Last Exit to Loyalty

http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1890351.html

by RKoutnik • 11 years ago

101 54 11 years ago

tim.dreamwidth.org

angersock2• 11 years ago

I don't completely (or even mostly!) agree with the author's politics or culture views.

That said, there is a still a lot here that resonates with me and, I suspect, with others.

Tech is a pretty derpy industry.

budu3• 11 years ago

What does derpy mean in this context? I tried googling it but all I saw were some My Little Pony references.

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Socially clumsy or awkward, sometimes painfully so. Non-empathetic. Unable (or unwilling) to put itself in other peoples' shoes.

underpantsgnome• 11 years ago

It's the type of place where they can't tell that means "has some problems, in a way similar to what the OP describes."

angersock2• 11 years ago

I usually use derpy as "well-meaning but perpetually flawed in execution".

It's often used by my colleagues and me to describe a mistake or state-of-mind that can be fixed but temporarily caused suffering or inconvenience. Almost always admits utility or value outside of the specific thing causing annoyance.

For example: "Yeah, the RAID card on that box is kinda derpy--usually fine, but it loses its damn mind on hibernate."

Or: "The way IE11 handles web workers is kinda jank. We tried using transferable objects, but for some reason it derps and trips all over itself in the sending worker."

Torgo• 11 years ago

"derpy" is a third-removed phrase that is short for herp-derp, which itself is short for hurf-durf, which came from a Metafilter comment. The original usage is something like "HURF DURF ${oblivious_statement}" and it meant to denote simplistic cluelessness. Apparently the connection to My Little Pony is that there was a dumb character named "Derpy Hooves". Some people took this character to be mentally retarded, and so "derpy" is seen by some as pejorative term for the mentally retarded. On Reddit, some people use "derp!" to indicate they had a temporary lapse in ability to understand something.

im3w1l• 11 years ago

"Derp is an expression associated with stupidity, much like the earlier forms of interjections like “duh” and “dur.”"

Knowyourmeme has a good history of the word tracing it back to the 1998 movie Baseketball by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

"Derpy Hooves" was the fan given name to a pony that looked, well, derpy.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/derp

thanatropism• 11 years ago

ultimately it’s capitalism’s responsibility to make me produce for it, and within the scope of my career, capitalism failed.

Ok.

mlinksva2• 11 years ago

Taking the assertion as a given, which of these 3 predominate:

1. Firms exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, but author and one of those firms never found each other: search failure?

2. Firms could exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, and those firms would have a competitive advantage over firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable, but those firms have not been created: knowing-doing gap?

3. Firms in which the author would have been satisfied and productive are at a competitive disadvantage to firms with culture/management making author's career unsustainable. If those firms have been created, they have failed quickly. Making author produce for capitalism would have lowered overall production: the system is working?

kragen3• 11 years ago

I’m not convinced of your assertion in #3; maybe I didn’t understand?

Let’s take as a given that Tim’s productivity per hour, making software, is strictly positive (a point on which I am not in fact convinced in fact because of the dogmatic nature of the technical viewpoints of his that I have disagreed with over the years).

It seems, then, that having Tim working on making software, rather than, say, no productive activity whatsoever, would raise overall production, not lower it. You could argue that maybe having Tim work on making software instead of someone else doing it, would lower overall production; but why should we assume that’s the alternative? Maybe Tim likes problem-solving so much that he would be willing to program in exchange for just enough money to rent housing in Oakland, make pizza, and go to Thai Temple Brunch once a week, so he’s only displacing ⅑ of the wages of another programmer. Or maybe, like Joey Hess, he could go live in the country, program on a tiny netbook, and connect to the world over a low-bandwidth microwave link, thus reducing his necessary wages to something like US$6000 per year. Or maybe the software that Tim will write is software that competes with, say, cabbies or coal miners, or maybe bingo-card layout services from copy shops, not other existing software; in that case he isn’t displacing any other programmers at all. Or maybe Tim will work on Rust, and Rust will make programmers more employable, thus “displacing” a negative number of other programmers; the failure of those other programmers’ employers to subsidize Tim’s work is then merely a market failure, the kind of market failure we systematically see around public goods such as free software.

