
Last Exit to Loyalty - RKoutnik
http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1890351.html
======
Kalium
> Why is it so compelling for some people to participate in a world where,
> ostensibly, they will never be seen as their entire selves and will be
> judged solely on some putatively objective numerical ranking within a total
> ordering of all hackers from best to worse?

Not everyone sees the whole of identity as relevant to everything you do at
every moment in time. This is not a failing. This is not a problem. This is
not people who are different being broken.

You know what? A line of C is syntactically correct or incorrect without
regard to the race, gender, sex, or other identity aspect(s) of the
individual(s) responsible for writing it.

> Since “some people” includes “me”, I have to guess that it’s because they’re
> terrified to be seen as their entire selves, since I know I am.

Or maybe not. The author pleads for empathy, but displays shockingly little of
it, running instead on infantilizing assumptions and generalizations.

I want to get the author to read this: [https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-
nerds-collide-31895b01e68c](https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-
collide-31895b01e68c)

~~~
theorique
_A line of C is syntactically correct or incorrect without regard to the race,
gender, sex, or other identity aspect(s) of the individual(s) responsible for
writing it._

Exactly right. Maybe some people (usually young, nerdy teenage guys) base
their entire identity on their code. Most people who code professionally or
recreationally over the long term strive for excellence and correctness at all
times, but don't base their entire identity on coding.

The industry is a lot healthier and more balanced than the OP article makes it
out to be.

~~~
srpablo
> The industry is a lot healthier and more balanced than the OP article makes
> it out to be.

I think that, for some who believe it is healthy (not necessarily you, but
many others I speak to who make similar claims), the conclusion is arrived at
incorrectly by survivorship bias: the most visible people _tend_ to seem like
they're doing alright! They're usually nice people! Good intentions all
around! But speak to people who left or are leaving (like OP), and you get a
more complicated picture.

I think the diversity numbers posted by Google, Twitter, Apple etc., and
arguments made by a number of underrepresented people in tech make a pretty
compelling case to me that the industry and its culture have plenty worth
criticizing.

~~~
hueving
>I think the diversity numbers posted by Google, Twitter, Apple etc.

... reflect almost precisely the pipeline of people coming out of
universities. Our culture discouraged young girls from coding. We cut off our
oxygen supply and we idiotically sit around arguing about how we should treat
the remaining oxygen better so we don't suffocate.

There are not enough qualified women to bring the ratio of software engineers
anywhere near normal. You can bitch and moan about terrible companies and
culture, but you can't attract a population of people that don't exist.

------
alexandercrohde
This is a genuinely interesting piece that touches a number of loosely related
points. They are (as I read them):

\- Engineering jobs are not primarily being about problem-solving (like he had
hoped)

\- High-salaries and vanity perks (chair-massage, lunch) can make us feel
work-related frustrations are invalid because we have so many perks (on
paper). But vanity perks don't compensate for a fundamentally unfulfilling or
disrespectful workplace.

\- Programming for oneself and for a company can be fundamentally different
experiences emotionally.

\- A lot of engineering drive (to work overtime) and need to be "the best"
stem from overcompensating and insecurity.

\- Negating our own and each others feelings is common as exemplified through
phrases like "suck it up"

\- Competitiveness and attempts to establish superiority through irrelevant
disagreements (mansplaining) illustrate an unbearable culture where you won't
find friends.

\- Provides an anecdote of an insensitive boss.

\- Admits to a problem of anger-swings that is exacerbated by software.

\- Admits to feeling so aimless that he has not worked for a week at a time
but instead browsed social media.

Clearly the author is not without flaw himself, and doesn't try to pretend he
is (anger swings). I really enjoy these candid reflections that bring up a
number of great questions instead of artificially trying to answer just one.

~~~
x0x0
It was interesting to read Tim's thoughts.

The flip side of the coin, however, is if he's hated every employer, perhaps
it's not them but him.

Software can be a good career, compared to many alternatives. Some autonomy,
relaxed hours, relaxed dress codes, a lack of interaction with certain groups
of people (I worked at mcdonalds; ask anyone who's worked at low end
restaurants. Their business models are to serve the dregs of humanity who
delight, in turn, in shitting upon the employees), and, of course, enough
money to not worry about eating or housing (well, much about housing).

