I Cannot Be Technical
fightforthehuman.com
fightforthehuman.com
This is clearly falsifiable, so I'm not sure what the idea is behind dragging this essay out for miles. The author doesn't feel like they're a technical person, fair enough, you do you and your labels. However there are plenty of people out there who tick all of those boxes despite you saying it can't be done. I know many people like this and they're often the best of both worlds, they bring a balanced and well rounded world view to bat.
No it isn't.
(Elaborate? You first.)
However there are a lot of well respected women in tech and with not much effort they can find places where they are respected.
I work with a number of women who are clearly "Technical" in the sense of this article, even if they have been dismissed a number of times as you say.
I'm totally with you (and presumably the author) that this kind of dismissal is really toxic. But I also feel like there's a no true scotsman thing going on here; if you say "actually I know Technical people who fit the author's description" the retort is "well the article isn't talking about those people!".
> I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.
So it's not just gender, it's a whole litany of stuff, including class, race and "ideological perspective" (whatever that means) that prevents "being technical".
You could be forgiven for missing this, though: the article isn't trying very hard to have a coherent point. Perhaps another reason the author isn't "technical" is an inability to write clearly.
And it is demonstrably true. Go to any (technical) conference and see how even the most technical people are denigrated or dismissed if they don't fit into the preconceived notions of the audience.
Or, to simplify, https://xkcd.com/385/
It’s reading a long essay by a girl who wasn’t invited to a classmate’s birthday party.
Just make your own community, and call it whatever you want.
The technocracy does not tolerate other communities - that’s also another of her points. The powers that drive this machine are malignant and constantly striving for monopolization and domination. Competition has become a thing to be avoided, rather than relished.
So, Ayn Rand was right in her diagnosis?
I don't see a way the free market alone could deliver us from this. Well crafted and enforced antitrust legislation seems to be the only thing that has ever worked against this kind of force. The key in that is making sure we don't elect an oligarchy who wields that antitrust to defend their interests.
I wish I had an excuse not to be technical. But I will not complain about not having it. Neither I will fake being what I am not so I can get that sweet free out of jail card.
I am a dumb tech boy who is fragile and broken. And I am not upset about it. I will kindly help you without putting you in a pedestal.
Your move to be human.
The reality of being a woman in tech comes with serious problems, and how we're treated is one of the biggest contributors to those problems.
Every single human is excluded from some club they might otherwise want to be a part of. Exclusion and inclusion, in some proportion, is the human condition.
The author is a psychologist. Okay. I am a high school dropout who studies and uses psychology and sociology in my work. I am never going to be called a sociologist or a psychologist. I accept that. But I am those things, in some real and practical sense. I am a scientist and a philosopher and I am not swayed by anyone claiming those identities who tells me I’m not. They don’t have to include me in their reindeer games and I won’t waste an erg of my energy asking them to.
I am technical. I am a man. I judge whether other people are technical, or for that matter whether they are men. My judgements may or may not influence other people. So what?
I read the essay because I was trying to understand what her motivation is. What is her project? I’m still not sure. I don’t buy that exclusion and othering and lacking “full humanity” should or do matter (they are facts of our existence… now what? complaining about them mostly creates hostility because power is real and powerful people will act to defend themselves.)
Still I found it thought provoking and endearing in a weird way. It was a usefully irritating essay by someone very different from myself.
Business class skills are generally considered a tier above... all of society.
Like, I think (it's still not entirely clear to me) that's the actual point. It's made fairly clear (relatively clear—again, still hard to follow, at least for me) toward the end.
Her clients seem like extra successful people, so yeah, if she wants to be like them then maybe she's not technical yet. But if she's focusing on the money part then stepping into the business domain is a step above technical.
Incidentally, the photo at the top of the piece would make for really good "rich coastal tech worker" in-group signaling.
I don't think there are any actual take-aways beyond an appreciation of rather well done nontechnical perspective take on what the technical world looks like. Although that is rare enough around here to make it quite interesting.
But, I don't know if the core thesis has anything to do with the matter of being technical. Dehumanization has always been a side-effect of corporatism, and the modern corporation just happens to be a tech company.
For what it's worth I'm a liberal arts major that's coded professionally and is considered technical by my peers. The humanity of it all is never too far from my mind, and I've worked with many people like me. I suspect your mileage will vary based on where you work and who's around you.
Is this an attempt to justify being non-technical? Because you don't have to.
I'd argue this is more aristocratic (or technocratic) social exclusion, which has gone on for far longer than compilers have existed.
