hardcover, 448 pages
Published March 26, 2019 by Penguin Press.
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 …
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.