I was very frustrated my first 4 years in the industry; I had many of the
symptoms he had (getting emotionally involved in my job, and, in my case,
caring too much about the experience of the end product). Taking a step back,
leaving the industry for a while, and realizing it was just a job helped. If
my employer wants to treat customers poorly, well, sometimes that's their
decision to make and I'm just going to shrug and let it go. I voice my
opinion, but if my boss wants something different I let it be just his or her
decision.

Hopefully Tim finds what he's looking for.

~~~
U0001f62d
He's soft. You think a softie like that could handle the intense pressures of
Bell Labs or really push the dynamic?

If you want to be a whiner and work to end a paycheck, fine. But if you want
to help change the world, you really gotta dig in and work x10 as hard as
everyone.

What most of tech don't realize is that the whole world is looking up to us,
to deliver a solution, and while guys like that, are sitting, and whining
about fairness, every day we're letting people out there down.

------
erroneousfunk
Obviously everyone's past and background is different, so how the industry
impacts them will also be different, and their views on tech culture will also
be different, but many things that the author said resonated with me as well.

I've been a programming for 10 years (three fourths of a masters degree in
software engineering -- will be graduating from a part-time program next year,
bachelors in engineering, multiple publications, 5 years industry), and, a
couple weeks ago, asked a straightforward question about a particularly
complicated implementation of a Java callable pattern, to a co-worker who had
done some work with the code I was expanding on. He took it as an opportunity
to tell me that I'd be dealing with this stuff all the time when I started
doing "real programming" and should get used to it. He then talked about the
difference between "real programming" and what I'd apparently been doing my
whole career for a couple minutes, and sent me links to a github repo with
code he said I should look at and learn.

He wasn't more senior than I was, I had always considered us to be equals at
work, he never actually answered my question, but the entire exchange
unsettled me for a couple days -- I felt like what I'd been working for my
entire career was just dismissed as "not real" by him, and potentially others
around me (this was after a couple of other similar incidents -- class I had
to drop, failed interview for a freelance job -- that had happened recently,
which made it especially unnerving)

That's the worst thing about this industry. It's almost habit for some people
to dismiss others if they haven't heard of a particular style of in-memory
caching that you use, or haven't used some language, or even use a language
that you loathe. It's obnoxious. I've been thinking quite a bit about leaving,
myself.

~~~
hollerith
The rude coworker probably has that attitude (i.e., the attitude that
technical skill is everything) because his social skills are so bad that he
has given up on the possibility of improving them.

So, if your skin is thick enough, you might take some comfort in the knowledge
that the guy's probably not skilled enough to harm you even if he decides you
"deserve" to be harmed :)

~~~
erroneousfunk
My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I
wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next
job, or the next?

It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play
here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real
programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to
person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look
down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree,
computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're
self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who
can't properly manage a Github repo.

This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to
become a "culture of constant pedantry"

~~~
kragen
I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count,
and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand
source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t
write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local
variables.

That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d
never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they _did_ study,
either.

I _also_ don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in
industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree
lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a
language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I _probably
should_ have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking,
spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in
practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years,
how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things?

And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come
upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender
and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per
sentence.

So, I think I really need to have more patience.

------
angersock
I don't completely (or even mostly!) agree with the author's politics or
culture views.

That said, there is a still a lot here that resonates with me and, I suspect,
with others.

Tech is a pretty derpy industry.

~~~
budu3
What does derpy mean in this context? I tried googling it but all I saw were
some My Little Pony references.