There does seem to be a persistent coalescing of certain personalities to certain industries that loves to exclude people (before, finance; now, tech) using mercurial standards that really just boil down to "do I like you", "do you entertain me or kiss my ass", or even "will you bang me"
Can I ask you to expand on this? I am curious as I had trouble making my way through it. I am also seeing people stating they gave up trying to understand it.
So, I am genuinely curious to hear what makes it well written according to other people.
Do you mean to say that from a literary perspective, the essay has strengths? Like the use of vivid metaphors, style, clever grammatical sentence structures, distinct voice, etc? Because these I can agree with, but these do not make a well written essay in my opinion.
At least in my mind, well written means that the message comes across. Meaning that clarity and readability are factors that weigh heavily into a well written essay. Here it very much falls short, again in my opinion.
Sentence length is high, the vocabulary swings between conversational and academic and has trouble following through with what is being said. It feels like it meanders, circles ideas without directly stating them. Basically it lacks a clear organizational structure. By which I don't mean the typical bullet point madness that people seem to overly rely on to make clear points these days. What I mean is that simple things like signposting (basically drawing conclusions at appropriate places) are lacking.
Given that multiple people have actually stated they like the writing, I am almost wondering if this is a different form of “technical” where reading long form texts in this same format is a learned skill. Because it reminds me of the sort of writing I see in certain academic circles. Which causes a lot of the same reading "fatigue" I experienced with this specific article.
I had to get all the way to the end, though, to figure out that this is about a particular kind of "big tech" culture among a very few people in a very few places, which is why I spent most of the article failing to understand WTF it was about. It does not communicate well at all, and in fact, even knowing that now, it assumes familiarity with that kind of culture to such a degree that I'm still in the dark about most of the piece.
This is objectively wrong, going from the comments from the intended audience in this thread.
If half your intended audience had trouble understanding the author's goal or message, then it's a very poor essay. Barely a passing grade, if one were to grade it.
The whole point of an essay is to get your message across. If it can't do that, it's a failure.
> Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled up intentionally fast and close to me and I hopped out of the way, scared. The men with me who did not jump roared with laughter, and this sparked a conversation (monologue) about innate personality differences (rather than, say, height differences). In that moment it was impossible for me to be a PhD who studies how we maintain beliefs about innate characteristics and generates empirical evidence around them and their impacts, even though I am. We are always constructing. In that street, my identity could not be made real against the identity that was offered out of the situation that aligned with a world they preferred, one in which some men could laugh at scared women.
Obviously I don't know these particular men, but from my experience "laugh at scared women" isn't what was happening in their minds. I think they would have laughed no matter the sex of the person who jumped, and if it was a man, he probably would have laughed at himself too - it was more like "laugh at reacting to a situation that didn't need that reaction". When stuff like this happens, men tend to use laughter as a bonding and tension-relief valve, not as ridicule.
The understands "being Technical" as something to be granted for its own sake. But wanting to be Technical without any real problem to solve is hollow. Technical isn’t an identity you earn through argument, it’s something you become in the process of doing the work.
Her argument is that she's done quite a lot of such work and is still not guaranteed to be afforded the rank of Technical.
Do you not get that there are things that may be possible for everyone, but are much, much more common for a clearly-defined subset of the population?
My main issue is how circuitous and rant-y it comes off as. Honestly the rhetoric style of argumentation and no qualifiers or even attempts to define terms makes it a really hard read.
For what it's worth (very little), there are many of us for which the technical label means strictly "expertise in X domain".
As my tenure in the industry extends into a third decade, I find most real problems we face (in organizations) are not technical, but people-based. 99.99% of technical problems are solvable, especially for people whom OP labels as "Technical". You may think they are not, but they are -- because they can be reduced to time and resources, reliably. The 0.01% where you're inventing something new, blazing a path, that's different. But most of us are not doing that.
The real challenges arise from the tribalism of groups, from emotional immaturity of individuals, lack of self-knowledge, and from the dictatorship-like power structure of most organizations. The inefficiencies and roadblocks posed by these aspects dwarf by orders of magnitude any and all technical challenges we ever come across.
EDIT: made my comment more specifically about writing style
In her essay "Why I Cannot Be Technical," Cat Hicks, a psychologist specializing in software environments, explores the structural and social dynamics that define the label "Technical" in the tech industry. She argues that despite her expertise in human-centered aspects of software development—such as behavior, culture, and organizational change—she is often excluded from being considered "Technical" because the term is narrowly defined to prioritize engineering and coding skills.
