A Note On The Origin Of Idiotic Behaviour In IT (Archive Material)

Another article from the archives. This one dates to 2016. I believe I wrote this in a coffee shop in Switzerland. Rush job by looks of it, but I'll stand by the core points.

CAVEAT READER: THIS NEEDS A SERIOUS EDIT…

Let´s start with the premise that some IT environments feature more of a particular class of programmer than others; the class that thrives on the illusion of possessing spectacular powers of programming unattainable to other mortals. Powers that also confer on the holder the right to be a complete jerk. In reality, these guys have been selected to join the workforce as a consequence of low hiring standards that focus on mediocre to advanced technical skills and little more. They are chosen by other like-minded individuals and survive because of weak management and the irrational fear that to lose a core developer is a tragedy when in reality all enterprise software can be refactored, even by people who are initially unfamiliar with the source code. There are other reasons too, but they are not as easily summarized.

Regardless of the reasons for their existence, the influence of just one or two overbearing, socially inept, ego-maniacal geeks (for want of a more academic description) can be deeply unsettling for the rest of the company. There’s been a focus lately on the lack of women in IT. Why would any woman want to work in an environment like that? No one does really. Men included.

The good thing is that most jerks move when they realize that they are not pillars of the establishment, but are just normal staff - like everyone else. They move on and on and on and on… Those the ones that do manage to remain in one place long enough to become a fixture may even end up in key positions. In that case, the best thing is to change company yourself - but do clarify to management exactly why you are leaving. If you can´t do it face-to-face, you can always send an email.

1 Free beer, table soccer, Nerf guns, and other crap ideas...

Note that banks don´t openly brag about having beer on tap and table soccer and it is not (to my knowledge) a feature of pharmaceutical companies that lab technicians get to shoot the shit out of the place with Nerf guns. (I was in one recently on a project. Not a Nerf gun in sight. I looked.) Another strategy is to make the office look as cool as possible. Personally, I like snazzy office interiors - but I am far too long of tooth to join a company for the interior decoration at this stage (I´ll come back to this topic later, briefly.)

Companies probably don´t mean to attract bad elements; they do it inadvertently. The job description first selects for the type (Rockstar coder? Come join us! Free beer!). The hiring manager reinforces the initial selection criteria by employing pretty much anyone at all - irrespective of serious personality defects or anti-social tendencies. "Whatever" - the thinking seems to go - "he´ll just be working with more geeks like him anyway...." Many small IT companies go out of their way to engineer their setup to attract the very guy that "loves pizza and beer, is a gamer, is a geek, wears hoodies every day and loves Game of Thrones" (see https://www.siliconrepublic.com/people/solving-gender-gap-tech-diversity-hubspot) But inappropriate behaviour has little or nothing to do with programmers´ gaming, eating or TV habits and everything to do with misconceptions about requisite skills and intelligence.

Maybe part of the blame lies with the owners of small IT companies, who in era of CEO worship on LinkedIn and elsewhere, could be focusing too much on trying to run a cool and trendy company and not putting enough effort into trying to ensure they run a decent work environment. That, or they are simply too aloof and uninterested, too busy trying to ensure that they are respected as CEOs by other CEOs and not by their the employees. 

My advice to a CEO (I say CEO, but it could equally be MD or simply ´owner´) would be to try to gain the respect of your employees. And you do that, in part, by ensuring that they get work in an environment that does not have rampant bullying and toxicity woven into the infrastructure. Don´t build an entire company where your IT setup is constructed and maintained by guys you can´t in your heart say you actually admire or like. And do not entrust your product development to a potential bully that thinks because he wrote a large chunk of code somehow he owns the company, when in fact he is just an employee and nothing more.

If you have no clue what is going on with your workforce, step down and put someone competent in your place. One way to soften the blow of admitting you have no clue what you are doing is to give yourself a new title - something that suggests power and loftiness - but that clearly conveys to staff that you will no longer actively be in control of anything beyond the choice of coffee - Chief Futurist perhaps. You can still take in a hefty pay check, you can still hang with your peers in other companies etc. It´s a good solution and my money says you´ll find a lot of high-level incompetency out there to relate to.

2 Minimum viable worker

So where did the classic IT idiot spawn from? I suspect the first modern generation of coders are the kids that grew up with personal computers long before computers were truly personal; the guys that had Commodore 64s, Amstrads etc. in their bedrooms and who were playing Elite and Commando and The Hobbit and writing little programs when the rest of the kids were making do with crap TV and maybe a simple game console where blocks moved on the screen. Programming was the preserve of spoilt middle class white guys. 

The reason some/many of these guys became professional coders years later is a question of temperament, intelligence, technology, and opportunity. Not everyone with a C64 became a programmer - but some did and they entered a market where their skills, largely honed at home, were rewarded very lucratively. 20 to 30 years later and with the rise of the internet there appeared to be an abundance of antisocial twits in IT.

Modern computers (PCS, handheld devices etc) - don´t require classic programming. Old computers did. So those guys got accustomed to working with computers without the use of handy APIs and GUIs. (This may be an important factor when schools start seriously introducing computing as standard courses on curricula.)

