I don't know, I think it's fair to say that computing is a field where really smart, but shy, individuals can participate and excel, compared to many other fields of work. That doesn't mean that everyone in computing fits that description, but it does suggest this group will be overrepresented.
He goes on to say, "Every developer I’ve ever worked with, for instance, is probably more qualified to be a member of Congress than most of the members of Congress we have now." I could say the same about almost everyone I've ever known. The problem is that politics isn't appealing to the type of individuals we consider exemplary, regardless of background. Just look at local politics, where you'll often find aimless drifters or self-serving candidates on the ballot among others who understand that government is complicated machine that needs to be run competently for everyone's benefit. But back on topic, how many of your school board or city council members are also software developers? My guess is few or none, because they just aren't interested or feel that it's too challenging to promote logical solutions in an environment of irrational rivalry.
Politics is a field that is underpaid and consists of mainly putting out fires, being beat on the head by numerous (often very slimy) special interests, trying to convince fickle people to vote for you, and being blamed for everything that's wrong and ignored when things go right.
The pay is a large issue. In the UK, being a Member of Parliament, you get around £65k. That doesn't compare well to business jobs of similar responsibility etc.
Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous. No wonder we have so many people in government from wealthy families.
I don't remember quite where it was but I read that somewhere in Asia the government/MPs get paid a million or so, which results in better people, and obviously less corruption/fiddling accounts etc.
Even more than salary in the US is the cost of getting elected. The CA governors race is going into the 9 digits. It cost millions to elect a congressman, 10's of millions for a senator. The only one with that kind of money are unions, corporations, and rich candidates. The candidates are bought and have to deliver. This is corruption on a massive and pervasive scale. And it's legal.
I've often wondered if part of the problem with mismanagement and corruption in government is that politicians are actually underpaid. Anyone really good wants to go into business or marketing, fields that demand similar skills but that pay way better. Corruption becomes a problem because it's the only way to get a raise...
Not necessarily just politicians, but government workers in general. Low level people like janitors are generally overcompensated compared to their peers, but higher positions like programmers, scientists, analysts, managers, etc, typically make far less than their industry counterparts. I personally know a few government scientists who make about 40% of their industry peers.
Because of that, I think you see a lot of corruption, indifference, or laziness due to workers "compensating" for the pay differences. It certainly doesn't help morale.
Another reason is that to get into politics, graduates normally have to do unpaid internships to get a foot in the door. This is only really an option if your family is well off.
The prime minister gets to live in 10 Downing Street, and can look forward to lucrative book deals, after dinner speeches and consulting gigs (Blair was getting £500k to advise JP Morgan). This isn't true for most jobs. It's not such a bad deal, but obviously most people don't get that far.
> In the UK, being a Member of Parliament, you get around £65k.
Yes, but until recently their salaries were being supplemented by very generous expenses. They were also allowed to take on other work, subject to certain rules.
> Even the prime minister is on less pay than several civil servants which is ridiculous.
Former prime ministers can earn a fortune, however, just look at Tony Blair. Retired MPs can also cash in, to a lesser extent, on their time in office.
>> "Former prime ministers can earn a fortune, however, just look at Tony Blair. Retired MPs can also cash in, to a lesser extent, on their time in office.
"
Right. Which IMHO is a bad idea. PM's are paid a bad salary, but know that they can go work for big.co after they're done being PM. That leaves them wide open to corruption.
By what measure is 65k a small amount of money, from what i remember the average wage in the uk is ~26k, and many full time workers earn much less than this.
I didn't say it was small. It's certainly small for what an MP/PM entails. Even a middle manager in some average company would expect to be on £65k.
So there is a massive disconnect between what members of parliament get paid, and what they would get if they moved into the private sector business world. The issue is that voters as you say, are on average paid a lot less, so they don't understand this point.
Personally, I'd like to see the PM paid £1m or so. MPs maybe £250k. I would expect them to be less corruptable and more focussed.
I'm unaware that the wage for a PM is the main motivating interest for most, in this case David Cameron being I assume at least moderately wealthy, the comparison is flawed I feel.
I don't agree that paying MPs more would create an environment for less corruption, I have so far seen little restraint in human greed, and even those at the very top of the pay scale are not above eking more out of the system.
