The Unspoken Truth About Programming

As much as I'd love to think of the world of programmers as this monolithic group of curious tinkerers and logical mavens interested in how things work, it's really not like that.  Those people who build robots out of nothing just for the grand experience of seeing something come together are few and far between.  More likely is that the majority of people that get involved with computers do so for the employment or out of petty cynicism.  They don't enjoy working with computers so much as they enjoy having technical knowledge that can be held over the head of somebody else.  That, whatever their lot in life, at least they know how to use Control-Alt-Delete, or W3C standards, or all of the Linux commands, and aren't you stupid for not knowing it.  Nerd snobbery as it were.  It's the computer equivalent of sneering at somebody for not knowing the difference between a cyborg and an android.

There's almost an equivalence between how much somebody presents themselves as a programmer to how interested they actually are in it.  The more somebody wears programming t-shirts and bumper stickers, the more I tend to think of them as frauds.  Chances are that if you cared about what you were doing, you'd generally feel ill at ease to grandstand because in the back of your head you know that you could always be that much better.  That sentiment also goes for pretty much any hobby or craft from minature train set collectors to Tai Chi instructors.  It's much worse for programming because there's good job security to be found in techno-cynicism.  If you can keep up a facade of gibberish and confidence, employers will be hard-pressed for a reason to argue against whatever it is you just said.  It reminds me of this presentation given by an executive from Disney on their hiring practices.  In it, he describes how Disney always looks for people who ask questions. There will always be plenty of people in the world willing to talk endlessly about themselves and who knows how much of it is true, but a person who asks questions shows a sign of curiosity, which is always in short supply. 

Then again, if you don't ever present yourself as something out of humility and effacement, then you'll never be recognized as anything in your lifetime.  Instead, hubris will be rewarded nine times out of ten.  Like the old rap adage goes, "the meek won't inherit shit, because I'll just take it from 'em".

—November 20th, 2009

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