I’m going to start this analysis by focusing on a negative pattern of behavior that seems unrelated to technology’s Damaso Effect.
The Misogyny Loop
I know someone (I’ll call him “Stan”) who’s about 30 and has never been in a relationship that lasted longer than about six months. He’s not unattractive and, while his opinions on many topics are wrong, he’s intelligent and well-employed. He’s even cordial. It’s pretty easy to see what’s wrong with the guy: he’s openly misogynistic. He believes that women are petty, irrational, capricious, emotionally dysregulated and have poor values, and it doesn’t take much to get him to share that opinion.
On one hand, he’s completely wrong. I don’t mean that it’s morally abhorrent (although it is) so much as that it’s just incorrect. Virtually everything Stan believes (or, at least, says he believes) about women and men and the relative value of each is total horseshit. You can’t take it seriously; it will just make you angry. Unfortunately, men who think this way are not uncommon, either in the technology industry or the world at large. Some learn canned social skills to trick shallow, confused women into going to bed with them and call themselves “pickup artists”. Others call themselves “incels” (involuntarily celibate) and stew about their predicament on the Internet. They’re awful to listen to, repetitive in their whining, and generally bad at seeing the real problem. “Hookup culture” is revolting, but pinning it on the women alone is misguided. The general pattern, for these men, is that they take traits of the worst people and project them on to “women”. I wouldn’t be surprised if female misandrists didn’t do the same to “men”. It’s a gender-neutral fact that the sexually and socially “loudest” people are often the worst ones, but they’re also a small fraction of the population. If you let them bias you, you’ll reach bad conclusions.
Stan, when he generalizes to “women”, sounds like an idiot. (If women are irrational and emotional, then why are most crimes committed by men?) Yet, I will give him this: his judgment is correct, over most of the women he’s dated. I’ve met a few of them, and they generally treat him poorly. He dates stupid, shallow, capricious, and damaged women, and this generates negative experiences that reinforce his blighted worldview. Comparing his small group of male friends to an adversely selected set of women, he concludes that men are better people and that women are unfair, capricious, and slutty creatures to be used only for sex. His negative views of woman keep him from meeting normal women (they don’t want anything to do with a guy who thinks women are innately inferior, and who can blame them?) and forming healthy relationships, and thus he falls into a Misogyny Loop. Because his attitudes toward women are abhorrent, he meets and dates damaged women who confirm his biases, and becomes even more entrenched in this negative view of the female sex.
Technology and the Business
I’ve written about the Damaso Effect. Programmers have a tribal dislike for “The Business”, for HR, and for the managers and executives (“pointy-haired bosses”) who pay us. As with Stan’s misogyny, these feelings didn’t emerge out of nothing. The sampling may be adverse and biased (and I’ll get to that) but the experiences are real. For most of us, the businesspeople who manage us are incompetent fuckups. Stack ranking, a textbook example of bad HR that is despised by competent business leaders, is still quite common in technology companies, and that’s because our biggest companies actually are run by a bunch of fucking idiots.
From Harvard Business School, the good students go on to start hedge funds or work on billion-dollar private equity deals, the middling ones get partner-track slots at McKinsey or end up directly report to CEOs of large corporations, and the leftovers get passed to California and boss nerds around. The best of our tribe (software engineers and lifelong technologists) answer to the worst of theirs. It sucks. It’s hard to ignore the tribal hatred that comes out of the humiliation inherent in a skilled programmer being told, by a fresh-out-of-college management consultant, that he has to attach future code-change commits to “user stories”. But let’s try to put any hatred and history aside, and step back. By any definition of the concept of a “business person”, there are competent, smart, ethical ones out there. I’ve met quite a few of them. They exist. They just… don’t come anywhere near our industry. Can you blame them?
Could we be like Stan? Is it possible that our blanket negative view of “business people” makes our industry unattractive to all but the hangers-on in their tribe? I think so. I think that it’s likely.
The screwy art of making exceptions
There’s something I should mention about Stan. Because he’s socially inept and (in his own mind) a tad bit desperate, he fabricates relationships that exist only in his head. His bitterness toward women in general leads him to erroneously up-regulate a woman’s signals. Thinking that women are horrible creatures who are predisposed to despise him, he tends to overreact to basic decency (real and superficial) in them. So he will mistake politeness for niceness, niceness for friendship, and friendship for sexual attraction. Also, his extreme negativity makes him a terrible judge of character. If a woman is basically decent to him, he puts her on a pedestal. She becomes one of those ultra-rare “good ones”, untouched by “feminism” and “frat boys” and the filth of the world. After this happens, she can treat him like dirt and he’ll make excuses for her. He’ll see the light (on her, but not in general) eventually, but his worldview becomes even more depraved as he learns the wrong lesson, that even his “perfect woman” turned out to be awful.
