Let's End Programmer Bigotry
infovegan.com
infovegan.com
He goes on to say, "Every developer I’ve ever worked with, for instance, is probably more qualified to be a member of Congress than most of the members of Congress we have now." I could say the same about almost everyone I've ever known. The problem is that politics isn't appealing to the type of individuals we consider exemplary, regardless of background. Just look at local politics, where you'll often find aimless drifters or self-serving candidates on the ballot among others who understand that government is complicated machine that needs to be run competently for everyone's benefit. But back on topic, how many of your school board or city council members are also software developers? My guess is few or none, because they just aren't interested or feel that it's too challenging to promote logical solutions in an environment of irrational rivalry.
Politics is a field that is underpaid and consists of mainly putting out fires, being beat on the head by numerous (often very slimy) special interests, trying to convince fickle people to vote for you, and being blamed for everything that's wrong and ignored when things go right.
Count me in!
Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous. No wonder we have so many people in government from wealthy families.
I don't remember quite where it was but I read that somewhere in Asia the government/MPs get paid a million or so, which results in better people, and obviously less corruption/fiddling accounts etc.
I've often wondered if part of the problem with mismanagement and corruption in government is that politicians are actually underpaid. Anyone really good wants to go into business or marketing, fields that demand similar skills but that pay way better. Corruption becomes a problem because it's the only way to get a raise...
Because of that, I think you see a lot of corruption, indifference, or laziness due to workers "compensating" for the pay differences. It certainly doesn't help morale.
The prime minister gets to live in 10 Downing Street, and can look forward to lucrative book deals, after dinner speeches and consulting gigs (Blair was getting £500k to advise JP Morgan). This isn't true for most jobs. It's not such a bad deal, but obviously most people don't get that far.
Yes, but until recently their salaries were being supplemented by very generous expenses. They were also allowed to take on other work, subject to certain rules.
> Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous.
Former prime ministers can earn a fortune, however, just look at Tony Blair. Retired MPs can also cash in, to a lesser extent, on their time in office.
Right. Which IMHO is a bad idea. PM's are paid a bad salary, but know that they can go work for big.co after they're done being PM. That leaves them wide open to corruption.
So there is a massive disconnect between what members of parliament get paid, and what they would get if they moved into the private sector business world. The issue is that voters as you say, are on average paid a lot less, so they don't understand this point.
Personally, I'd like to see the PM paid £1m or so. MPs maybe £250k. I would expect them to be less corruptable and more focussed.
I don't agree that paying MPs more would create an environment for less corruption, I have so far seen little restraint in human greed, and even those at the very top of the pay scale are not above eking more out of the system.
What would help with corruption, would be a more open lobbying system, restrictions on the jobs MPs can take after leaving parliament and ensuring members of the cabinet cannot be employed when they have obvious biases, a former oil company head being minister for energy for example.
Also as is obviously the case in many industries, Health and Social Care being one, the private sector model does not always make sense.
I'm in no way saying the private model always makes sense. What I'm saying is that the reason we perhaps have poor choice of MPs, is because all the people who would make great MPs are earning a decent wage in the private business world.
I'd argue that the IQ distribution amongst programmers is no different than that of the general population - there are just more people who mistakenly believe that they're smarter because they can throw together spaghetti code in a text editor.
As for this stereotype about social intelligence being an issue with most programmers - I call b.s. on that too. There are plenty of programmers who know how to socialize and how to relate to people - they're just not the ones portrayed in mass media.
That would imply that the average IQ of programmers is 100. Seems unlikely, I do think it attracts people smarter than average (at least in times when programming is not "popular" because big $$$ are promised). I do agree that some programmers have an overinflated sense of intelligence and/or self-importance, though. But there are probably job types where this is much worse...
I'm not trying to incite anything, but having worked in a couple of very different roles in my short career thus far, development being one of them, the proportion of mediocre programmers seems empirically equal to the proportion of medicore marketers, sales people, and so forth.
