I was thirteen when I got my hands on my first computer. It was three cubes, each bigger than a clothes washing machine. In 1980, by luck (and a quixotic alumnus), my high school was the only one in the US to have a DEC PDP/11. It was also a boarding school where I didn't have much to do in the evening, and I was one of those kids who would go on to be "a nerd."
I was "good" with computers. In my junior year, programming was topically wedged into the chemistry curriculum; I ended up writing a 3D engine to catelog and display molecules. I had to come up with the storage format myself and type the molecules in by hand from Von Nostrands, because there was no Internet and no public databases. The teacher looked at everyone's programs, except mine. To me he just said, "I assume you know how this all works, right?" I assured him I did and showed him the photocopied sheets I'd made of ACM papers on 3D displays from a visit we'd made to Princeton.
When I went to college in 1985 all my friends and colleagues either had a PC or one of those brand-new Macs which had come out last year. I waited two years until I convinced my father to buy me an Amiga 2000. Unlike the PC or the Mac, the Amiga came with all of its software available in two massive printed manuals. The Amiga OS was written in C. I bought a C compiler, building pre-ANSI C.
In 1992 I was living in Seattle, doing tech support for customers of an early Internet Service Provider. A woman asked, "Does anyone here know Perl?" I had taught myself Perl a few weeks earlier to make it easier to pull porn off Usenet, so I raised my hand. I was the only one. I ended well-paid as an early professional "webmaster." A lot of my career is like that: A failed startup taught me Webware (an early application server) and Python, which made me a miracle worker when I landed at Isilon. At a security start-up, my knowing both Python and assembly language made me indespensible. My anime habit taught me transcoding, which meant when I moved to the movie distributor I was able to save their business. Converting my stories to e-book format gave me knowledge that made me useful to a textbook startup. And so on.
Today, I get paid what Seattle's developer community calls "The Seattle ceiling," the most money you can make before moving into management. The question on the table is, do I deserve it?
My employer thinks so. Society thinks so. But the very notion of "deserve" is a slippery one: I had a lot of inborn talent, I had a ton of support from my family, and I was incredibly, unbelievably lucky time and again: lucky to go to a high school in 1980 that had Pascal and Fortran, and a working assembler, alongside the usual Basic. Lucky to know Perl at just the right moment. Lucky to know assembly, lucky to know the E-book 2.0 standard, lucky to know transcoding, lucky to understand credit card processing.
I'm a white guy who went to an expensive boarding school and speaks (and writes) better English than most. I also program in two languages exceptionally well and am competently skilled in a half-dozen more. My natural talents, my advantageous environment, my access to sufficient resources, and yes, luck have all placed me where I am today. This is not to say that I didn't work at it: obviously, I love what I do and I work hard to stay current and marketable. But "I love what I do" is clearly, in its own way, a kind of luck. I would probably not have loved being an accountant, which is where my college degree was headed.
What can we say about "deserving"? As Socrates pointed out at his trail, if you have personal gods, you might say "The gods gave me these advantages, in which case what am I that is pleasing to the gods that those not so fortunate are not? Am I pleasing to the gods and thus they bless me, or do they bless me and thus I am pleasing to the gods?" If you have an impersonal god, then you might say that my having the right parents and the right talents and the right luck is an advancement of humanity's overall ultimate objective. Or as Thucydides once wrote, you might say that you "deserve" what you have because you am clever and dominant, and "justice" is just a word the clever and dominant use to constrain and confuse the weak so that you can do what you want, and the weak suffer what they must.
"Deserve" isn't really a good word here. I may have "earned" a place in society, but the escalator I was given as a young man isn't the cliff faced by minority students. I've known women and black men who were far more talented that I am, who nonetheless languished in obscurity because they "didn't fit a culture." I worry that, at my age, I no longer "fit a culture" and my next job search will be much harder.
Imposter Syndrome is the belief that you're not really "good" at your job, and that at any second everyone around you will figure that out, and you'll be fired for incompetence, and you'll never work anywhere else ever again. Imposter syndrome used to be a feature mostly of artists who worried that someday the admiring public would "see through" their skill and realize it was all crap and toss the artist out onto the streets.