Similar to Stan’s misogyny, software engineers also harbor a generalized dislike for “business people”, whom we tend to view as stupid, emotional, childish, petty, and short-sighted. And about the business people who run our industry, we’re not wrong. We’re just failing to see the whole set of them. (See a pattern, here?) This bitterness doesn’t make us keen observers or tough judges of character. It makes us fucking marks. A naive engineer, whose model of a slimy businessman is a 40-year-old Harvard graduate in a suit, is underprepared when the 25-year-old Stanford “bro”, in jeans and sandals, cuts him out of the startup he built.
In relationships and business, deeply bitter people are often clingy. Whether it’s “women” or “business”, there is some Other that they despise but also depend on, and they tend to caricature it in the most vicious way. Anyone sending signals that negate this stereotype can break through the “bitter shield”, win undeserved trust, and eventually have license to treat a person badly while that person makes excuses for the awful behavior. In dating, the Stans of the world fall for “quirky” girls who’ve put on glasses to send “I’m not a slut” signals without improving their moral character. In business, the bitter engineers fall head-over-heels for talentless young things who read enough Hacker News to know that professing fandom for Postgres and OCaml will make them seem technical and smart (even while they continue to force their engineers to use PHP and work 18-hour days). In all of this confusion, we get cloudy but stable result where most of the clueless young engineers, even if they despise “managers” and “executives” in the abstract, like their supervisors. This is analogous to the common American attitude toward elected officials, and why there is so much incumbency that bad politicians are almost never voted out. Most Americans dislike “politicians” who make backhanded deals “in Washington”, but they love their politicians. “George Starr fixed the pothole on my street!” Well, yeah, that’s what he’s fucking supposed to do (maybe not directly, but you get the idea). These people fail to recognize that their own charismatic local favorites, more often than not, are part of what’s wrong with “politicians”. They also tend, because they’ve put a specific person (the “alpha male” to whom they’ve clung for protection) on a pedestal, to react with undue emotion (a sense of “betrayal”) when the relationship goes sour.
Good and bad tribalism
The truth about us, as software engineers, is that we get our tribalism completely-the-fuck wrong. We can be immensely tribal about stupid shit. If a person doesn’t have an active Github profile, we “flip the switch” (bozo bit) and assume that he’s an idiot, even if he has a completely different job. People who don’t “look like” programmers (and there shouldn’t fucking be a “look”, because technology is too fucking important to push talent out for stupid reasons) face an uphill battle at getting basic respect. We’re quite superficial, and I’ve been guilty of this in the past, too, such as by overvaluing technical preferences as an index of value or intelligence (e.g. “he’s a Java developer, he must be an idiot.”) Our superficiality, however, makes us really easy to confuse and hack.
We tend to think of “non-technical people”, in the business world, as idiots. It doesn’t help fight this stereotype that many of them are idiots, especially in technology, due to the Damaso Effect (which, as I’ve indicated, might be partly our fault).
Before going further, let me give a working definition of idiot for the business world: an idiot is either (a) a person doing an important job poorly, or (b) one doing an unimportant (or counterproductive) job aggressively enough to cause problems. There are many causes for idiocy, and while the cerebral narcissists among us tend to jump to a lack of innate intelligence, that’s actually one of the less common ones. Other issues are (and these will overlap) willful ignorance, lack of care, poor interpersonal skills, dislike of one’s job, and many external ones such as inept (or malevolent) supervision, bad strategic leadership, or environmental incoherency. Over 90% of non-technical people (and probably, to be honest, more than 70% of programmers) are idiots at work and a lack of innate intelligence isn’t the problem. We err when we assume that it is. Our adversaries (who are not always idiots themselves, but who spread and encourage idiocy for their own benefit) can, usually, flash enough cognitive muscle to break our stereotype of “the business idiot” and get us to take them seriously– to our detriment.
