Reading01: What is the ethos of the computing industry?

Maggie
Maggie
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

From my own experience, I believe the ethos of the computing industry is to simple make the world a better place through innovative and creative technology. The readings, however, specifically “Naive Meritocracy and the Meanings of Myth” took a more cynical approach that it is not pure meritocracy that drives the tech world, but rather personal experience and one’s own biases. The article “Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy. And it’s dangerous to hero-worship entrepreneurs” targets the key tenet of entrepreneurship in the tech fields as one core belief with which to grapple:

The undue emphasis placed on entrepreneurship, combined with a limited view of who “counts” as an entrepreneur, function to exclude entire categories of people from ascending to the upper echelon of the industry.

I do believe this quote is partially true: it’s undeniable that certain entrepreneurs make it farther than others due to the personal biases and experiences of those judging them. I do not, however, believe those personal biases and experiences are necessarily ill intentioned or as maligned as the author is making them out to be. I also struggled with the choice of wording in the first phrase in that quote: “the undue emphasis placed on entrepreneurship.” I do not believe that entrepreneurship is focused on too heavily in the tech world and I think that entrepreneurship is one of the guiding principles of the tech industry that should be celebrated the most.

The author also goes on to say:

The myth is that anyone can come from anywhere and achieve great success in Silicon Valley if they are skilled.

I disagree with this quote as well: I believe that it takes a lot more to succeed in Silicon Valley than just skill and I was under the impression that most other students believed this as well. I don’t think this is necessarily a “myth” to anyone. Perhaps I agree with the author somewhat in the sense that maybe in the tech world more emphasis should be placed on pure skill and slightly less on simple luck.

The computing industry most manifests the ideal of striving to achieve more for this world, which is something I agree with as well. If there is a process that is currently being done by humans that could be done significantly faster and cheaper by computers, the computing industry should embrace the opportunity to build the system for that project.

As mentioned in one of the articles, Github is a perfect example of how collaborative and focused the tech industry is on making the world a more innovative and advanced place. Through sharing code and technical strategies with others, Github proves that collaboration and transparency are two more core beliefs of the computing fields. While I do believe that the field manifests these two beliefs fairly well, it is when companies require that they own all the code you produce in a specific duration, whether on or off the job, that I begin to question how true the tech world is to its promise of transparency and its commitment to open source.

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    Maggie

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