It seems to me that it’s easy to believe that some productive programmer believes all sustainable capitalist firms unbearable. Indeed, the free software movement was founded by just such a programmer, an even less personable one than Tim.

calibraxis• 11 years ago

Yeah, it's a great sentence! Refreshing alternative to those sad articles about crafting yourself into a productive tool for your boss's pleasure...

erroneousfunk2• 11 years ago

Obviously everyone's past and background is different, so how the industry impacts them will also be different, and their views on tech culture will also be different, but many things that the author said resonated with me as well.

I've been a programming for 10 years (three fourths of a masters degree in software engineering -- will be graduating from a part-time program next year, bachelors in engineering, multiple publications, 5 years industry), and, a couple weeks ago, asked a straightforward question about a particularly complicated implementation of a Java callable pattern, to a co-worker who had done some work with the code I was expanding on. He took it as an opportunity to tell me that I'd be dealing with this stuff all the time when I started doing "real programming" and should get used to it. He then talked about the difference between "real programming" and what I'd apparently been doing my whole career for a couple minutes, and sent me links to a github repo with code he said I should look at and learn.

He wasn't more senior than I was, I had always considered us to be equals at work, he never actually answered my question, but the entire exchange unsettled me for a couple days -- I felt like what I'd been working for my entire career was just dismissed as "not real" by him, and potentially others around me (this was after a couple of other similar incidents -- class I had to drop, failed interview for a freelance job -- that had happened recently, which made it especially unnerving)

That's the worst thing about this industry. It's almost habit for some people to dismiss others if they haven't heard of a particular style of in-memory caching that you use, or haven't used some language, or even use a language that you loathe. It's obnoxious. I've been thinking quite a bit about leaving, myself.

hollerith• 11 years ago

The rude coworker probably has that attitude (i.e., the attitude that technical skill is everything) because his social skills are so bad that he has given up on the possibility of improving them.

So, if your skin is thick enough, you might take some comfort in the knowledge that the guy's probably not skilled enough to harm you even if he decides you "deserve" to be harmed :)

erroneousfunk2• 11 years ago

My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or the next?

It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree, computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who can't properly manage a Github repo.

This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to become a "culture of constant pedantry"

tomjen32• 11 years ago

Reading through the lines he didn't know the answer and rather than say so, he turned around and attacked you.

There is only one way to get around things like that and that is to keep pushing, but it requires the self-confidence that you are worth something which cannot be bootstrapped.

angelbob• 11 years ago

Sure. But the original article is a condemnation of an industry that supports and encourages people like the rude coworker. And it's not wrong.

(I've been in the industry for 17 years, not counting part-time jobs, college and various stuff before. I'm not dismissing blindly or without experience.)

pshc• 11 years ago

Thank you for being vulnerable and passionate, Tim. This is really helpful to me right now.

Kalium3• 11 years ago

Why is it so compelling for some people to participate in a world where, ostensibly, they will never be seen as their entire selves and will be judged solely on some putatively objective numerical ranking within a total ordering of all hackers from best to worse?

Not everyone sees the whole of identity as relevant to everything you do at every moment in time. This is not a failing. This is not a problem. This is not people who are different being broken.

You know what? A line of C is syntactically correct or incorrect without regard to the race, gender, sex, or other identity aspect(s) of the individual(s) responsible for writing it.

Since “some people” includes “me”, I have to guess that it’s because they’re terrified to be seen as their entire selves, since I know I am.

Or maybe not. The author pleads for empathy, but displays shockingly little of it, running instead on infantilizing assumptions and generalizations.

I want to get the author to read this: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

theorique• 11 years ago

A line of C is syntactically correct or incorrect without regard to the race, gender, sex, or other identity aspect(s) of the individual(s) responsible for writing it.