For all our superficial tribalism, software engineers are shockingly quick to sell their colleagues out to management, and to do exactly what their bosses want. Let’s use stack ranking as an example. When a company puts forced ranking in place, every savvy manager will hire an “insurance incompetent” or two, and put them on inconsequential work. It’s not a good thing for the company or the world, but it’s a way to put the team at ease because their jobs aren’t at risk; when the stack-rank gods demand human sacrifice, the insurance incompetents go while everyone capable stays employed. This allows members of the core team to focus on their jobs rather than politics. Typical software engineers are too clueless to realize the value in this and, further yet, will vehemently oppose it. “I can’t believe I’m working at the same company as a guy who mixes tabs and spaces!” (“I can’t believe someone else’s money is being used to hire an incompetent and protect my job!”) Many engineers (without political benefit in doing so) turn on their own weak, and will sell out their entire teams if given time in the executive sun. This is because they’re easy to confuse by invoking superficial tribal color. “Don’t worry, Tom’s not an asshole manager. He plays video games and used to code, ten years ago. He’s one of us.” Because engineers are a low-status tribe in the business world, it only takes a few flashes of tribal empathy, from The Business, to compromise the weakest of us. Instead of falling for this nonsense, we need to stop judging people based on tribal identity and start judging them based on what they actually do.
Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but managers don’t really suffer from engineers’ tribal dislike of them. We still need people with at least some of these skills. The tribalism makes engineers easy to manipulate. Here’s one place where the two cases (of Stan’s misogyny, and engineers’ dislike of business people) depart. Misogyny actually hurts women. Our dislike of “slimy suit-wearing businessmen” just makes us easier to hack by slimy businessmen who don’t wear suits– because they’re 23-year-old Stanford grads. Businesspeople don’t give a shit whether we like or hate or love or despise “businesspeople”; they just care about making money off of us. And while we should be gladly helping the best of them make money (so long as they don’t harm in the world in doing so, and they share the wealth with us) we should not be allowing them to drive us into subordination.
The right kind of tribalism
The current software tribalism is mean-spirited, exclusionary, and privileged, but it’s also ineffective at getting us what we actually want. For an analogue, peruse Quinn Norton’s notion of white privilege as, in reality, a ruse that convinces disaffected whites to oppose their own economic interests; because, at least, they have it better than the blacks. We’ve created a culture of subordinate and pointless privilege. In software, we now have a world in which well-educated, white men never have to grow up, and this suits the venture capitalists and “founders” because, so long as we aren’t required to turn into adults, we won’t expect to be paid or treated like adults.
I’ve written at length about the value of having a professional guild or collective bargaining. Respectfully negotiating on our behalf, toward our genuine shared interests, will get us a lot further than tribal shit flinging. Rather than having this unfocused dislike toward a large set of people whose skills we barely understand, we should figure out how, with focus and respect, to reach equality. We need them and they need us.
It’s going to be hard to reach common ground with the business elites. There’s much in the business world that is archaic, anti-meritocratic, classist, anti-feminist, irrational, mean-spirited, status-driven, imperialistic, and just plain broken. A world in which “pedigree” and connections matter so much more than substance, drive, and talent is a hard one to respect, and that’s what the business mainstream, at the highest levels, is. (It’s less that way amid the small, local businesses that tech companies, more often than not, blow away.) But what world are we creating, and have we created? The noxious miasma in VC-funded Silicon Valley is not superior to the corporate mainstream “establishment”; it is the establishment. So maybe it’s time to just forget about “worlds” and start talking to individuals as we figure out how to do things better. We had our chance to build a better world, in Northern California, back when housing was cheap and the air was fresh and the word “traffic” referred to telecommunications rather than automotive congestion, and we fucking blew it. Maybe those people in Washington and New York (“the paper belt”) were worth listening to, after all. Maybe people who’ve spent as much time amid bureaucracy and human politics and finance have a thing or few they can teach us.
There are certain tribal values among us, as technologists, that are worth preserving. What makes us unusual is that our discipline is progressive in nature. Code, well written, can be used forever. While most of the world is mired in zero-sum power struggles and territorial squabbling, we get a chance to add, even if in a small way, to the sum of human knowledge. That’s pretty damn cool, and the best things about us as a culture, I believe, derive from the progressive and collaborative nature of what we do. At least on paper, we create new wealth. We solve new problems, and the nature of code is that a solution once devised can be used anywhere.
Unfortunately, there are facts that break against us: our leadership is absolutely excremental, as Valleywag gleefully (and very competently) shows the world on a regular basis. “We” (meaning the executives injected into companies where we do most of the actual fucking work) destroyed San Francisco, and now the world is bracing for our “disruption”, just hoping that a 2000-style dot-bomb crash will prevent us “techies” (meaning the slimy proto-executives whom many of us blindly follow) from ruining everything. We have to fix “ourselves”, and fast. We have to organize so we can choose better leaders. Instead of having puppet leaders shoved into our top ranks from the refuse of the business world, we have to prove to ourselves (and to them) that we can do better when we select leaders who respect the best of our values, while diverting us away from our worst tendencies. They don’t have to be full-time coders. They probably won’t be. They have to be technologists in ethics; being so in craft is important, but secondary.