My imposter syndrome is fairly strong. Ask my wife. Every time someone compliments me, my response is somewhere along the line of "Yeah, but..." The 'but' is simple: I know how much I don't know. I know where my talents fall short. I also know that there's a million things I don't know, and want to know, and haven't yet learned.
Imposter Syndrome is fairly common among software developers. Kent Beck, who I admire as a developer,
recently wrote about his, and lots of other software developers have the same feeling. I think Imposter Syndrome is a curse of programmers because every once in a while, sometimes for several days in a row, we spend our working hours at the literal limit of human understanding; we hold in our heads so much context about the meaning of all the different abstract things roiling about inside a program that we don't have room for more. Yet when we lift our heads and look at the vast landscape of what there is to know, we realize that we don't know very much at all. Even in our own industry. Even in our own tiny slice of an industry. In some large but specialized fields, like C++ programming or web development, there's that horrible, nagging, "There's so much to this, I'm sure the way I'm doing it is less than ideal." Even if it gets the job done.
I was talking about this with a friend of mine who's a programmer. He said, "I don't want to hear about your Imposter Syndrome. You give me Imposter Syndrome. I don't go home and try to write a whole new programming language from a thirty-year-old textbook. I don't have a github. I just do my job and go home and play video games. You do this and you have, what, a wife and two kids and a house and everything?" He is a very talented programmer, and his people skills mean he's moving up faster than I am.
I believe the inherent libertarian cruelty we frequently talk about regarding silicon valley is partially a result of the anxiety caused by imposter syndrome. Every single one of us in this industry "knows" that our skills could be "worthless" in four years. The anxiety to keep up, the fear that we'll pick the "wrong" skillset to concentrate on and end up with unmarketable skills in the next downturn drives us all a little insane.
Worse, all of the "culture fit" bullshit which excludes women and minorities from workplaces is just, we all know, just that: bullshit. Three of the people on my "must reads" programming blog list are women, one of whom is black, another trans. I wish there were more, but this industry isn't kind to women or minorities.
When looking back at how we got here, most programmers have a story similar to mine. They happened to be the family with a desktop PC in the 80s or 90s, when home PCs aimed at kids were explicitly marketed to boys. They were good at it, or their parets pressured them into "the new good job" and they found they could make money at it. More than their peers were making. But they look at just how goddamn much money they're making, and how it involves sitting in a comfortable room while sodas and snacks are provided, and they wonder, like I do, "Do I deserve this?"
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." But it's not true. Some of us have skills that are scarce, and the more skilled you are, the more the people with money want to reward you. In a just system, though, no one deserves special reward because their skills are scarce. The only real justification for paying us more is that it's a way for institutions to attract and retain talent that's efficient at producing growth.
As Socrates would tell you, that's not an argument for justice. That's an argument for entitlement.
It's this combination of in-the-moment entitlement and on-the-horizon anxiety that makes silicon valley so cruel. Part of it is simple self-justification: a way of saying "the world is structured thus, and I'm on top, and so I am entitled in ways the poor, the homeless, and the unlucky are not." Part of it is the anxiety: "This could all disappear in a heartbeat, so I must make the most of it now and to hell with other people. Let Bill Gates save the world. I can barely afford my $3000/mo apartment."
In the end, we must all make excuses for our lives. We have not given up everything to go begging, as Buddha wished, or surrendered our possessions to follow Jesus, or made our pilgrimage to the Kabah, or even joined the Peace Corp in retirement.
My younger daughter goes to a public high school where she ends up feeling incredibly guilty sometimes because she has a reliable house in a quiet if run-down neighborhood, two parents who get along, who aren't drunk or high all the time, who manage on one income, and who have lots of time for her and for each other. Her friends don't have these luxuries: most come from broken homes, many are latchkey kids with absent parents, some are fighting homelessness. She also feels anger: many of the kids in her junior class just don't seem to care about their futures. They were never taught by their parents to look to the future, to care about it, to nuture yourself for it, and to have a sense of empathy toward your future self. She feels guilty because she didn't earn any of the things she has; she had parents who gave her those things.
I told her that her duty wasn't to tear herself down and be as miserable as they were. That would only increase the sum total misery in the world. Throwing away her foundation would only leave her as lost in the sand as her friends. If she feels that way, her moral duty isn't to tear herself down, it's to be strong, make her foundation as solid as possible, and then reach down and pull up as many people as she could. And yes, that's a life-long job, but I told her I'm sure she's up to it. One day at a time. We could do worse than say "Be excellent to each other!" We don't always succeed, but at least we should try.