Exactly right. Maybe some people (usually young, nerdy teenage guys) base their entire identity on their code. Most people who code professionally or recreationally over the long term strive for excellence and correctness at all times, but don't base their entire identity on coding.

The industry is a lot healthier and more balanced than the OP article makes it out to be.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

the "code" is just a tool to do interesting things is how I always looked at it.

srpablo• 11 years ago

The industry is a lot healthier and more balanced than the OP article makes it out to be.

I think that, for some who believe it is healthy (not necessarily you, but many others I speak to who make similar claims), the conclusion is arrived at incorrectly by survivorship bias: the most visible people _tend_ to seem like they're doing alright! They're usually nice people! Good intentions all around! But speak to people who left or are leaving (like OP), and you get a more complicated picture.

I think the diversity numbers posted by Google, Twitter, Apple etc., and arguments made by a number of underrepresented people in tech make a pretty compelling case to me that the industry and its culture have plenty worth criticizing.

zorpner• 11 years ago

I want to get the author to read this: https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

Please no. That article is genuinely terrible -- it's the worst of hacker exceptionalism coupled with an embedded false equivalence between social rejection and rape. It's a direct symptom of the effect where an echo chamber produces conservative extremism.

I know it's quite popular on HN in part because it provides people with a framework to justify the misbehavior of the social structure they're participating in (somewhat ironic in the face of the "we don't participate in ambient social structures" absurdity the article proposes), but it's fundamentally misguided and that acceptance is itself a problem with this community.

Kalium3• 11 years ago

I suggest it because it makes the counterpoint that different does not fundamentally mean broken. That is something the author does not seem to grasp.

tomjen32• 11 years ago

where an echo chamber produces conservative extremism

For a minimum of 90% of HN the following is true: does not support religion as better than non-religion, support a womans right to choose to have an abortion or not, strongly supports the right of gays to marry, supports the rights of transexuals, supports Obama Care.

That is objectively not a hotbed of conservatism.

Karunamon• 11 years ago

That was a beautiful article and a great read - thank you for linking it.

Most important quote, IMO:

If you tell me that your goal is systemic change toward radical acceptance, and I see that you treat those you perceive as lesser-than with the same kind of scorn and derision that pushed me toward this insular little subculture where I feel comfortable — and I do see this, every day, to the point where I’ve had to cull people I genuinely like from my social media feeds because it was that or get mentally knocked back every few minutes into the headspace I spent my K-12 years in and was only too happy to leave —then you’ve successfully convinced me that your acceptance is not radical and the change you want not systemic.

ggchappell• 11 years ago

Very nice article. Lots of interesting points.

But toward the end, the author writes as if addressing a very specific group of people, and I can't figure out what this group is supposed to be.

FTA:

And that’s the bastardly crux of it all: two groups who nominally want the same thing — a culture of acceptance — separated by the values that lead them to that desire and the fear that ultimately nothing will really change.

One group is the hackers. And the other is?

And then the last paragraph:

All we’re asking for is constructive proof that you accept us for who we are, rather than the fact that we build your toys or that we tripped and fell into a pot of money. The dominant culture has had two decades to demonstrate to us in copious detail what it’s willing to offer — the good parts and the bad ones — and now it’s your turn. Please show your work.

Who is the "you" here? Not the dominant culture, evidently.

Kalium3• 11 years ago

One group is the hackers. And the other is?

I think it's "geek feminists". It's the putative audience for the whole piece.

spectre256• 11 years ago

Having worked at a video game company, I've probably seen about some of the worst that the tech community has to offer (and, granted, some of the best). At the time, I didn't care about most of it: I could just concentrate on writing code and ignore the "drama", but now I care as much if not more about the wellbeing of my team that I no longer have that luxury.