What would help with corruption, would be a more open lobbying system, restrictions on the jobs MPs can take after leaving parliament and ensuring members of the cabinet cannot be employed when they have obvious biases, a former oil company head being minister for energy for example.
Also as is obviously the case in many industries, Health and Social Care being one, the private sector model does not always make sense.
I disagree. It's the same with teaching. Why become a teacher of X and get paid Y, when you can just become a professional X and get paid 2Y?
I'm in no way saying the private model always makes sense. What I'm saying is that the reason we perhaps have poor choice of MPs, is because all the people who would make great MPs are earning a decent wage in the private business world.
Because the average person isn't going to be fit to be a PM. The amount of responsibility that a PM entails is more than what would be required as CEO of most smaller companies, yet they would make a lot more.
"I don't know, I think it's fair to say that computing is a field where really smart, but shy, individuals can participate and excel, compared to many other fields of work. "
I'd argue that the IQ distribution amongst programmers is no different than that of the general population - there are just more people who mistakenly believe that they're smarter because they can throw together spaghetti code in a text editor.
As for this stereotype about social intelligence being an issue with most programmers - I call b.s. on that too. There are plenty of programmers who know how to socialize and how to relate to people - they're just not the ones portrayed in mass media.
"I'd argue that the IQ distribution amongst programmers is no different than that of the general population - there are just more people who mistakenly believe that they're smarter because they can throw together spaghetti code in a text editor."
That would imply that the average IQ of programmers is 100. Seems unlikely, I do think it attracts people smarter than average (at least in times when programming is not "popular" because big $$$ are promised). I do agree that some programmers have an overinflated sense of intelligence and/or self-importance, though. But there are probably job types where this is much worse...
Why would it be unlikely? Is it just because programmers have more college degrees than average? Isn't that more a measure of opportunity and background than it is of ability? In fact, don't you need to come from a relatively affluent background (read: can afford computers and resources needed for development) to even be exposed to programming?
I'm not trying to incite anything, but having worked in a couple of very different roles in my short career thus far, development being one of them, the proportion of mediocre programmers seems empirically equal to the proportion of medicore marketers, sales people, and so forth.
Programmers can do special things, but the mere act of programming itself doesn't make us special, better than average, or superior to anybody else. Programmer bigotry goes both ways.
"Programmers can do special things, but the mere act of programming itself doesn't make us special, better than average, or superior to anybody else."
I'm not arguing that it does, but the original statement was that the IQ distribution among programmers is no different from the general population, and I doubt that. I have of course zero proof of this, but since when has that stopped anybody? ;-)
It's just a hunch really. I associate programming with "figuring out difficult things", which is more of a pastime that (on average) more intelligent people seem to be attracted to. I am not claiming that this makes anybody "better", nor am I comparing the quality of people in different jobs, or on different educational levels. I'm solely looking at IQ (problematic as that measurement may be... but that is a different story).
To put it another way: if programmers had the same IQ distribution as the general population, then half of all programmers would have an IQ < 100. I find that VERY hard to believe. In this profession we like to joke about copy & paste programmers, or maybe PHP/Java/whatever programmers (insert favorite target here), but come on.
Because programming requires a baseline of logical reasoning ability. Certainly you don't have to be a genius, but I wouldn't expect to find many with IQs below 95 or so.
the proportion of mediocre programmers seems empirically equal to the proportion of medicore marketers, sales people, and so forth.
That's true by definition. Half of all theoretical physicists are "below average", but I'd expect their average IQ to be well over 100.
Depends on what you're measuring and the distribution of it through your population. For example, most people have greater than the average number of feet.
It requires the ability to write, spell, and sit for a few minutes in front of a computer screen that's not showing tweets, lolcatz, or breasts.
It also requires access to a computer, which severely underprivileged are unlikely to have.
Look at how many arts students fail the compulsorily "Intro to programming" courses that a few unis spring on them. I bet that's because (in part) they lack the logic-problem-solving (i.e. IQ) skills to cope with it.
I'd say that programmers in general have a higher general intelligence, and a much higher IQ, than the population in general.
The simple reason that's not true, is the general population contains many people with IQ below 60 but you don't find them holding down jobs let alone working as programmers.
As to there being more high IQ programmers or not that's a little more complex. However, I know the HN population has an extreme oversampling of people with 160+IQ's vs. the general population.
