Sergey Brin-Larry Page (Google), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Kevin Systrom (Instagram), Bobby Murphy (Snapchat), Steve Chen (YouTube), Brian Acton (WhatsApp), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and a lot more… These are just a few of the people who changed our lives, forever, with the companies they founded/co-founded. You know what is common with them, right? All of them are either engineers or engineering drop-outs. And this is the main reason of primitiveness of the products they created. Yeah, everything they created should have been ‘better’. Let me explain what I mean…
The idea of ‘using tools to solve human problems’ is not something new. As the human race, we have always been creating tools to solve our problems since the first day of our existence. Invention of axe, wheel or results of Industrial Revolution… They were all about this and they were big things for their time.
Since approximately 250 years, we have been extremely focused on using machines as tools to make our lives more comfortable and we have made a remarkable progress comparing to the first steam powered engine in terms of technology we use. Time has flied and by the middle of 20th century, the new ‘steam power’ became ‘information’ with the Information Age.
We have witnessed computerization of almost every aspect of our lives. Most of us, now, carry billions of times more powerful computers in our pockets than the room-sized ENIAC. By the invention of “The Internet” the spectacular power of integrated circuit (a.k.a silicon chips) and the opportunities it created have gone beyond the dreams. Very few people in the history were able to even dream this.
Considering only the last 25 years of our history and evaluating the progress we made in terms of technology is supposedly enough to amaze anyone who even knows very little about history. We should definitely appreciate and pay respect to any scientist or engineer who has a part in all giant steps we have taken. (I should make it clear that what I mean is real scientists and engineers who invented real things.)
But… There is a big catch here.
Even though the progress we have taken seems to be and is real, it is not much actually. We are still in early times of Information Age and the products created with the capabilities of existing high technology are just like things were made by axes that cave-men use. Just like invention of axe affected the life of a cave-man; invention of internet and super powerful smartphones has changed our lives dramatically. For example; Google has changed our lives, Facebook and WhatsApp helped us to connect with each other easily, Amazon enabled us to get anything we want without moving our butt etc. etc. But we are using the blessed high technology we have very “primitively”.
Let’s travel in time and get back to old-good days of a cave-man. While our guy sitting in front of his cave, The inventor cave-man shows up and says:
‘- Hey dude, I think I made something useful!’.
Our guy is amazed by the thing he sees and he has an idea:
‘- Wow! It’s great man! Why don’t we use it to cut trees, kill animals and enemies!?’.
The inventor cheers back:
‘- Yeah! Those would be great ways to use it!’
Things to tell about this fragment of the human history could have end by the end of this dialogue. However, it did not. After sometime, another cave-man who was handed this ‘tool’ looked at it and said:
‘- Hey… I can use this tool to carve wood and stone! I can create statues!’
And this was the artist cave-man.
The inventor -or the real engineer, or the real scientist- human being did invent something. The invention of the ‘thing’ is a stand alone success of humanity. Ordinary human being figured out that he is able to use the tool for his ‘fundamental’ needs and higher his life quality by using it. And The Artist used that ‘tool’ to create “art” — which could be claimed to be the most impactful and high level creation of humanity in terms of it’s social existence. (By the way, another cave-man used the same axe to murder a friend of him who he discussed with as well. But that’s another story… Using the power for evil. Anyways.)
It would not make any sense to ask the inventor of axe ‘hey, why didn’t you think axe as a tool for art?’, right? His answer would be short: ‘It is not my job!’ Yeah, it is not his job! Just like all other scientists, engineers or inventors. It is not their job to find best and most useful ways of using a ‘tool’. They create tools and let others find out the best ways to use it.
Now let’s turn back to date and think about the giant Silicon Valley companies. Let me make some simplistic definitions of what some of them are:
Google — You enter a keyword to a form, it makes a search through the database it already has and returns results of your search.
Facebook — You can create a friend list, share posts with them and give reaction to the posts.
Twitter — You can follow people, thay can follow you and you can share posts.
Snapchat — (Oh, it’s my favorite) You can put bunny ears to your selfies.
Each of these companies worth multi-billion dollars. They are far more successful than their nearest competitions, financially. Each of them is already part of billions of people’s lives — who have access to internet.