I'd like to think that it will be a relatively short amount of time before business figure out that a happy, well functioning team really is more productive, and things change overnight. But maybe that's too optimistic. Could it be that a boss who "doesn't care about feelings" as the author experienced is the best way to get things done? Probably not, but if so that sure sucks.

alexandercrohde• 11 years ago

This is a genuinely interesting piece that touches a number of loosely related points. They are (as I read them):

- Engineering jobs are not primarily being about problem-solving (like he had hoped)

- High-salaries and vanity perks (chair-massage, lunch) can make us feel work-related frustrations are invalid because we have so many perks (on paper). But vanity perks don't compensate for a fundamentally unfulfilling or disrespectful workplace.

- Programming for oneself and for a company can be fundamentally different experiences emotionally.

- A lot of engineering drive (to work overtime) and need to be "the best" stem from overcompensating and insecurity.

- Negating our own and each others feelings is common as exemplified through phrases like "suck it up"

- Competitiveness and attempts to establish superiority through irrelevant disagreements (mansplaining) illustrate an unbearable culture where you won't find friends.

- Provides an anecdote of an insensitive boss.

- Admits to a problem of anger-swings that is exacerbated by software.

- Admits to feeling so aimless that he has not worked for a week at a time but instead browsed social media.

Clearly the author is not without flaw himself, and doesn't try to pretend he is (anger swings). I really enjoy these candid reflections that bring up a number of great questions instead of artificially trying to answer just one.

walshemj2• 11 years ago

Id disagree the "engineering" isn't about solving problems obviously not everyone is working at JPL or NASA. But back when I worked for BT I was solving a problem when I recovered over £2 million by fixing a bug in or BACS transfer - never got a thank you mind ;-)

x0x0• 11 years ago

It was interesting to read Tim's thoughts.

The flip side of the coin, however, is if he's hated every employer, perhaps it's not them but him.

Software can be a good career, compared to many alternatives. Some autonomy, relaxed hours, relaxed dress codes, a lack of interaction with certain groups of people (I worked at mcdonalds; ask anyone who's worked at low end restaurants. Their business models are to serve the dregs of humanity who delight, in turn, in shitting upon the employees), and, of course, enough money to not worry about eating or housing (well, much about housing).

I was very frustrated my first 4 years in the industry; I had many of the symptoms he had (getting emotionally involved in my job, and, in my case, caring too much about the experience of the end product). Taking a step back, leaving the industry for a while, and realizing it was just a job helped. If my employer wants to treat customers poorly, well, sometimes that's their decision to make and I'm just going to shrug and let it go. I voice my opinion, but if my boss wants something different I let it be just his or her decision.

Hopefully Tim finds what he's looking for.

U0001f62d2• 11 years ago

He's soft. You think a softie like that could handle the intense pressures of Bell Labs or really push the dynamic?

If you want to be a whiner and work to end a paycheck, fine. But if you want to help change the world, you really gotta dig in and work x10 as hard as everyone.

What most of tech don't realize is that the whole world is looking up to us, to deliver a solution, and while guys like that, are sitting, and whining about fairness, every day we're letting people out there down.

michaelochurch3• 11 years ago

This is interesting for many reasons.

Tech is not inherently obnoxious. Government research labs don't have cultures that repel women or where microaggressions (also known as "pissing contests") dominate. Tech is this way because it comes from the top (VCs) down, and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich... and the scramble for position, to be a founder instead of an engineer in one's next gig, dominates any technical focus because most of these startups are actually technically boring and sloppy.

I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about the state of this industry (to be fair, it's worse in California than almost anywhere else) but the questions that come to my mind are... (1) who's going to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?

nostrademons• 11 years ago

I don't know about all government research labs - but I do have friends and family doing Ph.Ds (or postdoccing, or even on the tenure track) where the culture is far, far worse than in Silicon Valley. Get close enough to scientists and you'll see that those fields (and it's not just one...I've heard this about molecular biology, physics, and computer science) are doing their own soul-searching about oppressive cultures.