I was "good" with computers. In my junior year, programming was topically wedged into the chemistry curriculum; I ended up writing a 3D engine to catelog and display molecules. I had to come up with the storage format myself and type the molecules in by hand from Von Nostrands, because there was no Internet and no public databases. The teacher looked at everyone's programs, except mine. To me he just said, "I assume you know how this all works, right?" I assured him I did and showed him the photocopied sheets I'd made of ACM papers on 3D displays from a visit we'd made to Princeton.
When I went to college in 1985 all my friends and colleagues either had a PC or one of those brand-new Macs which had come out last year. I waited two years until I convinced my father to buy me an Amiga 2000. Unlike the PC or the Mac, the Amiga came with all of its software available in two massive printed manuals. The Amiga OS was written in C. I bought a C compiler, building pre-ANSI C.
In 1992 I was living in Seattle, doing tech support for customers of an early Internet Service Provider. A woman asked, "Does anyone here know Perl?" I had taught myself Perl a few weeks earlier to make it easier to pull porn off Usenet, so I raised my hand. I was the only one. I ended well-paid as an early professional "webmaster." A lot of my career is like that: A failed startup taught me Webware (an early application server) and Python, which made me a miracle worker when I landed at Isilon. At a security start-up, my knowing both Python and assembly language made me indespensible. My anime habit taught me transcoding, which meant when I moved to the movie distributor I was able to save their business. Converting my stories to e-book format gave me knowledge that made me useful to a textbook startup. And so on.
Today, I get paid what Seattle's developer community calls "The Seattle ceiling," the most money you can make before moving into management. The question on the table is, do I deserve it?
My employer thinks so. Society thinks so. But the very notion of "deserve" is a slippery one: I had a lot of inborn talent, I had a ton of support from my family, and I was incredibly, unbelievably lucky time and again: lucky to go to a high school in 1980 that had Pascal and Fortran, and a working assembler, alongside the usual Basic. Lucky to know Perl at just the right moment. Lucky to know assembly, lucky to know the E-book 2.0 standard, lucky to know transcoding, lucky to understand credit card processing.
I'm a white guy who went to an expensive boarding school and speaks (and writes) better English than most. I also program in two languages exceptionally well and am competently skilled in a half-dozen more. My natural talents, my advantageous environment, my access to sufficient resources, and yes, luck have all placed me where I am today. This is not to say that I didn't work at it: obviously, I love what I do and I work hard to stay current and marketable. But "I love what I do" is clearly, in its own way, a kind of luck. I would probably not have loved being an accountant, which is where my college degree was headed.
What can we say about "deserving"? As Socrates pointed out at his trail, if you have personal gods, you might say "The gods gave me these advantages, in which case what am I that is pleasing to the gods that those not so fortunate are not? Am I pleasing to the gods and thus they bless me, or do they bless me and thus I am pleasing to the gods?" If you have an impersonal god, then you might say that my having the right parents and the right talents and the right luck is an advancement of humanity's overall ultimate objective. Or as Thucydides once wrote, you might say that you "deserve" what you have because you am clever and dominant, and "justice" is just a word the clever and dominant use to constrain and confuse the weak so that you can do what you want, and the weak suffer what they must.
"Deserve" isn't really a good word here. I may have "earned" a place in society, but the escalator I was given as a young man isn't the cliff faced by minority students. I've known women and black men who were far more talented that I am, who nonetheless languished in obscurity because they "didn't fit a culture." I worry that, at my age, I no longer "fit a culture" and my next job search will be much harder.
Imposter Syndrome is the belief that you're not really "good" at your job, and that at any second everyone around you will figure that out, and you'll be fired for incompetence, and you'll never work anywhere else ever again. Imposter syndrome used to be a feature mostly of artists who worried that someday the admiring public would "see through" their skill and realize it was all crap and toss the artist out onto the streets.
My imposter syndrome is fairly strong. Ask my wife. Every time someone compliments me, my response is somewhere along the line of "Yeah, but..." The 'but' is simple: I know how much I don't know. I know where my talents fall short. I also know that there's a million things I don't know, and want to know, and haven't yet learned.