PS: Given there are less than 700k programmers in the US you would expect less than 100 to have an IQ > 160. So, if you can locate say 200 of them you can easily settle the issue.
What did the socially malformed do before computers were invented, anyway? (And I don't mean the Erdoses of the world, I mean the socially-malformed non-geniuses.)
Or has the invention of computers increased the number of socially malformed people out there?
I can't find studies offhand, but I recall the Jesuits attracted the more intellectually minded, while the more socially outcast could try for hermits.
Sherlock Holmes is pretty archetypal of a hyper-focused Asperger's type; the recent 2009 movie with Tony Stark in it probably does a better job than most film adaptations of conveying these aspects of his character.
Continuing off-topic, the ultimate Holmes was portrayed by Jeremy Brett in the several TV series based on the novels and short stories. I do not think they are well-known in the U.S. so I would recommend checking them out if interested in things holmesian.
A lot of this problem is people's misconceptions of the idea of what kind of person a programmer is. The public at large has a big part of this problem.
But another huge part of this problem is the people among us who try and propagate the stereotypes of the 'hacker' of yore. I was at my community hackerspace yesterday, and there were some visitors who were perfect embodiments of the "loud and obnoxious computer nerd who will talk your ear off about something even if you clearly don't understand"
The enemy is us. We need the loudest and most opinionated voices among us to not be the ones who try and mystify computers and programming, the ones who love to use unnecessary jargon with the public. We need the most well known of us to be the smartest, the best spoken, the charming.
"We need the loudest and most opinionated voices among us to not be the ones..."
Aren't the loudest voices always the ones that represent any group? Look at religion... most religious folks do not agree with hate-mongering fundamentalists or crazed wild-eyed apocalyptic preachers, but look who gets on TV.
Is that true? Every time I see someone preaching on TV it seems to be a kindly-looking badly-dressed dude repeating some platitudes about how love is nice. The preachers who get on TV are the Oprahs of the world, the ones who are best at raising money by mumbling things that everyone agrees with, rather than ones with fringe opinions.
On the other hand, there are a whole lot of people who want to believe that all Christians are hate-hongering fundamentalists.
Good point. I'm not well versed in such TV, but it seems that the Christians who get on TV are pastors or community organizers or what have you, very nice people who you might tire of in a half hour. In contrast, the loud, obnoxious, and persistently followed loudmouths who get on TV claim to be Christians.
I agree. Ideally we would have Richard Feynmans and Carl Sagans of programming and computing. Both these people did wonders for the public's perception (and understanding!) of science.
The thing is, IMHO Programming to most people is boring. It's like telling them you're a builder. Yeah you lay some bricks and cement and build stuff. (Well actually, they ask you to fix their PC, since you must know about such things if you're a programmer).
We're not on the cutting edge of science, we're often not inventing anything new, we're just doing boring grunt work shoving things together. We're factory workers. In 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation. We just happen to be in a time where there's still value in being able to manually translate 'what I want' into 'what computer understands'.
The public doesn't want some 'stellar factory worker' championing assembly lines, because it's boring.
I think we need to get real. Programming isn't something most people are interested in, it's not glamorous, it's factory work. Lets not delude ourselves that we're at the cutting edge of new discovery.
Of course there are stereotypes that are very real here. Just like the average man in fashion is camp, the average sysadmin is scary. People who work with computers often do have real 'people' issues. Perhaps that's why they gravitated to computers in the first place. There's no point denying such things.
Building companies, developing products, increasing revenue are all far more interesting to everyone.
"We're not on the cutting edge of science, we're often not inventing anything new, we're just doing boring grunt work shoving things together. We're factory workers. In 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation. We just happen to be in a time where there's still value in being able to manually translate 'what I want' into 'what computer understands'."
Factory workers? Do you really believe that? Or are you saying that that is the way this work is seen by non-programmers?
Also, "in 50 years our jobs will all be obsoleted by automation", may well by true for any job. Once there are machines that will do complex surgeries flawlessly, with access to all the medical knowledge in the world, people won't want a "stellar surgeon" either, for example. I wouldn't like to tell them that what they're doing is "factory work", though. :-)
>I think we need to get real. Programming isn't something most people are interested in, it's not glamorous, it's factory work. Lets not delude ourselves that we're at the cutting edge of new discovery.
