Select language, opens an overlay

Comment

Coders

the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
Aug 18, 2019sandraperkins rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Mr. Thompson is an entertaining writer, and this book is both fascinating and readable. If you want to understand what is going on behind the scenes in the world of technology, this book is a great place to start. Mr. Thompson makes the argument that programmers are among the most influential people on the planet. All of us interact with software constantly, at work and in our personal lives. (This is especially true for those who spend hours on their smartphones and/or looking at social media, but we are all affected.) Programmers wrote the software that we use to run our lives; their work changes our behavior, and in many cases actually rewires our brains. Programmers, and the tech companies that employ them, and the rich people who invest in them, are controlling our lives. This book explains how that happened. Today in the US the world of coding is dominated by young white males (many of whom graduated from Stanford). This was not historically the case. In the early days of computer science, men thought that engineering the hardware was the “cool” masculine part, and that software was menial, secretarial work best left to women. So the early coders were women, and they were great at it! Coding in the early days was much harder than it is today, as it was all new and computer languages were in their infancy. So this was an intellectually challenging job available to women long before women entered the professions in any significant numbers. (One of the early brilliant coders, Mary Allen Wilkes, ultimately left coding to become a very successful trial attorney and Harvard law professor.) The fact that most coders are privileged young white males is a problem. This leads to tremendous blind spots which might not be important to privileged young white males, but are important to the rest of us. For example, one reason that social media has become a tool of harassment used by trolls and people spreading hate is that privileged young white males are less likely to be the targets of harassment and hate, so it did not occur to them to anticipate this malevolent behavior and head it off at the pass. It may also explain why so much coding effort was put into startup businesses that would do errands and chores that young white males find tedious. So what kind of person is attracted to coding? Traditionally, these characteristics were most common: People who love to solve problems and puzzles; people who love to learn new things (and who hate repetitive work); and people who are not especially interested in other people (they like machines better than other people). Some of the stories about how coders dealt with personal relationships were bizarre and almost funny (reminding me of The Rosie Project and sequels). Interesting point: One huge benefit to hiring employees from nontraditional fields is that you gain their broader perspective. Eager computer science students fresh out of school have little life experience. They think they can solve any problem, but they fail to even notice real life problems because they have never encountered them. “And if they have studied very little of the humanities—history, sociology, literature—they often have what Northrop Frye might have called an ‘uneducated imagination’: They have little ability to envision what motivates the users of their software. They’re great at grasping the binary soul of the machine but not the quantum weirdness of human psychology.” One CEO of a tech company notes that his most productive developers had all studied humanities, such as philosophy or political science. He argues that the software industry should be hiring those who have studied broadly, and then either taught themselves to code on the side or retrained later. There is so much more in this book, including a discussion of the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Enjoy!