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I'm a dropped-out philosophy major with a humanities family and cultural background, and wearing what occasionally feels like the impostor's mantle of a softwar
by abalashov 9y ago
I'm a dropped-out philosophy major with a humanities family and cultural background, and wearing what occasionally feels like the impostor's mantle of a software engineer.
This leads to a lot of amusing, sometimes infuriating cultural conflicts. I frequently have this type of conversation with colleagues in my profession, and it's frustrating to see all the technocratic utopianism and narrowly conceived TEDdie-ism that often obtains on the other side.
Lately, I've resorted to making the point about mindfulness and purpose through the compact vehicle of jest, since business interactions seldom organically accommodate discussion of serious ideas and issues. In our hipster age of sham social capital, deniable low-calorie intellectual commitments, and instant disavowal of anything that begets complications down the road, oblique jokes seem to work better than direct critiques.
Something like:
- Client: "Our server has had five-nines uptime this past year!"
- Me: "But was it running good stuff?"
- Client: "What?"
- Me: "What's better, a highly available server sitting idle or running crap, or a less reliable server running good stuff? Quality over quantity, right?"
- Client: "Uhhh..."
- Me: "Think about it. Is the measure of a server really in how long it's been running? The essence of a server is that it serves, yeah? Availability is a secondary—if important—quality."
- Client: "... okay ...?"
- Me: "So, it's not enough to just be up. The host has to run good stuff. Has the server been running good stuff?"
- Client: "Erm... it runs our middleware? Are you asking if it's good code?"
- Me: "No, I'm asking if it's a good thing to run, although I suppose for a thing to be good to run, it has to be written well enough. Bad code doesn't run well."
- Client: "WTF?"
- Me: "Is your middleware good stuff?"
- Client: "What does that even mean?"
- Me: "Doesn't it bother you that you don't know?"
- Client: "... I guess I never really thought about it like that."
It's what I encourage everyone to do. Bring a little ancient Greece to the cloud data centre.
- pram 9y agoSounds tedious.
- abalashov 9y agoVery!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoArguably the definition of philosophy. It's tedious, pedantic, semantically focused and rigorous. All which makes it insufferable, yet ultimately important.
- abalashov 9y agoWell, there's a reason I dropped out, after all. ;-) But the article offers a good exposition of what happens when you have a world with too little philosophy. And that's the relatively harmless side of it. Everyone from Kafka to Hannah Arendt to Erich Fromm has sketched out the malignant side of capitalist education -- a society of people with skills but no Knowledge, a globe of narrow technical specialists with, to borrow a favoured turn of phrase from Dmitry Orlov, "nary a forehead in the crowd disfigured by a sentient impulse". This is a great article. I nominate it for article of the year.
- to3m 9y agoApproximate chance a Sam Kriss article isn't the article of the year on Hacker News: 0 (at least when displayed as an integer). But I wonder if this one would win in a fight with the one about Neil deGrasse Tyson... (I like a lot of HN articles, but the average Sam Kriss article is a lot better. Like I'm a dog drooling over my kibble... and then one day I get a sniff of my master's well-cooked person-food.)
- abalashov 9y agoI didn't know the author was a thing. This is my first collision[1] with his writing, as far as I know, although I don't always pay attention to bylines as much as I should. [1] Badoom tss.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Qwertious 9y agoSo that makes mathematics a sub-branch of philosophy, right?
- pascalxus 9y agoYou really need to define "good stuff", otherwise your point makes no sense.
- abalashov 9y agoThat's the very object of investigation. If they had said, "Yes, it runs good stuff", the next question would be what makes it good. :-)
- throwanem 9y agoYeah, you're basically just cheating your way around 'good' being undefined, and getting some kind of kick out of the fact that the other guy didn't see you palm the card. Presumably he hasn't spent a lot of time dealing with self-aggrandizing intellectual mountebanks - I, on the other hand, have, and 'pretentious' and 'tiresome' are words I scruple not in the slightest to employ in this connection.
- abalashov 9y agoThat's the conclusion most folks are going to draw, yes. I'll take the heat for it. Very occasionally, it spawns interesting discussions whose contours look a lot like those of the article, and I think that's great. The point is far more likely to be lost if I simply straight-up tell them the perceived problem in an "unpretentious" way. A lot of startup bros work quite simply; they may call you a pretentious prick, but they're more likely to respond to challenge to their egos by way of riddle—even if delivered in the dumpster fire form, i.e. a joke that their FOMO makes them anxious about not being in on—than sincere entreatments to ponder the uselessness of another multiplatform ad analytics play. I've given up on the latter.
- throwanem 9y agoThat's all fine as far as it goes; I enjoy such discussions myself, as the opportunity presents. What I don't do, though, is act like a smartass for the sake of acting like a smartass. It's not funny and it's not clever; it's an annoying waste of time for all involved. You can be the smartest person in the room, and if you're as smart as you think you are, everyone else in the room will love you for it. Acting like you're sure you're the smartest person in the room is a great way to make everyone else in the room hate you. Which do you think you're doing, when you act like you laid out above?