~~~
smacktoward
Socially clumsy or awkward, sometimes painfully so. Non-empathetic. Unable (or
unwilling) to put itself in other peoples' shoes.

~~~
ceequof
budu3: Note that this is a very non-idiomatic use of "derpy". Many other words
would be more suitable.

------
pshc
Thank you for being vulnerable and passionate, Tim. This is really helpful to
me right now.

------
relatedanon
Everything about this reads like an binary. Most things in life are not black
and white and not everything is "this way or that way". Frankly, the entire
post smacks of lack of empathy and failing to seek to understand rather than
being understood.

And, the honest truth is, I might be jaded, but I get the sense from this post
the OP looks for reasons to be offended. This frustrates me JUST AS MUCH as
people who are insensitive or seek to offend. Both have the same underlying
challenge: they genuinely don't care about the person on the other side.

And, for OPs sake, I hope he can find out what he wants to do in life. However
the sad truth of the world is there is no nirvana industry, profession, group
or structure. Everything has faults. Mature people get this.

~~~
powertower
The biggest red flag for me was OP's complete lack of any specific examples
and supportive evidence in the post.

I've seen way too many people claim some injustice or generalization that,
when the other side of the story came out, was shown not to really be present
to any significant degree in their case.

In most cases, if you are withholding evidence, you are not allowing others to
judge the situation for themselves.

From looking around his blog, it's clear that he has some very strong
political affiliations, which make the matter worse and the need for evidence
even greater.

------
thanatropism
> ultimately it’s capitalism’s responsibility to make me produce for it, and
> within the scope of my career, capitalism failed.

Ok.

~~~
mlinksva
Taking the assertion as a given, which of these 3 predominate:

1\. Firms exist in which author would have been satisfied and productive, but
author and one of those firms never found each other: search failure?

2\. Firms could exist in which author would have been satisfied and
productive, and those firms would have a competitive advantage over firms with
culture/management making author's career unsustainable, but those firms have
not been created: knowing-doing gap?

3\. Firms in which the author would have been satisfied and productive are at
a competitive disadvantage to firms with culture/management making author's
career unsustainable. If those firms have been created, they have failed
quickly. Making author produce for capitalism would have lowered overall
production: the system is working?

~~~
kragen
I’m not convinced of your assertion in #3; maybe I didn’t understand?

Let’s take as a given that Tim’s productivity per hour, making software, is
strictly positive (a point on which I am not in fact convinced in fact because
of the dogmatic nature of the technical viewpoints of his that I have
disagreed with over the years).

It seems, then, that having Tim working on making software, rather than, say,
no productive activity whatsoever, would raise overall production, not lower
it. You could argue that maybe having Tim work on making software instead of
_someone else_ doing it, would lower overall production; but why should we
assume that’s the alternative? Maybe Tim likes problem-solving so much that he
would be willing to program in exchange for just enough money to rent housing
in Oakland, make pizza, and go to Thai Temple Brunch once a week, so he’s only
displacing ⅑ of the wages of another programmer. Or maybe, like Joey Hess, he
could go live in the country, program on a tiny netbook, and connect to the
world over a low-bandwidth microwave link, thus reducing his necessary wages
to something like US$6000 per year. Or maybe the software that Tim will write
is software that competes with, say, cabbies or coal miners, or maybe bingo-
card layout services from copy shops, not other existing software; in that
case he isn’t displacing any other programmers at all. Or maybe Tim will work
on Rust, and Rust will make programmers more employable, thus “displacing” a
negative number of other programmers; the failure of those other programmers’
employers to subsidize Tim’s work is then merely a market failure, the kind of
market failure we systematically see around public goods such as free
software.

It seems to me that it’s easy to believe that some productive programmer
believes all sustainable capitalist firms unbearable. Indeed, the free
software movement was founded by just such a programmer, an even less
personable one than Tim.

~~~
mlinksva
Most of your third paragraph would argue for my #1 or #2 cases: there's an
opportunity for more arrangements that would allow productive programmers who
are not happy in firms with the dominant culture/management practice to have
sustainable programming careers, there just need to be more such arrangements
or better ways of such programmers finding out about such arrangements.

But my #1 or and especially #2 could mean that there's a much bigger
opportunity to make typical working conditions better. From this one might see
an opportunity for the industry to improve itself, or an opportunity for
outside regulation to stimulate such improvement.

My #3 predominating means that non-typical arrangements are irrelevant except
for extreme outliers willing to make great material sacrifices and that toxic
workplaces are somehow (presumably through causing people to work very long
hours and work hard due to fear) more productive than bearable workplaces, and
presumably there's little difference between workplaces at non- and for-
profits whether producing nonfree or free software, because they're all caught
up in a race to the bottom. In this case a productive programmer who finds
toxic workplaces unbearable and does not want to make extreme material
sacrifices would have nowhere to go other than a different full time career,
and there's no opportunity to improve the industry to change this outcome from
within the industry. From this one could accept that the current state of
industry is optimal, or demand outside regulation, or demand the overthrow of
capitalism.

To the limited extent that I know about them, I admire Tim, Joey, and RMS and
assume they've all made the right choices for themselves.