Right now, as a tribe, we’re far from self-sufficient. Indeed, in the 21st century, self-sufficiency doesn’t really exist. That ship sailed (or, more accurately, that container carrier motored away) a long time ago, and the global economy is far too interconnected. There’s a lot of knowledge that we, as a tribe of a couple million people with elite technical skills, just don’t have. We should be meeting with union organizers in order to learn the diverse forms of collective bargaining, and in order to find an arrangement that prevents the negatives (wage normalization, tyranny of seniority, mediocrity) associated with unions from setting in. We should be venturing deeper into “the business world” to find better (and, most likely, more experienced and older) leadership. There’s a whole slew of successes and failures that the rest of the business and governmental world has seen over the past few centuries, and throwing that knowledge out because we think we’re above “paper belt” politics (and we’re obviously not) does no good to anyone. We’ve got to do two things. First, we have to end our own tribal bigotry and reach out. We must vehemently oppose assaults (external and internal) on our values; but, at the same time, welcome other kinds of people. It’s not just our game, and they know how to do things (such as lead and build organizations) that we haven’t learned to do for ourselves. Second, we need to develop the ability to manage our own affairs. We have to step up, from the inside, and lead. If we don’t, then we’ll continue to answer to the mainstream business culture’s fail-outs, and stack ranking will never go away.
The core of the problem
It’s going to be hard to fix our affairs. To illustrate this, let’s take note of Stan and his dating woes. The transactional, superficial view of dating is that people match up based on attractiveness, whether superficial and physical or total and holistic: 10’s pair up with 10’s, 3’s pair up with 3’s, and so on, and it’s rare that a person gets to go into a higher “league”. Some people find this reductive and offensive, but there’s no question that the early stages of dating often are that way. Of course, as the Stans of the world will endlessly complain, there are skewing factors. Age is one, because men tend to prefer younger women and women prefer older men. Thus, 25-year-old men will readily date 20-year-old women, but the reverse is uncommon. Among college students, a male “7” is unlikely to find a female “7” in his age group, because the women have more options and some are “taken off the market” by older men. He’ll have to settle for a “4” or “5” if he wants relational market equality. Among 40-year-olds, it’s the reverse; average-looking men, in that pool, become highly desirable. Most men who fall into the Misogyny Loop do so in high school or college, when they get shafted by age-skew and there really is a shortage of available decent women (relative to the number of decent men) in the same-age dating pool. It’s not that available decent women (at any age) don’t exist. There are a lot of them, but (among 20-year-olds) they are popped off the market faster than men.
I don’t care to analyze dating, because I’m a 31-year-old married man who believes (and hopes) he is done with that nonsense, for life. It should be obvious that I intend to apply this to business. Business has “marriage/matching problems” and skew issues as people with separate skill sets try to size each other up and find parity. What should the equity split be, say, between two Technology 7’s and a Business 8? How should decisions be reached, and salaries be computed?
Let’s talk about new business formation (startups). The only reason why software engineers are decently well-paid, compared to the rest of the U.S. increasingly-former middle class, is that (at least, in theory) we have an alternative: to do a startup. A good software engineer typically makes $140,000 per year in San Francisco, $110,000 in Chicago, $90,000 in London, and $60,000 in Paris or Madrid. Why? It’s not just cost of living: London’s more expensive than San Francisco, and Paris isn’t cheap either. It’s about competing alternatives. The Googles have to compete with the Facebooks and the Facebooks have to compete with companies that don’t exist yet; and, for all the Valley’s flaws, it’s still the easiest place in the world to raise venture capital. To start a business that is interesting in the technology space, two things (the “2 C’s”) matter: Code or Contacts. If someone’s not packing one or the other (or, very rarely, both) then you can’t afford to make that person a founder.
You’ll soon need accountants, attorneys, HR experts, economists, and sales managers. I don’t mean to denigrate those skills. They just don’t need to be baked in to a new company’s formation. They’ll typically be employees, not founders. You can start with a service like TriNet and “bootstrap” up to a full-fledged HR department, just as you can start with Amazon Web Services (“the cloud”) and build your own data centers later. Early on, however, you absolutely need Code and, even more desperately, you need Contacts. These two assets almost never occur in the same person (they both take years of full-time effort to build, except for the very wealthy are born into Contacts) so they’re often described as separate roles: the technology co-founder(s) and business co-founder(s). In order to have a healthy company without warring tribes, you need equality between the partners. So, at what point are they socially equal, in terms of leverage?