Programmers can do special things, but the mere act of programming itself doesn't make us special, better than average, or superior to anybody else. Programmer bigotry goes both ways.
I'm not arguing that it does, but the original statement was that the IQ distribution among programmers is no different from the general population, and I doubt that. I have of course zero proof of this, but since when has that stopped anybody? ;-)
It's just a hunch really. I associate programming with "figuring out difficult things", which is more of a pastime that (on average) more intelligent people seem to be attracted to. I am not claiming that this makes anybody "better", nor am I comparing the quality of people in different jobs, or on different educational levels. I'm solely looking at IQ (problematic as that measurement may be... but that is a different story).
To put it another way: if programmers had the same IQ distribution as the general population, then half of all programmers would have an IQ < 100. I find that VERY hard to believe. In this profession we like to joke about copy & paste programmers, or maybe PHP/Java/whatever programmers (insert favorite target here), but come on.
Because programming requires a baseline of logical reasoning ability. Certainly you don't have to be a genius, but I wouldn't expect to find many with IQs below 95 or so.
the proportion of mediocre programmers seems empirically equal to the proportion of medicore marketers, sales people, and so forth.
That's true by definition. Half of all theoretical physicists are "below average", but I'd expect their average IQ to be well over 100.
My take is: because even for throwing spaghetti code you need a little more brain than average. I guess not much more, but I'd say a little more.
It also requires access to a computer, which severely underprivileged are unlikely to have.
Look at how many arts students fail the compulsorily "Intro to programming" courses that a few unis spring on them. I bet that's because (in part) they lack the logic-problem-solving (i.e. IQ) skills to cope with it.
I'd say that programmers in general have a higher general intelligence, and a much higher IQ, than the population in general.
As to there being more high IQ programmers or not that's a little more complex. However, I know the HN population has an extreme oversampling of people with 160+IQ's vs. the general population.
PS: Given there are less than 700k programmers in the US you would expect less than 100 to have an IQ > 160. So, if you can locate say 200 of them you can easily settle the issue.
http://www.neatorama.com/2007/08/19/iq-distribution-of-vario...
Or has the invention of computers increased the number of socially malformed people out there?
I can't find studies offhand, but I recall the Jesuits attracted the more intellectually minded, while the more socially outcast could try for hermits.
Sherlock Holmes is pretty archetypal of a hyper-focused Asperger's type; the recent 2009 movie with Tony Stark in it probably does a better job than most film adaptations of conveying these aspects of his character.
Granted, I knew exactly who you meant :)
But another huge part of this problem is the people among us who try and propagate the stereotypes of the 'hacker' of yore. I was at my community hackerspace yesterday, and there were some visitors who were perfect embodiments of the "loud and obnoxious computer nerd who will talk your ear off about something even if you clearly don't understand"
The enemy is us. We need the loudest and most opinionated voices among us to not be the ones who try and mystify computers and programming, the ones who love to use unnecessary jargon with the public. We need the most well known of us to be the smartest, the best spoken, the charming.
Aren't the loudest voices always the ones that represent any group? Look at religion... most religious folks do not agree with hate-mongering fundamentalists or crazed wild-eyed apocalyptic preachers, but look who gets on TV.
On the other hand, there are a whole lot of people who want to believe that all Christians are hate-hongering fundamentalists.
We're not on the cutting edge of science, we're often not inventing anything new, we're just doing boring grunt work shoving things together. We're factory workers. In 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation. We just happen to be in a time where there's still value in being able to manually translate 'what I want' into 'what computer understands'.
The public doesn't want some 'stellar factory worker' championing assembly lines, because it's boring.
I think we need to get real. Programming isn't something most people are interested in, it's not glamorous, it's factory work. Lets not delude ourselves that we're at the cutting edge of new discovery.
Of course there are stereotypes that are very real here. Just like the average man in fashion is camp, the average sysadmin is scary. People who work with computers often do have real 'people' issues. Perhaps that's why they gravitated to computers in the first place. There's no point denying such things.