Hicks emphasizes that this exclusion is not due to a lack of capability but stems from systemic biases related to gender, class, race, and professional roles. She notes that the designation of "Technical" often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism, determining who is deemed legitimate within tech spaces. This legitimacy is frequently withheld from those whose work focuses on human factors, regardless of its complexity or impact.
There's a reason there's a saying "brevity is a sister of talent".
Whatever point you are trying to make surely could benefit if it actually reaches more than a few % of people who don't give up reading 10 pages of rambling when it should have been a paragraph in reality.
I rather believe she is not intending to "make a point" but instead express herself. One may prefer brief self-expression but certainly not all do. Put another way: the expression is the point.
Is this something that would be clear to me if I’d worked in FAANG or similar? Is it a cultural thing there? Something to do with a corner of social media I don’t engage with?
The closest I can come up with connected to my experience is the opposite: “tech” related labels used to exclude people and dismiss their ideas, in decision-making or business-social contexts, and design processes. I’ve not seen it used in this power(? I think? I really can’t figure this out)-conferring way.
[EDIT] The anecdotes are so confusing.
> An example of this is every time evidence of efficacy is not able to exert any power versus the votes of engineering disengagement. You could put your diligent little psychologist heart into it and make a good program or policy change and muster up extremely critical evidence for something no one else bothered to measure but you could not demand that all of the engineering managers do it, for instance. The engineering managers always had the power and always would.
This is a manager thing. Specifically, modern management culture. Management wants to appear "evidence based" and "scientific" but the appearing is the only part they consistently care about. The "technical" run into this same wall, when they mistakenly believe surface claims that management's serious about working with evidence and "metrics" and such, and try to sincerely help as if that's the actual goal—it isn't.
[EDIT 2]
> This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough.
OK, I think this is confirmation that the piece is about a slice of the tech industry I've not really engaged with, which may explain why I am nearly at the end of the piece and am still not sure what it's about.
[EDIT 3]
> Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities.
OK, yes, this is about a tiny percentage of "tech". Under this article's usage, I'm not "Technical", and few or none of the programmers I personally know are. That helps, wish that'd been stated up front.
> The closest I can come up with connected to my experience is the opposite: “tech” related labels used to exclude people and dismiss their ideas, in decision-making or business-social contexts, and design processes. I’ve not seen it used in this power(? I think? I really can’t figure this out)-conferring way.
There's a recent-ish (5 or so years?) style change people have pushed to capitalize "Black" in news and articles [0], and I think this author is trying to do the same here. Whatever this distinction is, it's entirely possible it's in their own mind and nowhere else.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...
A key paragraph:
>> "This is because Technical is a structural designation that operates outside of any actual problem-solving you and I are doing together. Being Technical is about being legitimate. Or to put it more simply: it’s because you are Technical that I can’t be. We have created the identities this way. A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate."
I'm still reading but it does seem to be about gatekeeping while avoiding any language that would set off a Technical person.
But I don't think that's really how it works for anyone. I've been doing "technical" work for three decades and no one's declared me Technical or anything else. Some may consider me that and others may not; it's never occurred to me to ask. How I feel about whether I deserve to claim that title is up to me, and shouldn't really depend on others.
I don't think that's quite it.
> I guess technical is "techbros and their salary"
That is it, from what I can tell. "Technical" is "you get US coastal techbro power and money". Which, most "technical" (lower-case) people working in computing also don't get, even in the US.
This author wants sciency work in fields with more women in them than computing has, to be valued in terms of pay and prestige as capital-T "Technical", and defines "Technical" such that people deciding who gets that pay are somehow within it (rather than very much not within it, as would be the case for most of the category I think the median HN user would call lower-case t "technical", which is part of why so much of the essay is hard to follow until you've figured that out)
This is why the piece is so hard to follow: this isn't made clear until way down near the bottom.
I actually read your comment while still around the halfway mark of the piece, and assumed it was reductive and way off the mark, but I think you've located the actual heart of it, now that I've finished reading it.
I think so anyway. As I said, I had the same issue as you having difficulty getting through it. The article takes a long time to actually get to a point, circling around things rather than concretely building towards something.
If I had to guess it is more of a flow of thoughts and not really a classical argument.
It also makes it hard to draw any conclusions about it. Because I think I sort of get where they are coming from, but at the same time I am not sure if I entirely agree. In my line of work technical just means "being skilled with IT related technical skills" without a judgement about other skill sets. It is just there to distinguish between people who can dive into systems hands-on and those who have other skills and bring value in other ways.