~~~
kragen
Well, my third paragraph wasn’t arguing that it would be profitable to employ
Tim, just that him working on software in such situations would increase total
production of value. If that value isn’t sufficiently capturable by the
employer, it still might be unprofitable. So it doesn’t actually argue for
your #1 or #2 case.

I agree that if #1 or #2 is true, then there’s a big and profitable
opportunity to make things better within capitalism. But if they’re not true,
that doesn’t imply that regulation or the overthrow of capitalism is strictly
necessary to improve the situation; it could be that non-capitalist
institutions that can coexist with capitalism could solve the problem.
Dominant assurance contracts on Kickstarter, for example. :)

------
noonespecial
_" unpaid emotional labor"_

Term of the year, that right there. Shamelessly borrowing and reusing.

------
spectre256
Having worked at a video game company, I've probably seen about some of the
worst that the tech community has to offer (and, granted, some of the best).
At the time, I didn't care about most of it: I could just concentrate on
writing code and ignore the "drama", but now I care as much if not more about
the wellbeing of my team that I no longer have that luxury.

I'd like to think that it will be a relatively short amount of time before
business figure out that a happy, well functioning team really is more
productive, and things change overnight. But maybe that's too optimistic.
Could it be that a boss who "doesn't care about feelings" as the author
experienced is the best way to get things done? Probably not, but if so that
sure sucks.

------
prospero
Since the post doesn't mention it explicitly, it's probably worth noting that
the title is an allusion to the excellent book _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_ [1],
which is short and worth reading for anyone interested in the behavior of
communities.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty)

------
crucini
I am very glad I don't work with this man. This essay really makes me grateful
for working with pretty chill people.

We should have better sorting mechanisms so he can work with like-minded
people and I can avoid them. I don't say his style is "bad", but it doesn't
fit my style.

Which is not to deny he says some valid and interesting things - like the high
proportion of emotionally damaged people in tech. But the proper response to
this is to work extra hard at bridging the gap with your fellow geeks when
they are behaving badly.

I've only seen a few toxic people in more than a decade of tech; I suspect
this guy is characterizing many normal people as toxic.

------
bra-ket
related:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty)

------
U0001f62d
This is literal cancer on the tech industry.

------
michaelochurch
This is interesting for many reasons.

Tech is not _inherently_ obnoxious. Government research labs don't have
cultures that repel women or where microaggressions (also known as "pissing
contests") dominate. Tech is this way because it comes from the top (VCs)
down, and because it's private-sector tech oriented toward products that
mostly don't matter but might make a few individuals rich... and the scramble
for position, to be a founder instead of an engineer in one's next gig,
dominates any technical focus because most of these startups are actually
technically boring and sloppy.

I admire the OP for having the courage to stand up and speak the truth about
the state of this industry (to be fair, it's worse in California than almost
anywhere else) but the questions that come to my mind are... (1) who's going
to stick around and fight? and (2) how do we fix it?

~~~
nostrademons
I don't know about all government research labs - but I do have friends and
family doing Ph.Ds (or postdoccing, or even on the tenure track) where the
culture is far, far worse than in Silicon Valley. Get close enough to
scientists and you'll see that those fields (and it's not just one...I've
heard this about molecular biology, physics, and computer science) are doing
their own soul-searching about oppressive cultures.

~~~
Jimmy
An associate professor at a relatively prestigious university that I worked
under had essentially become a manager. His days were dominated by answering
calls and emails, writing grants, and going to meetings, with all of the
actual scientific research delegated to his grad students. Oppressive indeed.