Building companies, developing products, increasing revenue are all far more interesting to everyone.
>I think we need to get real. Programming isn't something most people are interested in, it's not glamorous, it's factory work. Lets not delude ourselves that we're at the cutting edge of new discovery.
And:
>Building companies, developing products, increasing revenue are all far more interesting to everyone.
But really, when was the last revolutionary product made? The last revolutionary way to increase revenue that was sustainable in the long run?
I've seen many revolutions in software, distributed version control for instance ie git, LLVM, gaming and visualization software, and hybrid synchronization systems such as unison. In OSS the 'As Seen on TV' type products generally don't see the light of day, they get buried and forgotten, it's only incorporate environments I've seen crappy interfaces using decrepit languages from the 90's, because those programmers have stopped, or never even started caring about programming. If they did they might take the initiative to fix up the program themselves.
As for the factory worker analogy, I think it's dead wrong. It's like saying anyone who ever designed a product is a factory worker. Programmers have to do a lot of design decisions, interop systems etc. Yeah if you're programming in Java, or making corporate program in programing lanaguage du jour you're probably not really innovating, like any part of life programming is self driven, for every Google there's a struggling business and for every git, there's a Java webapp for accessing an Access database.
Also if you think AI is going to obsoltete us in 50 years you're kinda pushing reality there. MS tried to make programming easy and accessible, look at every <LANGUAGE> in 24 hours book. They download MSVS and run through a bunch of wizards, that's about as much control and innovation as you get with a Java webapp that accesses an access database. Not only that but who's going to program all the new features into the the automation AI? When Intel releases a new architecture or something happens there's always gonna be a need for programmers to translate and incorporate data.
Essentially if what you said was true SIGGRAPH wouldn't exist. There's plenty of innovation going on in the software field, and plenty of talent, like every field there's a bunch of idiots, and plenty of talent. If anything you made a great social commentary, people care only about money, the easiest way to get money is working in middle management. Your argument is based on the corporate programmer stereotype.
Factory workers? Do you really believe that? Or are you saying that that is the way this work is seen by non-programmers?
Also, "in 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation", may well by true for any job. Once there are machines that will do complex surgeries flawlessly, with access to all the medical knowledge in the world, people won't want a "stellar surgeon" either, for example. I wouldn't like to tell them that what they're doing is "factory work", though. :-)
Developers have the ability to think clearly and actually create a working system that follows logical rules and accounts for edge cases and malicious users. This is not just "factory work" and never will be as long as we want software to do something that hasn't been done before, which will always be true.
this could be equally as well applied to dilbert comics.
seriously, some random guy calls programmers autistic and this somehow deserves a blog post breaking down the argument? give me a break.
I had hoped this article would be about admonishing programmers to stop being bigots. The community has a lot of sexism and ageism in it (levied in all directions). It also has a lot of irrational wu in it. For example, there are people who think that if you don't use a certain text editor, you aren't fit to work.
Man, I hope you meant "dragon hoard". A dragon horde just sounds dangerous.
At this point I'm leaning into it. If the word substituted is funny and it doesn't totally ruin the meaning, I am down.
(I wrote about the phenomenon in "What You Can't Say." Search for "English.")
I actually personally witnessed a trainer on Sexual Harassment Avoidance say "You can't make fun of somebody because they are black, or a woman, but you can make fun of them if they are wearing a pocket protector because nerds are not a legally protected class".
Strangely, my reaction to this was not joy that we are not a historically oppressed protected class. It was more like "Why can't we teach people to treat all their colleagues with respect"?
Most people are quite capable of distinguishing between the professional stereotype and any individuals they may meet, though.
"And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle."
It's not cool when people find it socially acceptable to say something venomous about a group of people.
Politicians, marketers, and other "people professions" are slimy and superficial fast-talkers. Businessmen are sociopaths. Neither of those is any more flattering than "engineers are autistic."
However, I would put my money behind scientists and engineers, because on the continuum of rationality, they're probably the best experts to make decisions.
