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To me, this is consistent with Paul Graham's essay "Keep Your Identity Small." If I have strongly identified myself as a "technical person" then I have excluded

by memset 15y ago

To me, this is consistent with Paul Graham's essay "Keep Your Identity Small." If I have strongly identified myself as a "technical person" then I have excluded myself from the possibility of becoming conversant in non-tech things, like good graphic design. Because I'm just a techie! Then this got me thinking about footnote #2 in the essay - that perhaps it is a net win to call oneself a scientist, which implies that one is not committed to any belief in particular. I was pretty pleased when I read this; "great, I'm a scientist, I must be pretty open-minded!" Easy. Except that - and this article seems to highlight the point - if you box yourself into being a "scientist" (I will suggest that many of us techies consider ourselves scientists, or at least science-minded) then you run the risk of excluding yourself from non-science things. Things like graphic design. (or marketing, accounting, or musicianship.) So. I am not a scientist! Not a techie. Not a designer. I am a person who is pretty (darn) good at technology and still has a lot of difficult things, like graphic design, to practice and get better at!

mattgreenrocks 15y ago
The problem is some titles, such as scientist or engineer, are used to reinforce group identity at some level. And that group identity then starts to push on the self.
robrenaud 15y ago
This is interesting, but I disagree. It's certainly possible to be able to engage in rational discussion about things related to ones own identity. I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages. But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you. And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too. Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.

by memset 15y ago

mattgreenrocks 15y ago

The problem is some titles, such as scientist or engineer, are used to reinforce group identity at some level. And that group identity then starts to push on the self.

robrenaud 15y ago

This is interesting, but I disagree. It's certainly possible to be able to engage in rational discussion about things related to ones own identity. I am a programmer, and primarily I identify as a C++ and Python programmer. Compared to other languages, for a given problem (unless it's truly massive, where the efficiency/expressiveness gain over the other two is large to offset becoming an expert in it), I am almost certainly going to provide an adequate solution quickest in one of those languages. But if you say that Python is slow, doesn't do concurrency well, or has trouble scaling to truly large, 100+ programmer codebases, I'll agree with you. And if you call C++ a large, ugly, language with a ton of ways to really screw yourself, and that is tied to a slow edit/compile/debug cycle, I'll agree with you there too. Here perhaps maybe enlarging my identity helped, if I was just a Python programmer, I wouldn't see how static typing and a really good code searching system would help getting an anchor on a large, complicated C++ code base. Those static types and non-virtual functions means that yes, I can see every place that this particular function is called in our entire code base without having to dig all that much. And if I was just a C++ programmer, I wouldn't know the bliss that is hacking a 200 line program in Python, and solving some mildy complicated but mostly self contained problem in few hour session, all without the bondage of makefiles, compiles, static typing and seg faults.