I found o3 to have done a decent job of it:
- Technical as structural identity: Being "Technical" is a power‑laden designation that shapes reality and enforces belonging, not a neutral skill measure.
- Dehumanization paradox: The system prizes flat emotions yet sustains itself by choosing emotions over efficacy, repeatedly devaluing human needs.
- Excluded expertise: Human‑centered work — psychology, caregiving, storytelling — is repeatedly labeled illegitimate despite its practical and moral value.
- Boundary policing: The "Technical" boundary is preserved by rejecting both outsiders and insiders who push its limits.
- Caring as resistance: Genuine care, narrative, and solidarity with those left outside offer a path to rehumanize tech beyond mere "Technicality."
- Collective rebuild: A hopeful call to action—tech builders possess the capacity to dismantle and reassemble systems to include humanity at their core.
Web dev? Just a graphic designer with poor tools: non-technical.
Engineering manager? Manager. Non-technical.
Write business logic? That’s just office work.
Banging out boiler plate code? Something a technical person might do, but not inherently in and of itself technical. A classical engineer must also sharpen their pencils.
Eventually we’ll deny the label to enough people that it will become a precise description rather than a trophy.
The author is a psychologist for software developers. She cannot join the ranks of the technical, just as a judge needs to be wary of bias towards the defence or the prosecutorial side.
Now I do not know her. I have no idea if I would call her technical. She appears to at least have the background to become technical, but she may not want to spend her time doing that. I'm not sure what level of others think you are technical is required to say someone really is, but it isn't unanimous agreement.
At any rate, this faculty member said, "Everything worth studying has an opposite that's necessary to understand what you thought you were studying." I have found this to be true.
Since this is HN some disclaimers -no that’s not always what’s happening, when “not technical” is thrown around -no it’s not always appropriate to use AI instead of asking an expert
The question is what you will/should learn for your limited time alive. Society needs well educated (I include things "street smarts" and apprenticeship in educated here) people in many different subjects. Some subjects are important enough everyone needs to learn them (reading, writing, arithmetic). Some subjects are nearly useless but fun (tinplate film photography) and so worth knowing.
Things like basic computer skills are raising to the level where the majority of people today need them. However I'm not sure that scripting is itself quite at that level. (though it is important enough that a significant minority should have them)
I’m talking about a general trend I see in use of this term, not that it’s always a bad thing to say “I’m not technical so someone else should write the script”
I agree with everything you said!
Both things are happening in the world: people using this terminology to throw work at others needlessly, and people doing good division of labor.
> We can rewrite this entire essay to be about my field, Psychology, if you need that.
I'm looking forward to reading and not responding to the inevitable copium sharing in the comments, hoping there will also be some interesting discussion.
For personal consideration/bias purposes before I go into my thoughts:
- Like Dr. Hicks, I'm a queer woman from an uneducated family who found success in academia. I had to leave before I could do a PhD because I got MS, but I am the only person in my immediate family with a graduate degree and I worked in academia for over a decade. I say this because, since she's relying a fair amount on standpoint epistemology, I'm in identity categories that according to her own approach say I can evaluate what she argues from that standpoint, and some of my disagreements come from her being overly narrow in interpreting her experience.
- Unlike Dr. Hicks, I'm an oddity in that I'm Technical (by her definition) by birthright (I'm a 3rd generation programmer and 3 out of 4 of my grandparents as well as several other elder figures in my family were all hackers/tinkerers/etc. - I started programming when I was 4-5 years old.) I'm not good or spectacularly talented since I've focused on other areas and talents of mine, but I have unambiguously done 'Technical' work and would be/am considered 'Technical' by most people. I've also observed 'Technical' culture for a long time and have what I would consider to be a fairly robust knowledge of the history and development of that culture. A fair number of my disagreements come from my own observations so I think clarifying my own position is important.
Where I agree with her is in her pointing out that there is unambiguously a 'Technical' culture that has an often antagonistic relationship with other cultures and that has a sense of self-superiority which often goes unchecked. I also agree that there are various aspects of Technical culture that result in some very, very offputting decisions when those decisions are enacted on a wider society. And that, because of the massive amount of societal power this culture has begun to wield in such a short time (on a historical scale), the faults and downsides of this culture are causing harm and suffering. I relate a great deal to her realization that the people who treat her nicely do not do the same for her friends/loved ones. I'm in the culture and so generally treated decently, but, like Dr. Hicks, I spend a lot of time around people who aren't/don't and the discrepancy in treatment really bothers me.
