Are You Perceived as a Low Status Techie? | Hacker News Reader

Are You Perceived as a Low Status Techie?

codebelay.com

46 pointsbarce39 comments

> In San Francisco, it’s very different. You can be a techie like Marissa Mayer, and on the red carpet and have people comment on your awesome date or outfit.

Er... I think if you're the vice president of a company, any company, with nearly $60 billion dollars worth of assets then you'll be invited to a red carpet event.

You're even more likely to be invited if that same company is always in the news under such hot topics as "pulls out of china due to foreign hacking", "driverless cars" and "did Do No Evil Inc., do evil?".

Honestly, you could do better than pick a Google VP as an example of a techie being treated as high status, only because they're in San Fran.

I think the point behind that was not about her per se, but that she (as a "techie") was on the red carpet in the first place. In a city like LA I imagine you'd see movie stars or rock stars, and zero techies, whether they're VP of a $60BN company or not.

The actual event referenced by the article was the opening of the Symphony season, which is an event available to anyone who wishes to purchase a ticket. No actual red carpet was in evidence in the photos. Those who attend and wear clothes by top designers are more likely than others to get their photo in the society page. It's not really about tech people being respected in the bay area in this example, it's about tech people who happen to be interested in the arts and who also wear clothes that cost a few thousands of dollars.

I feel like this blog post gets a lot of things wrong, but it doesn't really have a conclusion or coherent argument. So I'll just point out what I feel is wrong:

• I don't see how social capital or track record is zero sum. When you build something awesome that gives you a reputation, that doesn't take away from other people's achievements.

• Techies are low status people except for a few elite (kind of like 99% of regular people as well?). I'm not sure I understand what it means to be low status and its implications on a person.

• "Manipulating people is hard". I think you mean "managing people is hard". I understand your bias against non-engineers being responsible for product development, however just because someone isn't a programmer does not make them bourgeois to proletariat. The truth is 100% of people who get paid to work are also told what to work on.

There’s another problem with the managing/manipulating people being hard statement: people vary a lot. Some people don’t need any managing at all; others can’t be trusted at all. By contrast computers are very consistent.

social status definitely a zero-sum game, you cannot "create" status out of thin air.

The highly respected member of society is always a small percentage of the populace.

It may be difficult to acquire, but that doesn't make it zero sum. If you gain status by creating a billion dollar company or writing a bestseller, it doesn't take away from anyone else's.

That said, who gives a shit? People focused on status tend to be incredibly lame.

It is pretty close to a zero-sum-game because time is finite and status requires people's time to pay attention. If you gain status by writing a bestseller, some other author is not being talked about now and loses status. Time is a limiter.

Who cares? Well, status is a currency in many professions. The most obvious are performers. Status allows options which allows better pay or more personal projects. Status allows a programmer to talk to graphic card companies and have a hope of changing their minds. As much as I wish it were so, pure competence or brilliance doesn't buy that. You have to use the skills to acquire the status. The guy in the back room churning out just as good of code doesn't have the influence (probably some exec does in that case).

Being high status implies that other people are below you. Otherwise, your status could not be high relative to theirs. It's a relative measure, sure, but being high status implies that there's at least one other person who isn't.

That said, I agree with you about focusing on status.

Being pedantic here, but it is possible to have a society where everyone is a highly respected member (although it would likely have to be smaller for everyone to even have an opinion on everyone else).

The set of people who are _most_ highly respected could be a small percent of that population depending on the amount of variance in respect people have of each other.

I'd love to live in a society where everyone is equals. In fact I think the future of mankind would be best to have all things automated so extremely small communities can survive without much external dependencies.

If I create a cure for cancer tomorrow, I will suddenly be very prestigious. I cannot imagine whose status it would really degrade. Competing cancer researchers would at worst be in the same position they were in before my achievement, and some would probably be better off if their work contributed to mine. Cancer patients would probably not lose face by being cured.

On a basic level, status is just recognition of your deeds. There are very few fields so glutted with great deeds that doing something new will necessarily lead to somebody else's status dropping. Pure socialites are sometimes in such a field. You probably aren't.