The term minimum viable product was born in the IT industry. And along with minimum viable product, it seems you also got minimum viable worker. Personality problems are compounded by the fact that the engineering standards of software are risable when compared to those of just about any other industry. It does not matter if all the features of an enterprise software product really work when a client purchases it. You just supply a list of feature tagged "coming soon" and hope the clients buy the promise. Try applying the same approach in the automobile industry: "Here is your car sir. You can drive it up to 100 miles an hour. And by next week, if you bring it back to us for some adjustments, we are almost certain that the brakes will work."

The product is not ready, not because this is an incredibly tough job, depending on intellectual powers beyond those of the average human being and things don´t always work out as planned etc etc. Actually chances are very high that the product is not ready because of poor management, poor lead programmers - and frankly, because of people not giving a shit as result of the former two. The development team knows that nothing depends on their work. No lives will be lost. It´s probably just a game or some bog standard tool for working with the internet or doing something relatively inconsequential. "Expect the next release to include a lengthy note of thank-you to all the people that helped identify and fix the bugs that we couldn´t be arsed dealing with..."

3 Beyond the smoke and mirrors

Some of the tactics used by mediocre IT companies is to lure people in with promised of free beer and other cheap or semi-cheap perks, such as dressing up entire office complexes to look like IKEA stores on acid. Once the spell is broken, expect good IT companies to start offering employees proper benefits, like child minding services, gym membership, health insurance, training courses, book allowances, etc.

The next generation of IT ´specialist´ should look out for intelligent work environments that seek out and select normal people and not low-brows that can be won over with some liquor and tat. I recently saw an otherwise decent Irish company on LinkedIn post that it had just installed its beer fridge. My first thought was "Uh oh, why does the CEO think this is a good thing?" How about "we´ve just installed out first treadmill!" or ´We have just signed a contract with the local gym so that all our employees get 50% off annual membership".

One thing I would say to any kid heading into the software development environment and tempted to join a start-up is that he or she should take into account that sometimes people don´t know what is best for them - and environments that seem like fun, may actually be highly toxic. Clowns to the left of you, Jokers to the right,? Get out of there. Management has not cared about the environment to date: pointing it out now won´t help. Move on and find somewhere better. Free beer, table soccer etc. are cheap ´benefits´. I can almost think of nothing more unappealing at work than seeing a group of deeply unhappy colleagues thrashing out the tensions on the soccer table.

And as for junkets - short flashy trips to the hills and the sea may cost a few hundred to a thousand dollars per employee to organize - but that figure pales when compared with what dishing out a proper annual bonus per employee would cost. Some countries offer thirteen salaries where that thirteenth month is officially on top of your salary and not calculated as part of the total. If you get a few glasses of wine and a trip away in a country where thirteenth-month salaries are the norm - but no thirteenth salary - you are effectively working under conditions that are outside the norm. Why is that?

Look around and you will see that the really bright coders are working in companies that offer bonuses, training schemes, promotions and career progression. Don´t be afraid to work for what looks like a dry or dull company- maybe that makes diagnostic machines for hospitals or software for industrial engineering projects. You will almost certainly get a better deal working somewhere like that than - say - at a half-ass games company. Another tip, if you get offered a job by a company abroad, if the company does not offer to help pay your moving costs etc. don´t take the job - or just take it as a foothold in that country and then move to a proper company.

Serious companies value employees and not just pay them. Always bear in mind that it is the dream of many software companies not to be successful at what they do, but to be sold so that the owners can retire early. This is a variation on the classic get rich quick scheme. And of course, as with all these schemes, it comes at the expense of fools or people who think they are getting a better deal in a company that allows them more personal freedom than they would somewhere where they risk wearing a tie. That may be true in many cases, but personal freedom and fun are not the same as anarchy and asshole behaviour. Nor should you take lightly the presence of people that are not only toxic but lazy and unproductive, masquerading, unchallenged, as viable employees only because the emperor is too busy prancing naked before the crowd before he divides up the kingdom.

4 A note on pilots

The ability to fly an airplane was once an extremely rare skill. In a way it still is - but only relatively so. The world has rather a lot of pilots. Noteworthy is that piloting is another male-dominated profession - but one which (with a few exceptions that usually make it to the world news) does not seem to permit the same idiot behaviour as software development. (Remember, in small to medium-sized software companies that attract idiots, life-and-death issues do not usually arise. And if a life-and-death situation does arise, you can be sure it is the result of alcohol and asshole behaviour.)

There have been arguments that piloting is a profession best suited to men. That I do not know. Going by local automobile crash statistics we might all be much better of letting women take over our roads. What I do know is that as coding as a skill becomes less of a rarity, we can expect a much clearer picture of how women rate versus men when it comes to developing parts of software products. And even at present it seems there is very little evidence that women are not as good at coding as men. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women-considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github as one example. Time will tell.

Luckily (in all senses) almost every kid (in the Western world at least) now has access to the very technology that may open the way to steady and lucrative employment down the line. Owning a computer is no longer the preserve of spoilt suburban brats. The next step is to ensure that kids learn how to use them beyond posting crap on Facebook. To help offset the rise of the lone geek, computer science (and lightweight variations of) must become standard subjects in school - possibly even obligatory ones. Remember, we are talking about programming here - being able to make things with a computer - and not just using programs that other programmers have made.

GS