That said, she gets a lot of things wrong:
- She pretty much only studies the culture by observing the most materially successful inhabitants. It's like only studying how the royal family lived in England in 1600 and using that to extrapolate about English culture in general. Ironically given her talking about having to study the opposites of matters to fully understand them, she completely discards anyone Technical who is not working in Big Tech. The legions of IT workers and devs at lower companies, FOSS and general non Big Tech techies (like I don't think anybody would question Linus Torvald's 'Technical' status), freelancers, etc. Working at any company or organization usually requires at least somewhat licking the boot of whatever culture they profess - it's a self-selecting pool. Of course people she studies in Big Tech are going to act that way: It's a prerequisite to being there in the first place!
- She ascribes a lot to Technical people that she sees as unique, but I don't think are. Like when she talks about not wanting to be a U/X or tech 'People Person' because she can come up with a good, robust idea and can't make the engineering managers do it. Does she think that non Technical managers are any better at taking feedback and policies from people they consider outsiders? They aren't, in my experience. There's a decent amount of friction between academic librarians and other faculty members at a lot of institutions because the academic librarians don't always have a PhD, and good luck trying to convince the Sales and Marketing departments in a giant megacorp to do something that makes sense if it goes against their temperaments. Likewise, it's true that it's a mostly male group and this causes them to overlook some aspects of the female experience. I've found that groups and places that are overwhelmingly female do the same thing in the other direction. The results are different because of how our society is set up, but any group full of one type of person is going to be bad at considering matters outside of that group's experience because humans are pretty self-absorbed. I can also assure her that academia is very hostile and condescending to people outside its bubble on much the same level as high-status Technical people, and I see much of the same discrepancy of treatment there. High-status Technical people treat my working-class friends poorly, and so do academics. She just might not notice because she's in that club - most working-class people who 'make it' end up very attached to the culture of the people who lifted them out.
- She seems to think that Technical culture status is conveyed on high by some central authority, when in my experience, squabbles over who is in the culture or not are fairly common and not all of us agree. I, for example, would absolutely consider some devs at Big Tech to not be 'Technical' based on various measures. When people are offering her 'access to the tent', they're saying they see her as one of them. There's not a group chat where we update who's in and out. Likewise, you can absolutely convey 'Technicality' on to someone, but you don't do it by just saying 'this person is a techie'. You do it by introducing them to the culture, teaching/mentoring them, and helping them with projects/work. Then you let them speak for themselves and their own work. Having someone speak for you is actually kind of an anti-signal in some ways, because a strong indicator of Technical culture is being able to speak for yourself, your work, and your thought process.
- I think she lacks an understanding of Technical history. A lot of the hostility in Technical spaces came about because the first generation to 'make it big'/be socially accepted and impactful had very hostile interactions with mainstream culture before that point. She notes that she's treated with hostility because she doesn't meet Technical expectations or qualifications, but that's the same experience a stereotypical Technical person has outside of Technical spaces. I move in 'people oriented'/mainstream non Technical spaces well because I'm a bubbly, somewhat charismatic white woman who can read social cues well. I'm attractive/feminine enough to not be considered 'weird' or 'creepy', and I know how to tailor my appearance/speech/etc. to different groups. It's better than it used to be, but a lot of that top down antagonistic culture from Technical people is reactive, and the superiority is partially a defense mechanism/coping. This is also one reason Technical people tend to take critiques from outsiders poorly, especially when that critique is 'you need to be more like us! :)' This is also related to the changing demographics and dynamics of the Internet/Web and a lot of Technical people feeling like they lost a bubble and safe place.
IDK, good on anyone who reads my word vomit, I just wanted to get my thoughts out. They're not particularly well formed or organized, though.
However, you might be one of the people the person in the post is talking about. The people who make “being technical” into a status symbol and something to gate keep. To the point that I have to wonder if you are going for some sort of stereotypical response in order to make a point.
If you are not, then your reply is not cool, or productive.
Of course it's not technical writing! That's the point, it's human writing about the human experience. Which of course some Technical people regard as an imperfection to be ground off the perfect featureless spherical non-human Technical.
I think it's a rather well constructed piece about social boundaries that is incidentally somewhat technical (though, I'm guessing, its technical aspects are from outside your field).
Right. Translation: "I'm actually incompetent. I have no technical abilities, and I'm lazy to learn."
Her entire blog post - and probably career - is just her waffling around.