When Empathy > Technology

Dennis's shirts hang on the left side of our shared closet, mine on the right.  The closet doors are the typical sliding ones, so that when one side is open, the other side is occluded by door.  When the doors are open to my side, light from the window is largely eclipsed by anyone standing in front of it, leaving the job of illumination to anything coming from the left.  On the opposite side, it's the opposite story.

Thus, Dennis hangs up his shirts so that they face the right; I hang up mine so they face the left.  In a logical Universe, we would respect this light-optimised orientation when hanging up each other's shirts.  But even a dual-programmer household falls well short of the Spock/Sherlock ideal.  Alack.

The mayhem and havoc wreaked by misaligned clothing can be quantified in terms of extra fractions of a second required to select the t-shirt whose snark and/or geek culture in-joke best matches our mood-of-the-moment.  A #firstworldproblem if there ever was one, in other words.  But it illustrates the power of personal norms to trump logic (and the instinct to use it).  And, in a way, it makes me despair for human progress as driven by first world technology...or even most first world technologists (in whose number I count myself, btw).

Silicon Valley has been panned by folks as diverse as Valleywag and Startup L. Jackson for burning so many calories turning paper millionaires into paper billionaires while infantilising the twenty-something dudebros who are the face of its culture/ethos.  The first is just what shareholder capitalism is optimised to do.  (The second is just plain pathetic.)  Neither of them can be considered truly "disruptive"--at least not in the net positive sense their apologists would have you believe.  Sure, it's taking bites out of the taxi and hotel industry by socialising the costs of industries formerly held more accountable via regulation.  But, hey, you can't make a creative destruction omelette without breaking a few social contracts, amirite?

It's not even a private sector ailment.  NGOs can (and do) squander resources applying first world thinking outside the first world.  Case in point:  The first attempts to convince Cambodian families to add a lotus-shaped chunk of iron to their cook-pots to reduce/eliminate anaemia fell short.  Follow-up visits discovered the iron being used for other purposes, notably doorstops.  But casting the iron in the shape of a fish considered "lucky" by locals changed the game.  Anaemia has been eliminated in 43% of trial subjects, and a sustainable business model was spawned in the process. 

Moral of the story:  Sometimes it's the users, not the technologies, that have to be "hacked."  The catch is that those of us who are paid to be problem solvers have the instinct to hack technology first.  Don't get me wrong--I'm a huge proponent of usability.  The bigger a technology's side effects, the more incumbent it is upon its designers to make it as impossible as possible to misuse.  I get it.

But the slickest, most bulletproof interface in the 'verse means bupkis if it is A.) Not solving a worthwhile problem, and/or B.) Is too expensive (in terms of cost, infrastructure support, externalised costs, etc.) to use by those who would most benefit from it.

So, to recap, to successfully "disrupt" anything, the designers/developers need to:

1. Allow people to benefit their lives/families/communities in a way that was previously impossible
2. Allow them to do it in a way that doesn't require huge (for them!) investments or later remediation
3. Ensure that misuse is darned near impossible without anything beyond rudimentary training

Put together, that's a very tall order.  To pull all that off that takes great wads of empathy--which starts with the proverbial exercise of putting oneself in someone else's head-space.  (But we geeks are supposed to be the "smart" people, right?)  Alas, empathy (or even self-awareness) is not something I expect to find thick on the ground in a place where more than one techbro has very publicly hated on the problems his very own Galt-couture has created.  If that's a representative sample of the "thought leadership" in the culture of disruption, that culture is bankrupt.  Part of me thinks that, in this case, this latest tech. bubble can't burst soon enough.  Except that it won't move the needle on the culture.  At best, that offers the cold comfort that it won't be so lionised by press and pundit.  With February winding down, I've had enough cold for one winter, thanks.

Exceptional madness

Doubtless, my Gentle Reader has heard some form of the adage, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results."  It's not a bad rule for nearly all situations, actually.

Problem is, it doesn't necessarily work that way in Software Development, particularly during debugging.

See, when you're trying to reproduce a problem, you want to see the same results after doing the same thing over and over.  Anything else spells extra time and resources.  Second-to-worst case scenario is you'll end up essentially creating a VirtualBox-type simulacrum of the production environment so you can replicate the live conditions as closely as possible.  Maybe you'll end up dorking with the system date, or writing custom scripts to roll back test data to a specific point in time...repeatedly.  For sure, you'll be spelunking in the database, likely scribbling down ID numbers and combing through matrices of data.

Worst-case scenario, though, is that you're never able to reproduce the error, EVER.  Nope, no matter how faithfully you re-create the conditions from the bug report, the gremlin never reappears.  That, mes amis, is The Short Road to Crazytown.