Why would social status be a zero-sum game? My brain only has room for a few hundred celebrity factoids. Some are good, some are bad. If I see a lot of headlines about Mel Gibson being a nutcase, my opinion of celebrities (and the world in general) tends to be lowered.

Social pecking order is zero-sum, but social status isn't. In some places (New York?), everyone has a low opinion of most other people. In other places (Canada? Some parts of California?), people generally treat each other with respect.

I don't understand why anyone would settle for a job where they're considered "low status". Especially in an industry like ours where even fair to decent coders can essentially write their own ticket.

The "write their own ticket" idea is both a myth and a misunderstanding. Even if you're say a coder in NYC making 200k at an ad agency, your status isn't as high as the coder at FourSquare making half as much. By status, the zero sum part of social capital ways in more. For the amount of capital generated in Silicon Valley, coders at 6 figures are underpaid. 7 figures is the ticket they should be writing.

A startup with 42 million (which is a lot for most 1-3 year startups) in capital and 40 programmers would eat up their run way in less than a year, not that practical.

> coders can essentially write their own ticket.

I'm glad that you think that's true for you, but it's not for 99% of coders. You are probably 20-25 with a degree and live in silicon valley or a big city.

Because there are only so many jobs that let the techies call the shots. A good portion of the coding gigs are in support of new or existing business. This means you do the grunt work to build a product dreamed up by the business people that integrates with "legacy" system. In turn, this locks you into specific platforms and tools with little to no leeway to "call the shots" outside of naming your variables foo instead of bar.

Also, consider the fact that some people want jobs like that. They can walk in the door at 8/9am and be out by 4/5pm with no worries and few long hours. Not all techies have the drive and desire to "call the shots", shoot up the social ladder, and achieve some level of public recognition for their work. For a coder who wants to work and do hard things, getting stuck at a non-technologist company could be akin to being in coder's hell. For a coder who want's a stable 9-5 and lots of free time to do other things--like hang out with friends/family--the "low status" work doesn't really look that low status anymore. It's all about cost/benefit analysis for each individual than extrapolation to a group of people.

> Especially in an industry like ours where even fair to decent coders can essentially write their own ticket.

That's just not true. There are plenty of places that do pay fairly (and a few that do interesting work), but the places that are truly "engineering-driven" (as opposed to driven by product management or marketing) are a few in between. These kinds of places (select few groups at Google, Palantir, places like Jane Street capital) are also enormously picky about who they hire (since engineers are responsible for a lot more than implementing a PRD with commercial/open-source components).

"You can be a techie like Marissa Mayer, and on the red carpet and have people comment on your awesome date or outfit."

I stopped reading. The emphasis of the article was on "coders" (fair enough) and then Marissa Mayer was bought into the equation.

No one considers Marissa Mayer a 'techie' - she's a business executive at a technology company. Two different things.

I had never heard of her but her wikipedia background seems to be quite 'techie'. BSc in Symbolic systems, MSc in Computer Science, first female engineer hired at Google.

If you are the solle person to call the shots on what goes into prod and has the degrees she has, you're a techie.

I first heard of Meyer in my information retreival class when implementing an algorithm from a paper she wrote. That's pretty 'techie' afaict.

Mayer is definitely a techie. However, she is aiming to conquer the world of social status (which has its own rules which cannot be broken)[1].

> But then, one Friday night in mid-April, Mayer was eating a bowl of pasta in her dorm room and scanning her email when she spotted a message slugged, “Work at Google?” Just as she was about to hit delete—her reflexive response to new recruiting pitches—she leaned over and inadvertently hit the space bar key, opening the email. As she read, she remembered a conversation she’d had in the fall with her mentor, computer science teacher Eric Roberts.

She had just returned from nine months in Zurich, Switzerland, where she was working with 30 other researchers to build a recommender system for the web, similar to the one Amazon uses to suggest books based on a customer’s previous purchases. As Mayer talked to Roberts in his office, he nodded and pointed upward. “There are two guys on the fourth floor who are building what you built,” he said. He apologized for not being able to remember specifics about the company they were forming, except that it had a funny name, but he thought maybe she should get in touch.

...

