Coders

I could have done without all the quotes from Anil Dash (friend of the author), ever since back in my twitter days when he crashed a conversation where I complained about him pandering to the "if only programmers took liberal arts courses" crowd who I suspect are just sore their MFA isn't bringing in six figures (when Wall Streeters crash the economy while giving themselves fat bonuses no one complains about their Ivy League coursework, and that philosophy degree didn't exactly make Peter Thiel a gem of a human being).

This is a general danger of this type of book, reinforcing stereotypes dating back to The Revenge of the Nerds (the 80s was a mixed bag) and giving the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world a pass (by the way, nicely lampooned in the first season of The White Lotus). Blame hyper-focused, socially awkward programmers for pushing out products with unintended and damaging consequences, but if marketing is involved, hey that's just marketing being marketing. And when is someone going to start pointing figures at the ad industry?

That said, although I think the emphasis and balance could be different in parts and a bit less simplistic (the author quotes Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow fame as pooh-poohing the "everyone should learn to code" sentiment by saying that's like everyone should learn plumbing, but as a former homeowner I absolutely believe everyone should learn how their plumbing works and it should be taught in school), this book does comprehensively cover the modern rise of programming culture (and some of the early stuff back when programming was considered women's work, ironically, and of course an Ada mention, but there are other books that focus more on that, like Walter Isaacson's The Innovators). I do personally relate (and remember) to much of this, starting out as a self-taught programmer in the early PC days, majoring in CS when it was relatively new (my dad urged me to choose a more reliable engineering field), seeing more women join in grad school and thinking this will be the great new meritocratic discipline, and then dismay at Silicon Valley startups founded by the wave of east coast MBAs who migrated there to get rich (I interviewed at one San Francisco startup that was doing no development, just staffing up while they were waiting to be bought by ETrade) and who think they worked hard for everything they got by graduating from college (seriously, someone said that).

What I hope readers get out of this book, besides a better understanding of the culture, history and issues that got us where we are, is an appreciation for the creative aspect of programming (the book leans heavily on coders who love automating the heck out of things, but that's never been my bag, I like creating user apps, and one of my favorite anecdotes is from the chapter in Masterminds of Design where the PalmPilot creator walked around with a small slab of wood and mimicked how he would like to use the device).

This is touched upon when talking about web developers, but game developers are noticeably absent in the book (at some studios you're going to get game designers who think programmers are just code monkeys to service their creativity, I even worked for one who had the book How to Lead Nerds on his shelf, but there's a thriving community of all-in one game developers who cobble together all the art, music, design, and code that they need.

The book ends fairly optimistically, describing a Kentucky startup that hires and retrains coal miners as contract programmers, and it turns out that it's a helpful background (another thing I wish people to understand, a lot of things you have to learn in programming, like boolean logic and tracking down bugs, are applicable to a lot of other fields, and vica versa), and they enjoy the creative aspect. Not exactly consistent with the earlier arguments against everyone learning to code, but if anything is a mixed bag, it's coding.

Spectacular in every way a great piece of journalism should be. Studs Turkel's "Working" for the age of software.

As a sometime coder, I wanted to know about my tribe. Did I have one? Also, I sort of knew the author online (and his wife) though I don't think we'd ever had a direct conversation. Online life is like that. I was also surprised to find many other people I "knew" in the book. People like Mark Abene, Max Whitney, and most surprisingly Fran Allen who is the ex-wife of my NYU thesis advisor.

And yet I often felt alienated reading it. I almost abandoned it at times and here I am giving it 4 stars. Were I a logical person, as a coder should be, I'd find that discrepancy disturbing. I came the closest to giving up reading about an introvert pitching business ideas to Peter Thiel. What kind of introvert does that? I screamed (in my head). Do we use the word "introvert" differently? Also, I didn't want to read about Peter Thiel or people like him. I certainly didn't want to be in the same tribe.

Still, I'm glad I stuck it out. Despite cliches about coder culture no deeper than an episode of the TV show Silicon Valley, there were also surprising tribal traits I'd never thought much about before such as compulsive optimization. I'm (sometimes) a compulsive optimizer. That plus discussions of coal miner coders, the origins of AI paranoia, racist and sexist algorithms, Twitter's and Facebook's attempts to combat the misuses of their platforms.

Oh--one more thing. Clive declares there's no analogy of writer's block for coders. That's not true--I have experienced it (as well as writer's block.) I think coders just don't talk about it while writers like to talk about everything.