And:
>Building companies, developing products, increasing revenue are all far more interesting to everyone.
But really, when was the last revolutionary product made? The last revolutionary way to increase revenue that was sustainable in the long run?
I've seen many revolutions in software, distributed version control for instance ie git, LLVM, gaming and visualization software, and hybrid synchronization systems such as unison. In OSS the 'As Seen on TV' type products generally don't see the light of day, they get buried and forgotten, it's only incorporate environments I've seen crappy interfaces using decrepit languages from the 90's, because those programmers have stopped, or never even started caring about programming. If they did they might take the initiative to fix up the program themselves.
As for the factory worker analogy, I think it's dead wrong. It's like saying anyone who ever designed a product is a factory worker. Programmers have to do a lot of design decisions, interop systems etc. Yeah if you're programming in Java, or making corporate program in programing lanaguage du jour you're probably not really innovating, like any part of life programming is self driven, for every Google there's a struggling business and for every git, there's a Java webapp for accessing an Access database.
Also if you think AI is going to obsoltete us in 50 years you're kinda pushing reality there. MS tried to make programming easy and accessible, look at every <LANGUAGE> in 24 hours book. They download MSVS and run through a bunch of wizards, that's about as much control and innovation as you get with a Java webapp that accesses an access database. Not only that but who's going to program all the new features into the the automation AI? When Intel releases a new architecture or something happens there's always gonna be a need for programmers to translate and incorporate data.
Essentially if what you said was true SIGGRAPH wouldn't exist. There's plenty of innovation going on in the software field, and plenty of talent, like every field there's a bunch of idiots, and plenty of talent. If anything you made a great social commentary, people care only about money, the easiest way to get money is working in middle management. Your argument is based on the corporate programmer stereotype.
> We just happen to be in a time where there's still value in being able to manually translate 'what I want' into 'what computer understands'.
Developers have the ability to think clearly and actually create a working system that follows logical rules and accounts for edge cases and malicious users. This is not just "factory work" and never will be as long as we want software to do something that hasn't been done before, which will always be true.
I'm writing medical software that has the potential to save lives and has a real, measurable social impact. That's hardly factory work; I think that's a gross misrepresentation of our craft.
Software isn't built it's designed, then prototyped, then finalized. The guy on the assembly line isn't designing an MRI machine, that's already been done, he's screwing screws into place. Building implies it's done more than once in a repetitive fashion which is definitely not the case with software, software is written to overcome that.
"This is bigotry, plain and simple. Its taking sterotypical prejudices based on what may be real-life encounters with a relatively small sample group, and applying them to a wide class of people. It’s gross and it needs to end."
this could be equally as well applied to dilbert comics.
seriously, some random guy calls programmers autistic and this somehow deserves a blog post breaking down the argument? give me a break.
Yeah, most of us are crying ourselves to sleep every night sleeping on our giant dragon horde of money. You know who's actually facing significant persecution and bigotry? Gay people. We get a few odd jokes and have to endure the existence of “Big Bang Theory”.
I had hoped this article would be about admonishing programmers to stop being bigots. The community has a lot of sexism and ageism in it (levied in all directions). It also has a lot of irrational wu in it. For example, there are people who think that if you don't use a certain text editor, you aren't fit to work.
I don't know about that. It's not unPC to make fun of lawyers, but I sure wouldn't like for programmers to be the butt of those kind of jokes.
I actually personally witnessed a trainer on Sexual Harassment Avoidance say "You can't make fun of somebody because they are black, or a woman, but you can make fun of them if they are wearing a pocket protector because nerds are not a legally protected class".
Strangely, my reaction to this was not joy that we are not a historically oppressed protected class. It was more like "Why can't we teach people to treat all their colleagues with respect"?
Relax. Every profession is stereotyped by every other profession. Programmers are boring nerds who only care about Star Trek. Lawyers are soul-sucking bastards. Plumbers are filthy and walk around with their butt cracks hanging out. Politicians are also soul-sucking bastards. Engineers are like programmers, only drunk. And so forth.
Most people are quite capable of distinguishing between the professional stereotype and any individuals they may meet, though.
