perform, and eventually not be offered another extension. Cycling back to what Dr. Hicks references in her post, she built a much more human IT department during her tenure. The mood and morale of that group was far higher when I left than when I arrived. I laughed a bit after writing that, because in part that humanity also made it a place where I was less likely to excel.
A few years earlier I got called in to save a project that was unsalvagable. I can work the occasional miracle, but not after the customer has sent a letter that amounts to “stop all work and get your stuff out or it’s going into a dumpster, any responses should go to our lawyer”. But that particular disaster was a symptom of some much deeper issues, and in short order I found myself responsible for all of engineering, in charge of a department of some 15 software developers and engineers. Just one of those was female and on the customer engineering side of the shop. During my introductory meetings with my new team, she’d identified a stability issue in our product but said nobody would listen to her (anyone surprised?) I took the issue up with our lead developer who dismissively asserted that the product was perfect, and that it was an application issue. So I bought a diagnostic tool that simplified the identification of software flaws, gave it to her, and let her run with it. A day later, she’d identified the null pointer dereference that was crashing the system (and a handful of other customer installations). We presented this hard evidence to the lead developer (together, because I expected if she gave it to him alone, it would be dismissed yet again), got the problem fixed and in the process finally got a system in production sufficiently stable that the customer released a rather substantial final payment. I also put a lot of effort into a “check your ego at the door” culture. We had some very talented developers and we had some average developers, but my experience is that everyone has strengths and most of the time you can find a place to let them thrive. One wasn’t the best at writing new code, but was an absolutely meticulous tester. Another was extraordinary when communicating with customers. I tried to fit them into places where they could use their strengths. One day just before a long weekend, I had a screaming match with our CEO, who attempted to manufacture a crisis that would have kept our team working through the weekend. Personally, I’ve never been much into this work-life balance thing, but the people who reported to me were largely neuro-typical, and I felt I had a responsibility to give them what balance I could. False crisis averted, they got a much deserved weekend and the knowledge that I’d risk everything to defend them. After a year, the problems I could fix had been fixed and I moved on. I hope that I left a more human friendly place in my wake.
All that is a prefix to the career path of the woman in this story. Some time after I left, she moved to another company to run a team of her own. This felt like an achievement. Someone I’d mentored went on to a leadership role in tech! But then not too long after that she switched to a sales role. My guess is sales offered more money, more humanity, less sexism, and more people who would actually listen to her. A few years later I worked with a founder of the company she went to on another project and if anything this reinforced my guess.
In my experience, software development is a career that does an excellent job of chewing people up and spitting them out. Most of the men I know in my cohort got out of coding early by their 30’s, the women years earlier than that. Some moved to management, some to things like technical sales support, but the vast majority into something distant from writing code (for example, farming). I can think of just one woman who stuck with it through to retirement. I think the industry favours young developers straight out of school not only because they are quick to learn and become productive, but also because they’re easier to exploit. It’s harder to put in twelve hour days when you have to go pick your kid up from daycare because your wife left you for working twelve hour days all the time.
I spent much of my career working for small businesses and startups, many of which were working on ideas that could have become billion-dollar businesses, putting in the stupid hours, all in hopes of one day coming out with a massive payout that I could subsequently use to build rocket to Mars and the like (yep, I thought much like “that guy” as much as it pains me to say that now). I think this is still the underlying driver that lets the software industry abuse its practitioners: the “hey if this works, the options will pay out in the millions and it will all be worth it” myth. Legends of early Microsoft employees cashing out in the millions looms large in tech culture to this day. All this despite the fact that large investors have come up with elaborate ways to screw employees out of any real wealth, with pre-IPO dilutions, layoffs just before options trigger and other manoeuvres from the Capitalist Asshole Playbook.
During the dot com boom, two friends of mine got involved in a startup that scored, big. They both came out wealthy enough to never need to work again, but not wealthy enough to throw them into the ranks of the uber-rich. One of them was more than a friend. We were close enough to be brothers. Instead of all that money becoming a platform to do more, to do better, it triggered a series of events that caused him to lose his way and within a few years he was gone. Gone in his early 40’s, with so much more left to do.
It took some time for this loss to take it’s full toll on me. Subconsciously, the entire point of becoming rich enough to do “great things” was eradicated, replaced with become rich and spend the rest of your life shepherding your assets as investments or do something dumb that ends your life. A main pillar of how I framed my existence had been destroyed. After he died, I did a couple more “impossibility remediation” projects and then slipped into a fifteen year-long set of cycles through mild to moderate depression alternating with thinking I’d pulled out of it. The years that should have been my most productive were so attenuated that they were essentially lost. I kept coding though, offering up some products that were minimally successful in their niche markets (successful in that they at least paid back more in revenue than the hours I put into them). I wrote some reasonably cool open source stuff and made several attempts at bringing new ideas to a minimal viable product stage, without success. Even in less severe cases like mine, depression is a bitch. There’s no real way to communicate that unless you’ve been there, but what I can say is that I remain exuberant at having gotten past it, am as confident as possible that it’s not coming back, yet vigilant for some other thing that could trigger a brand new wave.
As I write this, I wonder (as you probably do, having gotten this far) what my point is, and how it relates to Dr. Hicks’ essay.
In part I think I’m trying to illustrate by example a point that Hicks makes.That even when one is Technical (in the specific way that she uses the term), it is not possible to be Technical. Technical is a construct we willingly create for ourselves and subscribe to provide meaning to our work, our lives. It isn’t real, and like any construct it makes those who believe it subject to manipulation by others. Capitalism is more than happy to perform that manipulation to it’s advantage and to the detriment of people, of humanity.
My other point is that Technical, as currently practised, is intrinsically elitist, sexist, ableist (possibly unless you’re a functional autistic), and a whole mess of other negative -ists. I think anyone in the field, even the boy genius super-programmers, will benefit greatly by developing an understanding of Hicks’ work. I mean, even if your own personal development powers are god-like, understanding what she’s learned will benefit the semi-useless plebes on your team and help them get out of the way, so it’s like totally worth it. Yes, you may read that last sentence fragment in Valspeak.
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