So if you've ever wondered why some programmers (and other I/T folks) have a slightly skewed perspective on the world, this is one of the reasons.  For us, madness lies in the exception, not the rule.  In more than one way.

A.B.H.

As with many rants, the thing at which I'm yelling is not actually the thing that cheesed me off in the first place.  For that reason, I'm keeping names out of this.

The Moncton tech. community, like any community, has what's known as "super-hubs" in its network.  These are the folks who pretty much know everybody (sometimes even before being introduced), and whose job--officially or not--is to connect people.  It would be difficult to overstate the time/resources/opportunities that would be wasted if not for these folks, and I look for ways in which I can repay what they've done for me over the last few years.

But with any community resource, its value is cheapened when any-old-body assumes that they can short-cut their way to clients, employees, etc. by basically asking a super-hub to spam her/his network.

As these requests go, today's email was comparatively defensible, and I'm honestly quite happy to note how tight-knit the Moncton and Fredericton tech. startup community is.  No silo-ing or turf wars in sight, and thank the FSM for that.

Alas, something that's been simmering for awhile boiled over.

For anyone who doesn't know me, I'm a freelancer building a fairly niche business and, frankly, I'm still in over my head on where I fit into the local economy...if indeed I fit at all.  And so I've been to a whack of after-hours mixers and lunch-n-learns and business-over-breakfast thingies lately.  And I'm afraid that in the context of such events, I've too often heard the lament that business "can't find" the programming talent it needs in Moncton.

Yet, strangely, the only people I see at the user group meetings are other programmers.  Ditto the classes sponsored by the Cybersocial.  Same deal at the MPL Makerspace/FabLab.  It's like all these non-technical managers/executives are afraid of programmers in packs.  Like there will be a West Side Story-esque suits-vs.-geeks rumble.  Or something.

There are a few notable exceptions.  I know of at least one Moncton tech. company that practically works hand-in-glove with a private college.  Frankly, such pipelining doesn't skeeve me out.  Far better that than the business that expects the government to provide a corporation-coddling tax climate and educated college grads.  And--bless his heart--Dan Martell's advice to would-be tech. entrepreneurs was to (gasp!) figure out where geeks hang out and go look for a technical co-founder in those places.  (Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to mention names, but credit's due where credit's due, yo.)

Clearly, some suits get it.  It's the ones who send out the emails that contain phrases like "We have an immediate need for _n_ developers..." that burn my bacon.

No.

You had that need as soon as you knew that you were opening a branch office.  Or as soon as you put together the project proposal you knew your current staff couldn't support.  Or as soon as you started lunching with VCs.  Basically, as soon as you were fantasising about how you were going to spend your share of the new profits, you, my friend, had that need.  If you now have an "immediate" need, it's loonies to Timbits that you chose to do other things until you absolutely couldn't ignore the most fundamental job a business has.  You're basically the kid who waits until 8:30 the night before the project is due to tell Mom that you have to go to CraftWorld for the supplies.

And so I frankly don't want to hear about the dearth of programmers that you could be standing knee-deep in if you'd bother to get to know them.  Best of all, the programmers who show up to places like Makerspaces and user groups are the motivated ones.  Sure, I've known plenty of very bright developers who prefer to pick up a new technology/framework by reading code and tinkering on their own.  Nothing wrong with that.  But the advantage of mixing with programmers among their own tribe is that you meet the ones who aren't embarrassed to ask questions in front of their peers. 

Look.  Most suits are inherently salespeople.  So I'm going to assume that part of their self-education involved the film Glengarry Glen Ross.  As such, they'll immediately recognise that I'm referring to that scene:  Alec Baldwin's profanity-laden verbal beat-down that includes the acronym "ABC," for "Always Be Closing."  That maps nicely--and without all the F-bombs--to "ABH" for "Always Be Hiring."

Hiring the best of the best means having a the pick of the market.  Which means that you have to know the market in the first place.  Oh, you had your heart set on that 10X full-stack unicorn, but now s/he can't be poached from the once-in-lifetime start-up opportunity?  Womp-womp on you for not seeing if there were any more at home like her/him.  Maybe next time you'll create a job around a person you know will take you to the next level...before it's time to scramble up that hockey-stick curve.  Or, better yet, you'll actually have met all your potential hires face-to-face long before their phone screen.

Start-ups have the mantra, "Get out of the building," which means validating their ideas before they build.  "Get out of the building" also applies to hiring.  Because you can't say that your employees are your most valuable resource if you expect them to magically drop into your org. chart with the right skills at the right time.

Always.  Be.  Hiring.

And, if we happen to meet at any number of these mixers, bee-bop on over and say "Hi."  Now that I have this rant off my chest, I probably won't be too bitey.  Unless, of course, you ask me if I know anyone who's looking for a developer job.  :~/