Of course, there’s a hell of a lot of skew. Is a Tech 8, like me, going to pair up with a Biz 8? Not a chance. The market value of a Tech 8 isn’t that much higher than that of a Tech 5. A Tech 5’s salary will be between $90,000 and $150,000 per year; the Tech 8 is at $120,000 to $200,000, depending on location. A Biz 8 can get a $500,000-per-year job out of a 5-minute phone call. They, to put it simply, have more options. Tech 10s have to stay in tech for their skills to be treated as meaningful. (I’d argue that a legit Technology 10 could kill it, with proper training, in business or law or medicine… but I won’t get into that here.) Business 10s can go anywhere in the global economy. There are two fundamental commodities in an economy: Past (property, reputation, connections, wealth) and Future (motivation, creativity, talent, grit) and the exchange rate between the two has always favored Past.
Even in the contemporary technology “startup” world, it matters more to have Contacts than Code. A Tech 8 can write a scalable, back-end recommendation engine in Haskell. She’s incredibly valuable. You can bet a company on her. On the other hand, a Biz 6 can get a TED invite and a Biz 8 can get into Davos. Even a Biz 7 can deliver Sequoia or Y Combinator in an afternoon with half an idea scribbled on a napkin, and can get a total pile of crap “acqui-hired” for $5 million per head by Google. The Biz 8 and Tech 8 “deserve” to be equal in social standing, but they’re not. The skew is enormous. It sucks and it’s frustrating, but it’s something we have to deal with.
If I (a Tech 8 without special connections) went to New York or San Francisco today and looked for a “business co-founder”, I’d have to sift through hundreds of Biz 3-5 who “just need a programmer”, offering 5% equity in companies around their lame ideas, not shared ideas that might emerge and be better than either of us would come up with individually. It’s a dreadful market. The exchange rate between Code and Contacts is morally unacceptable. Contacts is winning so handily that it’s creating tribal hatred and bad startups. It’s driving us, as programmers, toward defensive rejection. We loathe our (objectively unfair) low status relative to the business mainstream, and our loss of the world (Silicon Valley) we created. We should loathe it. We should be disgusted (even though a large part of it is our fault). Unfortunately, many of us overreact. Instead of hating arrogant individuals who lord their unreasonable, unjustified high status over us, we let it evolve into a generalized hatred of “business people” or “suits” or “MBAs”. I’ve been as guilty of this, in the past, as anyone, but we’ve got to fucking stop.
So why is it like this? Why is there so much skew? Part of it is that, sadly, society just has more options for Contacts than for Code. Jeff Dean (a Tech 10) would likely be an obscure programmer without Google. The proving ground of a large corporation that allowed him to hone and show his exceptional engineering ability; without his work at Google, we wouldn’t know that he’s a Tech 10. On the other hand, Biz 10’s aren’t anywhere near tech companies; they’re managers of billion-dollar hedge funds who turn away almost all investment offered to them. Hell, it’s rare that you find a Biz 6 willing to be a “business co-founder”. A Silicon Valley founder is a middling product manager, and the true executives are the investors, and savvy people spot the pattern quickly and head for the investor ranks if they’re going to be part of that game. Biz 5-6 are routinely offered entry-level (associate) positions at prestigious venture capital firms, and Biz 7-8 get partner-level jobs, offered on the spot. Yes, it’s unfair as hell. So, what are we going to do about it?
I’m coming to an answer that isn’t the forceful kind of solution that I tend to like. Slinging mud is a hell of a lot of fun. I won’t deny that. And there’s a world of deserving targets out there. However, is hating “The Business” getting us anywhere? Or might we do better to swallow our pride, and to replace unfocused tribal dislike with focused and deliberate organization around our own interests? I think the answers are obvious, here.
If we don’t want for the bulk of us to answer to Biz 3’s for the rest of our lives, then we need to start attracting the Biz 7-9’s who have other options. We have to convince them that what we can build is genuinely important (which means we need to stop it with the played-out social media nonsense). They don’t need us, but we (probably) need them. Their skills, we can learn and grow internally, and we’ll have to do some of that. Their contacts, at least for now, have to be drawn in from outside, since we (as engineers) are a deeply middle-class group. It’s going to be hard to do this. It’s going to be especially hard to convince them to form partnerships at the level of equality that we deserve. I don’t have all of the answers, certainly not yet. I do think that we’d have better odds if we took stock of, and reformed, our attitudes toward business people and what they do. This will also force us to acquire a sense of nuance that will enable us to push the actually scummy business leaders (who are, right now, most of them) out of our industry. It can’t hurt.