Caveat: of course the nature of politics would still corrupt the integrity of a congress made up by scientists/engineers, because of (a) influence (b) psychological "imbalance" (c) ambition (d) uneducated public, and (e) sex scandals
The real key to good government (and the brilliance of the founding fathers) has actually been to effectively cripple the government and make sure nobody has the power to completely rewrite the government on a whim, and that no coalition that is capable of doing so can last very long. Unfortunately, that still seems to only delay the inevitable, but that's better than nothing.
Are scientists really rational? I would like to think so, but have you looked at science lately? There's brutal infighting over the credit for research, outright corruption over licenses and patents, taking $250 an hour from BP to be "oil spill consultants" and agreeing to three years of silence, working for tobacco companies, and on and on.
I am skeptical that all scientists are rational, but I certainly wouldn't dismiss any one scientist as irrational. I would like to judge her on her merits.
But I was of course replying in the context of, not only the poster's reply to the Gartner reply, but to his original post (http://infovegan.com/2010/07/19/why-developers-should-run-fo...)
In there he espouses programmers' (and for some reason he thinks web developers are higher up the totem pole than "regular" developers) knack for solving problems, looking for novel solutions, etc. etc., in the context of issues that are increasingly technical (which I think is debatable).
I think one particular aspect of programmers, a stereotype if you will, is that they don't like to compromise and are generally quite independent of mind. Perhaps one could argue this would be a Good Thing™. But, if you look at all the disagreement amongst programmers, I don't see why their proposed solutions would be better than they are currently (in the end it is about politics).
To your question: "Are scientists really rational?" - see my caveat :-)
(PS: I think politicians should focus on creating policy, not try to solve problems that the free market solves better).
[1] I'm educated as an engineer so it's ok for me to stereotype about this. [2]
[2] Humour.
Here's an anecdote: a friend of mine decided that the template blogs available were not what he wanted for a website to showcase his art. So he taught himself php, sql, html, javascript, and gimp, rolled his own site, and asked me to look at the code. It was completely fine -- on par with work I've seen from professionals with 2-3 years experience. He works at Starbucks, which is the kind of job you get with a BFA.
Or, to put it another way, if the (relatively mild) stigma of software development keeps people out of the industry, it helps to raise the pay of those who are in it.
Artificial limits on the number of Professional Software Developers established by some governing body (ala dentistry or orthadontics) is a better way of keeping salaries high. Of course, I think that's a terrible idea.
But of course being a programmer myself, I find the stereotype humorous at best. Although I will admit that there is a "tribe" mentality that does perpetuate the stereotype even amongst programmers. Most programmers I've met have some sort of eccentricity about them. Those who don't have a quirk or two are often regarded as outsiders or met with suspicion. It's kind of like porn... you know it when you see it.
Awful I know, and I totally agree with your post. But good luck. Humans love simple classifications. It makes the big, bad world easier to deal with.
I think you mean hour-long talks with major points shown in Emacs Org-mode via a projector. If military strategy is under discussion, then a working version of the strategy in Dwarf Fortress will also be presented.
The real question here is, how many will read it a second time while actually thinking about what it says?
It has _never_ been true.
Also, this is why some new schools are blending their business/communication/cs courses together to create projects that require the interuse of all three skills.
Having good communication also means being able to relate to your peers, despite what you think about their intelligence.
My point, relating to peers and being able to communicate with them when necessary is one thing, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water...
Find and take a look of a video of lectures given by Igor (nginx's author) and you will, probably, understand - he isn't a public person.
You should be a little bit autistic (say, near Asperger's) in order to produce something extraordinary. It is just a mater of time, energy and concentration. And practicing, practicing, practicing.
Analogy with public activity, like a politics is rather stupid. You need totally different skill set for any public relations, while those skills are requiring a lot of time of practicing, practicing and practicing.
Professional communication is as difficult as professional programming, btw. man NLP. ^_^
Don't tempt us...