> The following afternoon, Mayer was interviewed first by Amit Patel, the company’s eighth employee. His opening words to her were, “I’m not sure I’m able to interview you, as I started this morning and I don’t know what we do yet.” He eventually posed a number of general computer science questions about the way memory is allocated in different programs.

http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/adventures-marissa

[1] "Glamour at Google" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120881523314732607.html

I do agree with everyone she is a techie.

What did people think of the article's use of opening night at the opera and symphony as examples of attaining insider social event status in the bay area? I am a bit skeptical of this since opening night is not by invitation only, seats are available to whoever wants to buy a ticket. On the other hand, most charity galas and such that end up on the social register page are also available to whoever has the money to buy a ticket as well.

The thing is, if you have enough money (e.g. work is an option) and are bored, you will want for challenge and diversion. Money doesn't cure the human need to be recognized and to be connected and to be relevant. If anything, it makes it more of an isolated and pure drive.

I know someone who used to be a very successful fundraiser for a museum. The unwritten subtext is if you want to be 'Chair of the ball' is that it is a sizable donation ($25-$50k to start).

Money is the price to entry but navigating the social hierarchy (e.g. socialite) is something that requires acumen, not just money.

I am reminded of a Brasilian girl who moved to our neighborhood/school district in middle school (most of us had known each other since early grades). She invited literally everyone to a big party (not extravagant by any means). Quickly become integrated into the social circles. But her ongoing popularity was more due to her acumen and personality.

Depends on the company. At most tech companies, the financial department isn't a big deal, at a large accounting firm they rule.

So who really cares about status? Really? In your heart of hearts... it does afford the opportunity to "make a difference", but at a price. I've seen good men go bad that way. It's really dark in Plato's Republic, and the Massive Sorting Machine is an very good sausage grinder.

I don’t believe social capital or track record capital—more sensibly known as _achievements_—are zero-sum games. If I create a new product (an achievement) what does that take away from anyone else? And, if social capital was really zero-sum you wouldn’t suffer by never socializing.

If I create a new product (an achievement) what does that take away from anyone else?

Attention.

It could be left unpublished. Most things people create aren’t released.

If you don’t like that example, pick another: learning a programming language. What is lost by me learning a new programming language? It takes time for me of course but that time would have passed anyway.

You don't get social/track record capital for things nobody else knows about.

I beg to differ, you still get experience

Attention doesn't automatically default to the next product should a superior product not exist.

Any product worth seeing/writing about/using has to be attention worthy enough in the first place, and then competes with other products for attention. Just like if two hot dog stands compete on the same street and one leaves. If the remaining hot dog vendor produces the ugliest nastiest worst tasting hot dogs, he does not capture the rest of the market afforded by the absence of a competitor. But if they were the two best hot dogs stands in the city, people flock to them and their market size actually grows.

Attention doesn't automatically default to the next product should a superior product not exist.

It doesn't have to. Yes, an endeavor may fail to capture any attention, but in that case, it hasn't gained the person any social/track record capital.

I like this part:

>It’s kind of insulting when I hear the phrase "translate things into English." It puts the blame on the person on the team most equipped to solve the problem. The person, who wants "things translated into English," is the problem, not the coder.

It is true that programming computers can be simpler than programming people. The high status career paths are the ones where the individuals who make up that career path demand respect. Techies don't demand respect because we don't spend our time mastering social situations pecking order and people manipulation.

If all us coders get together and decide to walk out if we don't get respect like the highest status careers, then we will get it. Usually techies are not concerned with being seen as baseball stars or heros, we care about contributing to society and making as much money as possible. It's supply and demand.

In other times and industries, this would be called unionization.

In any case, one shouldn't need to demand respect, one should command it. The difference is that the former is impossible unless you equate fear with respect, the latter is a natural result of the transferability (or other relative metric) of your talent/skill/ability.

This article comes off as just being pompous about being an engineer.

As a coder, I'm sure you understand separation of concerns. Well, it works the same way in a sufficiently large company. Coders can't and shouldn't be doing everything. Let's say a build vs buy decision needs to happen. Someone needs to be mindful of the budget and time to market. Sometimes you want a feature that might step on the toes of a partner. Someone needs to keep up with those relationships. If you left it up to coders, they might spend all their time coding things that interested them.

The problem arises when the people making decisions don't listen to the recommendations of the technical people. But that does not mean that technical people necessarily need to run everything.

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