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Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. I

Tech engineers get pushed around by upper management and have failed to professionalize like doctors because too many of them lack social and political savvy. It's a clear personality trait in the profession. Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Can you imagine a top lawyer looking like that? The importance of projecting a serious professional image to the broader society doesn't seem to even occur to most software people.

ahomescu1 13y ago
> Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Doctors/lawyers interact with clients/patients a lot, so they dress to impress; whereas programmers only interact with other programmers or managers, who don't really care. If you're a programmer, the code you write matters much more than the human interaction around it (arguably the same can be said about doctors and lawyers, but a lot of people wouldn't hire a lawyer dressed in jeans and a t-shirt). Also, there are external dress requirements. For example, a lawyer might get thrown out of court if he/she shows up in casual clothes.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  > programmers only interact with other programmers or managers This is the problem half the time. Nerds in childish t-shirts want to sit around pecking out code in isolation instead of taking full responsibility for their work by putting on a jacket and working the organization. This is why IT projects are consistently such disasters and why executives have the idea to get cheap grunts to do this stuff under a layer of middle managers.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit: The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A programmer is paid for the software she creates; the user of that software has no idea what the programmer who wrote it looks like, and they judge the quality of it by what it does. So programmers have developed other metrics that they use to form a status hierarchy, notably the quality and difficulty of programs that you've written, but also things that are somewhat fuzzier like the technologies and tools you use. Contrast this with a lawyer or salesman, where your buying decisions are directly influenced by how they present themselves and you often cannot directly determine the quality of their product. People in these professions have a strong incentive to present themselves well because customers have no other information to base their purchasing decisions on. Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search [1]. [1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm
    - judk 13y ago
      In particular, coders do dress to impress-- they dress up the software to make it look fancier, bigger, more important, more substantial.
    - defen 13y ago
      > Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search That's completely irrelevant. The point is not whether Google engineers make enough money to be comfortable, or an amount that other people would consider "a lot", or anything like that. The point is that "all" the relevant big tech companies in SV colluded, prisoner's dilemma style, to pay them less than they would have if there were no collusion.
      - nostrademons 13y ago
        I'm responding only to the parent poster, not to original article. The view put forth in this particular comment thread is that programmers are underpaid because they don't dress well, which I find ridiculous. The article has a more reasonable explanation that programmers are underpaid because their employers collude, but plenty of others have already responded to that.
  - jazzyk 13y ago
    Amen. It is the Jobs-Wozniak syndrome re-played again and again. We focus on technical issues and (mostly) ignore the business value we produce (aesthetics included). Guess what, the money is being made not because of code quality only, but from the business value it produces. So whoever presents him/herself neatly and can accentuate the awesomeness of the product (taking credit for your work), becomes the rainmaker and assumes power.
  - clavalle 13y ago
    "Working the organization" is generally a low value activity as far as the organization is concerned. What good does it do anyone aside from the schmoozer and the schmoozee that some middle manager at Apple is good as schmoozing?
yapcguy 13y ago
Exactly, but it's worse. There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder. You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.
- natrius 13y ago
  Doctors and lawyers use the legal system to limit the number of people they compete with. I will not model my profession on those.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.
- lhnz 13y ago
  This is the unfortunate truth. So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer. And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.) The affordance which a software engineer now has will not last forever; power left on the table is power lost. As engineering becomes more commoditised (through education and simpler tools) the pay check will drastically decrease but the less-than positive terms will remain. It's a personal choice that anybody can make to raise their opinion of themselves, to learn how an executive (and other professions) behave and to not accept less than they are worth. There's so much opportunity to be had. Nobody should be acting like a cog! You should all be playing greater games and constantly redefining what you believe you can do. A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be.
  - 13y ago
wildgift 13y ago
True, techs are often nerds, but not always. Look at someone like Larry Ellison, or a lot of startup founders, etc. Also, look at how FOSS was created - by nerds. So, nerds can organize socially. There are unions for cinematographers and editors in the media. Those are two terribly "nerdy" jobs, and the people who do them are, honestly, huge nerds. Musicians have a union, and a pension system, and generally do pickup work rather than working for companies. And the musicians in that union are quite a mix of people ranging from "alternative" people (aka, cool nerds) and classical musicians. Dressing is not important. Business casual is good enough unless you're working in an orchestra. You can be professional in jeans and short sleeved shirts. Most physicians in the ER dress casual.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the interests of this group (thus solving the free-rider problem) is an essential social skill. However, when groups professionalize in the sense of restricting the supply of people to that job, they are benefiting their own in-group at the expense of society as a whole (customers, employees and shareholders, people excluded from the profession, and indirectly, everyone else). Tech workers intuitively recognize this, and professionalization is the antithesis of hacker culture. In fact, I would say that professionalization wouldn't actually help the nerdy people you are referring to. It would just bring in different people (of course the social justice movement is already working hard to eliminate hacker/nerd culture from the tech industry). As this article shows, tech workers are fighting this issue through the legal system. Maybe a union will be needed just to deal with this issue. I suspect that the rivalry between Google and Facebook, and the fear of further lawsuits, will keep competition rigorous in the short term.

