Tech’s Damaging Myth of the Loner Genius Nerd | Hacker News Reader

Tech’s Damaging Myth of the Loner Genius Nerd

nytimes.com

I really agree that social skills are the biggest missing component in effective engineering collaboration (because there are so many Loner Genius Nerds who refuse to use each others software but would rather rebuild a monument to themselves).

But I wish they wouldn't conflate this with the google memo though. That topic is already too muddled.

The three entirely distinct questions are:

1. Is lack of interest on average (due to genetics) a potential contributing factor to the male/female ratio in engineering?

2. Is asking that question (or expressing an opinion on it) a punishable offense? If so, when and why, and are both sides equally punishable, or only the conservative side?

3. Are social skills an undervalued in technology?

The reason the google memo instigated such a shitstorm is that it (and the ensuing debate) conflated questions 1 and 2.

One side was largely arguing that presenting gender-based-patterns in a scientific light (true or not) has negative psychological effects.

The other side was railing against the fact that a debate couldn't even happen because one side was being socially punished for even bringing up the question.

> Silicon Valley culture encourages it. Google calls engineers who aren’t managers “individual contributors.” Technical skills are valued above soft skills or business skills. “Anyone who deals with a human being is considered less intelligent,” said Ellen Ullman, a software programmer and author of a new book, “Life in Code.” “You would think it would be the other way around, but the more your work is just talking to the machine, the more valuable it is.”

While I clearly don't think one should go to the extreme of undervaluing soft skills, can we at least keep one industry that primarily values technical competence? There is absolutely no shortage of other fields (most of them) where the main/only way to advance is through management, and I don't think this has to be treated as a flaw that needs to be fixed.

The essence of the problem is this: 'tech' is now simply too big and too important to our culture and society to be only about the technology.

Now, decisions made at Google don't just change how we search the internet.

Now, decisions made at Uber don't just change car hire.

Now, decisions made at Amazon don't just change online book selling.

Technical competence is essential for competition and innovation, but social competence (and conscience) are essential to growth and longevity.

I feel the writer is either being disingenuous or isn't a professional in the field.

As a software engineer myself I do agree that collaboration is essential for the product development cycle, specifically it's important for training hires and for project planning, including breaking down features into tasks. That said, once we make it into the task level, where coding gets done, the job is absolutely a solo task. That's what the whole process is designed to do; to break down any requirements into tasks that can be worked on solo by one team member, at that level collaboration or anything other than technical skills don't offer much.

It varies from day to day and person to person, but "the task level, where coding gets done" is not really where I spend much of my working time. Much more of my time is figuring out how things work and then getting agreement on changes.

So that consideration elevates the value of social skills, but it's not obvious what that means in practice. Nerds with poor social skills can fail for all the usual reasons, #1 being big ego. But if we respect our colleagues' intelligence, then it can be helpful when we nerds are socially "naive" enough to take comments at face value without the usual human instinct of treating them as moves in a complex game.

Another social skill is clear communication, and that is rare. But I've found it uncorrelated with nerdiness -- maths and engineering types are occasionally good at it, because they are good at pinning down concepts. But artsy types can also be good at it. I'd say lawyers are the best overall.

Well, except for pair programming, which is controversial can be a very good way to bring new team members up to speed. That's obviously social (a teaching task).

Maybe there's no direct causal link between "Loner Genius Nerd's" and "being a great developer" but I think there's an indirect correlation.

"Loner's" have lots of alone time. One way to use alone time is to use and learn technology.

Technology is a new, complex and fast-changing field. There were always professional benefits to having thousands of hours invested in it.

There is a correlation between "loner nerds" and "good developers" in the same way that there is a correlation between "drinking orange juice" and "testing well on the SAT." One doesn't cause the other, there's a underlying thing that causes both.

Nowadays, technology is so broad and pervasive that there are also ways to channel thousands of hours invested in socializing, understanding people, drawing, writing letters, farming, helping old people into being a good developer.

Yes and no. It's true that collaboration is important when working on a team, and that social skills are underrated in engineering. On the other hand, the job is fundamentally not very social. Collaboration in engineering means breaking a large problem down into smaller pieces, and assigning those pieces to individual engineers to work on by themselves for hours or days at a time.