Most politicians are lawyers by trade, never ever forget that. When you really realize the implications of this, it starts making way more sense why things are as screwed up as they are.
Looks like you anticipated Scott Adams' "High Ground Maneuver" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1530274) in that essay - "One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction."
I think that programmers are on the weakness side rather than the strength side:
"And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle."
Politics has a way of becoming a popularity contest, I can see the programmer type presenting a rational, realistic and effective set of policies just to be beaten out by a more charismatic opponent who managed to visit more schools and old peoples homes during the campaign. I really hate in interviews when a politician will go off on a tangent with an answer to avoid and tough but direct question.
I also hate when the interviewers just let them get away with giving non-answers to questions. I once saw an interviewer -- I forget the name -- who, after hearing such an evasive tangent, calmly repeated the question, word for word. It was beautiful, and I've never seen it happen since.
Politicians, marketers, and other "people professions" are slimy and superficial fast-talkers. Businessmen are sociopaths. Neither of those is any more flattering than "engineers are autistic."
I wouldn't want people who are (purely) programmers running congress either; why would they make more rational decisions than lawyers?
However, I would put my money behind scientists and engineers, because on the continuum of rationality, they're probably the best experts to make decisions.
Caveat: of course the nature of politics would still corrupt the integrity of a congress made up by scientists/engineers, because of (a) influence (b) psychological "imbalance" (c) ambition (d) uneducated public, and (e) sex scandals
A system full of smart people with no effective opposition is too unstable, in the physics sense of the term. It's too easy for the system to go flying off in some really, really bad direction with nobody stopping it, because all the smart people have rationalized that this is a good idea and the negative consequences will come far too late. (And smart people are just as vulnerable to the argument "The bad things are happening because our ideas haven't been implemented hard enough, so the solution is to do the same thing, only more!" If I could just wipe one argument from political discourse, that's probably the one I'd pick....) If you need to see government where intellectuals of one sort or another were in uncontested control of the government, the 20th century can provide you with some examples. You probably won't like them.
The real key to good government (and the brilliance of the founding fathers) has actually been to effectively cripple the government and make sure nobody has the power to completely rewrite the government on a whim, and that no coalition that is capable of doing so can last very long. Unfortunately, that still seems to only delay the inevitable, but that's better than nothing.
I think we have different perceptions of the point of the OP. I read it as suggesting that basing decisions on stereotypes is flawed. It doesn't really matter whether few, some, or even most programmers would be poor politicians: The point of a democracy is to allow us to judge the one programmer running for office and elect them based on their actual characteristics.
Are scientists really rational? I would like to think so, but have you looked at science lately? There's brutal infighting over the credit for research, outright corruption over licenses and patents, taking $250 an hour from BP to be "oil spill consultants" and agreeing to three years of silence, working for tobacco companies, and on and on.
I am skeptical that all scientists are rational, but I certainly wouldn't dismiss any one scientist as irrational. I would like to judge her on her merits.
In there he espouses programmers' (and for some reason he thinks web developers are higher up the totem pole than "regular" developers) knack for solving problems, looking for novel solutions, etc. etc., in the context of issues that are increasingly technical (which I think is debatable).
I think one particular aspect of programmers, a stereotype if you will, is that they don't like to compromise and are generally quite independent of mind. Perhaps one could argue this would be a Good Thing™. But, if you look at all the disagreement amongst programmers, I don't see why their proposed solutions would be better than they are currently (in the end it is about politics).
To your question: "Are scientists really rational?" - see my caveat :-)
(PS: I think politicians should focus on creating policy, not try to solve problems that the free market solves better).
I'm not being sarcastic at all. I know several people who would make excellent developers, but they went into teaching, or consulting, or marketing, or whatever. The pay is either equivalent or less, but the status for those positions is higher.
Here's an anecdote: a friend of mine decided that the template blogs available were not what he wanted for a website to showcase his art. So he taught himself php, sql, html, javascript, and gimp, rolled his own site, and asked me to look at the code. It was completely fine -- on par with work I've seen from professionals with 2-3 years experience. He works at Starbucks, which is the kind of job you get with a BFA.
Is it really a tragedy that the world is being deprived more software developers? Doesn't the world already have pretty much all the software developers it needs?