Jimmy• 11 years ago

An associate professor at a relatively prestigious university that I worked under had essentially become a manager. His days were dominated by answering calls and emails, writing grants, and going to meetings, with all of the actual scientific research delegated to his grad students. Oppressive indeed.

michaelochurch3• 11 years ago

Academia is pretty awful, too. Scarcity makes people bad. The tech world's problem isn't real scarcity but false poverty (OP's "this is a startup" excuse) and the mentality that you get in a false poverty culture.

bkcooper• 11 years ago

"The scramble for position" is probably pretty universal. It's certainly common in academic science, especially since instead of scrambling "to be a founder instead of an engineer," a better mapping would be "to be a founder instead of unemployed."

crpatino• 11 years ago

I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about the state of this industry

I share your admiration to the OP's courage, and while my own experiences are not as extreme as this article, there is a bizarre resonance in it all.

(1) who's going to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?

The one problem I see with this is that we are spoiled by money. "Tech" is a field that produces return on investment, so there's lots of money to burn. In more traditional fields, the economic failures caused by this kind of misbehavior would force out the players who cannot do a minimum of self regulation.

Not us I say. It is hard to convince people of these and other structural problems if they are making money hand over fist. The bosses that say "Suck it up, cry baby" don't really have to even pretend to listen to you. Everything is going well after all. If mistreating high skilled people would put their own positions and incomes in jeopardy, they'd at least have to pay attention.

michaelochurch3• 11 years ago

I just finished a blog post on exactly the topic you're bringing up. There's so much money in tech that it permits a criminal degree of mismanagement. https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/can-tech-fix...

EdwardDiego• 11 years ago

where microaggressions (also known as "pissing contests") dominate

That's my most hated thing about coding - alpha nerd pissing contests, especially when it's about technology choices backed by opinion only.

hueving2• 11 years ago

and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich

That's better than most government research lab projects (in CS) that mostly don't matter and rarely produce anything that the private sector or academia in Universities hasn't already done.

In CS the government research labs are where the washed up post-docs go that couldn't get a tenure-track position and didn't pass interview for a large company with a decent internal research group (e.g. Google, IBM, etc).

noonespecial• 11 years ago

"unpaid emotional labor"

Term of the year, that right there. Shamelessly borrowing and reusing.

relatedanon• 11 years ago

Everything about this reads like an binary. Most things in life are not black and white and not everything is "this way or that way". Frankly, the entire post smacks of lack of empathy and failing to seek to understand rather than being understood.

And, the honest truth is, I might be jaded, but I get the sense from this post the OP looks for reasons to be offended. This frustrates me JUST AS MUCH as people who are insensitive or seek to offend. Both have the same underlying challenge: they genuinely don't care about the person on the other side.

And, for OPs sake, I hope he can find out what he wants to do in life. However the sad truth of the world is there is no nirvana industry, profession, group or structure. Everything has faults. Mature people get this.

powertower• 11 years ago

The biggest red flag for me was OP's complete lack of any specific examples and supportive evidence in the post.

I've seen way too many people claim some injustice or generalization that, when the other side of the story came out, was shown not to really be present to any significant degree in their case.

In most cases, if you are withholding evidence, you are not allowing others to judge the situation for themselves.

From looking around his blog, it's clear that he has some very strong political affiliations, which make the matter worse and the need for evidence even greater.

prospero• 11 years ago

Since the post doesn't mention it explicitly, it's probably worth noting that the title is an allusion to the excellent book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty [1], which is short and worth reading for anyone interested in the behavior of communities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

bra-ket• 11 years ago

crucini• 11 years ago

I am very glad I don't work with this man. This essay really makes me grateful for working with pretty chill people.

We should have better sorting mechanisms so he can work with like-minded people and I can avoid them. I don't say his style is "bad", but it doesn't fit my style.

Which is not to deny he says some valid and interesting things - like the high proportion of emotionally damaged people in tech. But the proper response to this is to work extra hard at bridging the gap with your fellow geeks when they are behaving badly.

I've only seen a few toxic people in more than a decade of tech; I suspect this guy is characterizing many normal people as toxic.

U0001f62d2• 11 years ago

This is literal cancer on the tech industry.

Last Exit to Loyalty

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