>Empathy also affects which products are built in the first place — why, for example, Silicon Valley has spent more time building apps for expensive food delivery than for decreasing hunger.

>“There’s no cool technology toy that teaches that there are different religions around the world and it’s O.K. to be tolerant.”

I think the author is confusing "problems that exist" with "markets that exist", since both of those are more philanthropic endeavors than they are profitable businesses.

How about let's get rid of the idea of prescribing how people should program. Different situations call for different approaches.

> Some people in the industry say computer science students would benefit from more liberal arts courses.

The sentiment is nice but I can't see this having an actual impact. How does taking interpretative dance help me with anything?

> Different situations call for different approaches.

This leads to a situation of growing chaos where not everybody can understand what everybody else does. Your engineers are no longer easily replaceable and creating interacting systems gets growingly complicated.

Mix this in with limited time and resources of management, it's easier to give out guidelines than to deal with the mess that'll be created when loosening the leashes.

(It all totally depends on the situation, though.)

The alternative is a situation where you have many meetings for every decision and nothing gets done due to analysis paralysis.

In Finland, there's a concept of management by perkele which I like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N2S_Gm78SLs

Analysis paralysis goes well with bikeshedding when people who are not into the technical details are involved in the decision making process and start arguing about not-so-relevant details.

I'd like a situation where the affected people give input and management decides who shall be involved in the decision making and delegates the decision and parts of the execution to those people.

One example right off the top of my head: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-jobs-death-apple...

You'll find dozens, hundreds, or thousands more if you choose to look for them.

Pre-internet examples are less than relevant.

Needs citation.

Lol what a terrible response.

You can think it terrible if you'd like. Ultimately, it doesn't make a difference to me one way or another, as I was hoping to expose you to a different perspective that doesn't cut you off from thousands of years of shared cultural experiences, not win internet points. But, whatever, you do you.

Wtf are you on about.

> The Google engineer who was fired last week over his memo wrote that most women were biologically unsuited to working in tech because they were more focused on “feelings and aesthetics than ideas” and had “a stronger interest in people rather than things.” Many scientists have said he got the biology wrong. But the job requirements of today’s programmers show he was also wrong about working in tech.

But... he didn't get it wrong. Collaboration and social skills are extremely valuable in tech, sure. But they aren't the primary focus of the job. If I were someone more interested in people than things (not saying that women are), I wouldn't want to work in an industry where the primary objective is to make a thing, regardless of how cooperatively the thing was made.

Good engineers solve problems well.

Excellent engineers solve better problems.

Usually it's a long path from something a customer wants (or actually needs) to finding an appropriate implementation (if there even exists one). Many things can go wrong along the way and miscommunication happens in both directions.

As a successful 'loner genius', I am a little bit conflicted about being in the same category as an unicorn.

The first sentence already states, that fired guy said women "unfit". Stopped reading right there.

While this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15004138 gets flagged instantly, that rises to the top? Google, HN, New York Times, Gizmodo -- who else? Stand up and be counted.

This is off-topic but I figured I'd let you know: I flagged the post you linked, without coordination from others, for being derivative and lacking in any new content, perspectives or even a novel presentation.

I am sure that other people flagged it too.

I am not a big fan of this piece for its inaccuracy, but at least it brings some new subjects and perspectives so I can't find a reason to flag it other than my exhaustion with the subject (which is, of course, insufficient).

Why would you blame HN here? The post had 8 points on a midday Sunday.

Because that's the pattern I noticed in the last few days (or maybe I missed the good discussions that were had previously of which this is a repeat?). For example, as I pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14997068

> Yesterday, this had 156 and 101 comments points after 4 hours, and had been sunk like a brick to place 46 on page two

(which I now realize should have read "156 points and 101 comments")

How about flagging things that absolutely don't belong on the site, and simply not upvoting things you don't find very good?

edit: I mean, especially in the context of a guy writing a memo the "larger point" of which is to not silence people who aren't ultra-aligned, to have free discourse about ideas and how to make Google and the situation for women at Google better, getting fired for that and then HN being filled with people distorting what he wrote, while "journalists" do the same. And yes, it's getting upvotes, too, people do want to discuss it, it's just that others don't want to let them.

This is an outright attack. This is another move of sociopath social engineers testing the limits of what they can get away with, and just like with Appelbaum, HN fucking FAILS. It's not about "content", at most about the content of the personalities of the people involved.