Or, to put it another way, if the (relatively mild) stigma of software development keeps people out of the industry, it helps to raise the pay of those who are in it.
I don't buy that argument. In my opinion, the more talented developers there are, the fewer bad ones will be able to remain in the industry. I don't see the market being glutted by great developers under any circumstances.
Artificial limits on the number of Professional Software Developers established by some governing body (ala dentistry or orthadontics) is a better way of keeping salaries high. Of course, I think that's a terrible idea.
> Doesn't the world already have pretty much all the software developers it needs?
I'm unaware of the job market elsewhere, but in New Zealand there's a distinct shortage of good developers and a decline in the number of CS graduates.
Not sure why this guy has such a livid response to those columns. I think he say's that kind of talk is "ugly" several times. Ok... well, I don't really see a problem with stereotyping programmers to add a little spice to your column. It wouldn't be the first time, and I got a laugh in at those two columns at several points.
I dunno if I would replace politicians with programmers per se... I'd be afraid that they would be all too eager to replace congress with a monte-carlo simulation, replace themselves with shell-scripts and auto-responders, and introduce the use of 20-second slide-shows at press conferences.
But of course being a programmer myself, I find the stereotype humorous at best. Although I will admit that there is a "tribe" mentality that does perpetuate the stereotype even amongst programmers. Most programmers I've met have some sort of eccentricity about them. Those who don't have a quirk or two are often regarded as outsiders or met with suspicion. It's kind of like porn... you know it when you see it.
Awful I know, and I totally agree with your post. But good luck. Humans love simple classifications. It makes the big, bad world easier to deal with.
I think you mean hour-long talks with major points shown in Emacs Org-mode via a projector. If military strategy is under discussion, then a working version of the strategy in Dwarf Fortress will also be presented.
I like your word choice. I think next time someone casually reiterates programmer stereotypes in conversation I will calmly assert they are being a bigot (and pick my battles, take context and social relations into account, etc). It sounds much more effective to just drop the B-word than to launch into a counter-effective "let me prove to you this is incorrect" conversation.
I don't understand this at all. I've never had a problem with communication. Maybe it's because I was always more social with adults than the annoying other middle/high school idiots, maybe it's because I did debate, but I have no problem chatting up CEOs and VPs on more than one occassion.
Also, this is why some new schools are blending their business/communication/cs courses together to create projects that require the interuse of all three skills.
In a big company, any programmer is at most one link on the org chart away from the line of fire of corporate politics. If anything, communication and office political skills are more crucial to programmers than the average for most professions. It's the stereotype that obscures this fact.
Relating and wanting to socialize with them are two different things. If I didn't socialize with adults and people with decent conversation skills that wanted to talk about something besides who in my highschool was a "wangster" or who was knocked up this week or what drugs he was doing etc then it would be different. I can communicate with peers, mentors and managers just fine both at school and at work.
My point, relating to peers and being able to communicate with them when necessary is one thing, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water...
The real differences begins when some prefer, choice (because one wants, enjoys it) to stay home coding instead of go out and socialize. This is how great software projects, like nginx, created and evolved.
Find and take a look of a video of lectures given by Igor (nginx's author) and you will, probably, understand - he isn't a public person.
You should be a little bit autistic (say, near Asperger's) in order to produce something extraordinary. It is just a mater of time, energy and concentration. And practicing, practicing, practicing.
Analogy with public activity, like a politics is rather stupid. You need totally different skill set for any public relations, while those skills are requiring a lot of time of practicing, practicing and practicing.
Professional communication is as difficult as professional programming, btw. man NLP. ^_^
If the majority of people is shy an introvert in a sense, I say we have a lot of votes in our favor. And we don't need to be social to socialize, we can do it all on the web.
He goes on to say, "Every developer I’ve ever worked with, for instance, is probably more qualified to be a member of Congress than most of the members of Congress we have now." I could say the same about almost everyone I've ever known. The problem is that politics isn't appealing to the type of individuals we consider exemplary, regardless of background. Just look at local politics, where you'll often find aimless drifters or self-serving candidates on the ballot among others who understand that government is complicated machine that needs to be run competently for everyone's benefit. But back on topic, how many of your school board or city council members are also software developers? My guess is few or none, because they just aren't interested or feel that it's too challenging to promote logical solutions in an environment of irrational rivalry.