Imposter Syndrome is fairly common among software developers. Kent Beck, who I admire as a developer,
recently wrote about his, and lots of other software developers have the same feeling. I think Imposter Syndrome is a curse of programmers because every once in a while, sometimes for several days in a row, we spend our working hours at the literal limit of human understanding; we hold in our heads so much context about the meaning of all the different abstract things roiling about inside a program that we don't have room for more. Yet when we lift our heads and look at the vast landscape of what there is to know, we realize that we don't know very much at all. Even in our own industry. Even in our own tiny slice of an industry. In some large but specialized fields, like C++ programming or web development, there's that horrible, nagging, "There's so much to this, I'm sure the way I'm doing it is less than ideal." Even if it gets the job done.
I was talking about this with a friend of mine who's a programmer. He said, "I don't want to hear about your Imposter Syndrome. You give me Imposter Syndrome. I don't go home and try to write a whole new programming language from a thirty-year-old textbook. I don't have a github. I just do my job and go home and play video games. You do this and you have, what, a wife and two kids and a house and everything?" He is a very talented programmer, and his people skills mean he's moving up faster than I am.
I believe the inherent libertarian cruelty we frequently talk about regarding silicon valley is partially a result of the anxiety caused by imposter syndrome. Every single one of us in this industry "knows" that our skills could be "worthless" in four years. The anxiety to keep up, the fear that we'll pick the "wrong" skillset to concentrate on and end up with unmarketable skills in the next downturn drives us all a little insane.
Worse, all of the "culture fit" bullshit which excludes women and minorities from workplaces is just, we all know, just that: bullshit. Three of the people on my "must reads" programming blog list are women, one of whom is black, another trans. I wish there were more, but this industry isn't kind to women or minorities.
When looking back at how we got here, most programmers have a story similar to mine. They happened to be the family with a desktop PC in the 80s or 90s, when home PCs aimed at kids were explicitly marketed to boys. They were good at it, or their parets pressured them into "the new good job" and they found they could make money at it. More than their peers were making. But they look at just how goddamn much money they're making, and how it involves sitting in a comfortable room while sodas and snacks are provided, and they wonder, like I do, "Do I deserve this?"
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." But it's not true. Some of us have skills that are scarce, and the more skilled you are, the more the people with money want to reward you. In a just system, though, no one deserves special reward because their skills are scarce. The only real justification for paying us more is that it's a way for institutions to attract and retain talent that's efficient at producing growth.
As Socrates would tell you, that's not an argument for justice. That's an argument for entitlement.
It's this combination of in-the-moment entitlement and on-the-horizon anxiety that makes silicon valley so cruel. Part of it is simple self-justification: a way of saying "the world is structured thus, and I'm on top, and so I am entitled in ways the poor, the homeless, and the unlucky are not." Part of it is the anxiety: "This could all disappear in a heartbeat, so I must make the most of it now and to hell with other people. Let Bill Gates save the world. I can barely afford my $3000/mo apartment."
In the end, we must all make excuses for our lives. We have not given up everything to go begging, as Buddha wished, or surrendered our possessions to follow Jesus, or made our pilgrimage to the Kabah, or even joined the Peace Corp in retirement.
My younger daughter goes to a public high school where she ends up feeling incredibly guilty sometimes because she has a reliable house in a quiet if run-down neighborhood, two parents who get along, who aren't drunk or high all the time, who manage on one income, and who have lots of time for her and for each other. Her friends don't have these luxuries: most come from broken homes, many are latchkey kids with absent parents, some are fighting homelessness. She also feels anger: many of the kids in her junior class just don't seem to care about their futures. They were never taught by their parents to look to the future, to care about it, to nuture yourself for it, and to have a sense of empathy toward your future self. She feels guilty because she didn't earn any of the things she has; she had parents who gave her those things.
I told her that her duty wasn't to tear herself down and be as miserable as they were. That would only increase the sum total misery in the world. Throwing away her foundation would only leave her as lost in the sand as her friends. If she feels that way, her moral duty isn't to tear herself down, it's to be strong, make her foundation as solid as possible, and then reach down and pull up as many people as she could. And yes, that's a life-long job, but I told her I'm sure she's up to it. One day at a time. We could do worse than say "Be excellent to each other!" We don't always succeed, but at least we should try.
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