ahomescu1 13y ago

> Look at the way so many programmers choose to dress and groom. Doctors/lawyers interact with clients/patients a lot, so they dress to impress; whereas programmers only interact with other programmers or managers, who don't really care. If you're a programmer, the code you write matters much more than the human interaction around it (arguably the same can be said about doctors and lawyers, but a lot of people wouldn't hire a lawyer dressed in jeans and a t-shirt). Also, there are external dress requirements. For example, a lawyer might get thrown out of court if he/she shows up in casual clothes.

a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
> programmers only interact with other programmers or managers This is the problem half the time. Nerds in childish t-shirts want to sit around pecking out code in isolation instead of taking full responsibility for their work by putting on a jacket and working the organization. This is why IT projects are consistently such disasters and why executives have the idea to get cheap grunts to do this stuff under a layer of middle managers.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit: The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A programmer is paid for the software she creates; the user of that software has no idea what the programmer who wrote it looks like, and they judge the quality of it by what it does. So programmers have developed other metrics that they use to form a status hierarchy, notably the quality and difficulty of programs that you've written, but also things that are somewhat fuzzier like the technologies and tools you use. Contrast this with a lawyer or salesman, where your buying decisions are directly influenced by how they present themselves and you often cannot directly determine the quality of their product. People in these professions have a strong incentive to present themselves well because customers have no other information to base their purchasing decisions on. Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search [1]. [1] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/ceo-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm
  - judk 13y ago
    In particular, coders do dress to impress-- they dress up the software to make it look fancier, bigger, more important, more substantial.
  - defen 13y ago
    > Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search That's completely irrelevant. The point is not whether Google engineers make enough money to be comfortable, or an amount that other people would consider "a lot", or anything like that. The point is that "all" the relevant big tech companies in SV colluded, prisoner's dilemma style, to pay them less than they would have if there were no collusion.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      I'm responding only to the parent poster, not to original article. The view put forth in this particular comment thread is that programmers are underpaid because they don't dress well, which I find ridiculous. The article has a more reasonable explanation that programmers are underpaid because their employers collude, but plenty of others have already responded to that.
- jazzyk 13y ago
  Amen. It is the Jobs-Wozniak syndrome re-played again and again. We focus on technical issues and (mostly) ignore the business value we produce (aesthetics included). Guess what, the money is being made not because of code quality only, but from the business value it produces. So whoever presents him/herself neatly and can accentuate the awesomeness of the product (taking credit for your work), becomes the rainmaker and assumes power.
- clavalle 13y ago
  "Working the organization" is generally a low value activity as far as the organization is concerned. What good does it do anyone aside from the schmoozer and the schmoozee that some middle manager at Apple is good as schmoozing?

yapcguy 13y ago

Exactly, but it's worse. There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder. You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.

natrius 13y ago
Doctors and lawyers use the legal system to limit the number of people they compete with. I will not model my profession on those.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I agree. People here are acting as if our collective unwillingness to lobby for rent-seeking legislation, is a personality flaw.
lhnz 13y ago
This is the unfortunate truth. So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer. And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.) The affordance which a software engineer now has will not last forever; power left on the table is power lost. As engineering becomes more commoditised (through education and simpler tools) the pay check will drastically decrease but the less-than positive terms will remain. It's a personal choice that anybody can make to raise their opinion of themselves, to learn how an executive (and other professions) behave and to not accept less than they are worth. There's so much opportunity to be had. Nobody should be acting like a cog! You should all be playing greater games and constantly redefining what you believe you can do. A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be.
- 13y ago

wildgift 13y ago

True, techs are often nerds, but not always. Look at someone like Larry Ellison, or a lot of startup founders, etc. Also, look at how FOSS was created - by nerds. So, nerds can organize socially. There are unions for cinematographers and editors in the media. Those are two terribly "nerdy" jobs, and the people who do them are, honestly, huge nerds. Musicians have a union, and a pension system, and generally do pickup work rather than working for companies. And the musicians in that union are quite a mix of people ranging from "alternative" people (aka, cool nerds) and classical musicians. Dressing is not important. Business casual is good enough unless you're working in an orchestra. You can be professional in jeans and short sleeved shirts. Most physicians in the ER dress casual.

yetanotherphd 13y ago

I have no doubt that professionalization is highly related to social and political savvy. The ability to form an "in-group" and commit to doing what is in the interests of this group (thus solving the free-rider problem) is an essential social skill. However, when groups professionalize in the sense of restricting the supply of people to that job, they are benefiting their own in-group at the expense of society as a whole (customers, employees and shareholders, people excluded from the profession, and indirectly, everyone else). Tech workers intuitively recognize this, and professionalization is the antithesis of hacker culture. In fact, I would say that professionalization wouldn't actually help the nerdy people you are referring to. It would just bring in different people (of course the social justice movement is already working hard to eliminate hacker/nerd culture from the tech industry). As this article shows, tech workers are fighting this issue through the legal system. Maybe a union will be needed just to deal with this issue. I suspect that the rivalry between Google and Facebook, and the fear of further lawsuits, will keep competition rigorous in the short term.