For comment points dropping and rising, I am not positive on this but what I've heard is that we're sometimes witnessing fake accounts get banned off the site and their votes being retracted.

I've had bug negative votes on posts suddenly pop back up almost instantly. In threads on this subject, it happens an awful lot. I suspect people are availing themselves of various vote purchasing schemes to amplify their points.

That wasn't about points dropping and rising, it was about a story that would without flags be square on page one clearly being sunk with flags. It was in neighbourhood of stories with either much less points, or that were lots older. Once a month I think of making a scaper just to detect this, to filter out the interesting stories automatically, if you will. The ones that are clearly not spam or such, but still get dropped like a hot potato.

Well I can't speak to other people's actions, only mine. When a story is small and it's submitter is of medium karma it doesn't take many flags.

I have had many arguments with the mods over my years here and we still have our disagreements, but I don't see them nuke things often.

I see vote and flag manipulations a lot.

Oh, I absolutely didn't mean to imply that HN mods intervened manually. They're just not intervening to keep people from keeping others from having a discussion, either.

If you put the word "unfit" in quotes then you are quoting the article. The first paragraph of the article says:

The article does not use the word unfit in the first or in any of the remaining paragraphs. Since you got that simple fact wrong I stopped reading your in-depth analysis right there.

I vouched for the story (which I didn't flag) just so I could reply: "unfit" and "unsuited" mean exactly the same thing. Are you being this intellectually dishonest on purpose?

> Since you got that wrong I stopped reading your analysis right there.

That's great, because the analysis is concluded: hack fraud journalism. Next.

Unfit and unsuited do not mean exactly the same thing. In particular, I can't say that the manifesto said that women are unfit to work in tech. Damore didn't say and he didn't mean that. I can and will say that the manifesto said (not quoting here) that women are unsuited for tech. There's sufficient difference between the two words to drive that truck between them.

  Unfit: not of the necessary quality or standard to meet a particular purpose
  Unsuited: not right or appropriate.

When you quote, quote accurately, especially if you put your quotes in quotation marks.

> In particular, I can't say that the manifesto said that women are unfit to work in tech.

You can't say it said they're unsuitable to work in tech either.

> I can and will say that the manifesto said (not quoting here)

You can't make this shit up.. well, as long as you're not quoting I don't care so much what you "can and will say". It's just hot air and saying nothing. But with the way I hobble around in the uncanny valley of the English language, I'm always happy to teach bits of it to a native speaker: http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/unfit

unsuited is one of the synonyms. Though not vice versa, but then again, that's just some random site: http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/unsuited

Here's another random site: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unfit

    a :  not adapted to a purpose :  unsuitable

But what really gets me that rather than correcting that, you just add something even more silly:

  Unfit: not of the necessary quality or standard to meet a particular purpose
  Unsuited: not right or appropriate.

Do you notice something? "Unsuited" without a qualifier such as "to meet a particular purpose" makes no sense, and cannot be used that way. If anything, unfit can be used that way, though the purpose (being a mother, or standing up without wheezing) is usually implied. You might as well spell the definition of one word with capital letters and the other with lower ones and say "that's not exactly the same".

I agree that unfit can be used to mean a value statement, a "not good enough", where unsuitable is more neutral. But even the Oxford Dictionary which defines the individual words in such a way then has this:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/unfit

Drive a truck between them? Heh.

Language is too nice an invention to play games with it like this.

> When you quote, quote accurately, especially if you put your quotes in quotation marks.

If you get hung up on this, and actually defend it, you would otherwise have ignored it or found something else. I'll just claim that -- I can, and I will! -- to save us both time.

When you quote, quote accurately, especially if you put your quotes in quotation marks. Full stop.

Do you mistake yourself for someone who can give me orders? "Full stop" is code for you not having the honesty nor courtesy to just say "thanks for the correction". Your comment stands corrected, you're welcome.

Sorry for the confusion, I used quotation here in sense 6 from http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Quotation-Marks In my opinion in this context "unfit" and "unsuited" are synonyms.

What do you think the motivation for the Google memo was, exactly?

I think the proper response to the Google manifesto is to say that women don't always choose to become programmers, but when they do, they're pretty good at it.

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