“So what’s wrong with all of this?”
Well…
None of these companies actually invented anything real. None of these companies were first in their market. Turning back to our cave-men analogy, the guys who founded these companies were even not like ‘the inventor’ cave-men. They are just acting ordinary people role in this play who have engineering mindsets because of their education and they have been and are only using the ‘tools’ created by real inventors, smartly. (One simple question for critics; what if Dennis Ritchie didn’t exist? What would happen?)
I know this idea sounds pretty orthodox and most of the readers will call this opinion bullshit. But let me go one more step further; any ‘well known’ and ‘big’ company which is an online service existing in 2017 are all technically overrated.
Any experienced software developer of a profession can create a ‘miniature’ version of any given ‘Giant’s service in a short time. The sole success about the ‘Giants’ could be claimed as ‘scalability’ (For web services and APIs). One developer’s miniature version may be down after 100 concurrent users and 1000 documents but ‘Giants’ can handle millions of concurrent users and billions of documents, right? However, none of giants could handle the load they have without proper hardware and infrastructure. This takes us to the next level of the argument…
If you’ve paid attention, you would realize that I didn’t say a word about ‘hardware engineering’. Do you know why? Because I think hardware creators are doing a great job! THEY are great ‘inventors’. The spectacular power of our little tiny smartphones is the result of hardware engineers success (Okay, if you’re in guard while reading this article, you will immediately think that I have no idea about ‘embedded software’. No dude, I know. But I count them inside hardware engineers). Hardware industry is doing it’s part very well and providing excellent ‘tools’ to humanity. Not only to software engineers.
Yes! Here is my point! Here is all I am talking about.
Turn back to cave-men anagoly…
Today’s ‘inventor cave-men’ are hardware engineers. They do create greate ‘tools’. No one expects them to create an online service, an app, a software for daily use.
Today’s ‘ordinary men’ are software engineers. Sad but true. Because of their access to required tools to create a ‘software product’, THEY have the role of ‘ordinary men’ at our cave-men analogy. Sorry but, they can’t do even good. But it is not odd that they can’t go beyond ‘fundamental needs’. Because, normally, it is not their job to find out best use cases of tools! They are ‘engineers’ and they are supposed to solve ‘problems’. But they are not required or should be expected to discover problems.
Pick 10 random software engineering job postings and analyze. You will most likely see “excellent problem solving skills” sentence or similar as a qualification requirement in most of them. To be fair, yeah; problem solving is a daily routine for any software engineer. But the question is; how many of the problems that engineers deal with are related to the real problem — which is supposed to be the reason of existence the Company which they are working for? More importantly, what exactly do the tech companies consider as problem?
Because of their founders-cofounders ‘engineering’ backgrounds, all existing big online services deal with extremely primitive problems of humanity:
- Google: Yeah, we humans do need to access to the information since hundreds of thousands of years. We were using libraries and librarians and it was taking time to reach information. But now it’s easier to reach (a type of somehow) information because of you. You used the hardware, you used the existing software tools and created a too, thank you! But that’s all!
- Facebook: Yeah, we humans are ‘social animals’ and we need to socialize and feel ‘liked’. Since we already have super powerful smartphones with internet connection in our pockets, it’s nice to share something with our friends easily and feel the illusion of being ‘liked’. Thank you! But that’s all!
- Twitter: Yeah, we humans all envy to be a leader and having ‘followers’. Thanks for making us believe that thousand of people care us and the whole world is interested in what are we doing any given time of the day. Thank you! But that’s all!
- Snapchat: Yeah, we humans love entertainment. We have been making bunny ears to our companions since a hundred year while our image is being captured but now we don’t need ‘anyone’ to have bunny ears. Thank you! But that’s all!
Are you aware that every single internet company’s value comes from only and only from the content? Search engines’ content is every single web site on the internet. Social networks’ content is you and your friends. Video services content is the cinema art. E-commerce sites’ content is products. News sites’ content is news and so on…
The high technology we have is just being used to imitate real world concepts. Since the real world concepts we already have are already ‘fundamentals’ of our lives; high tech is being used for only bare minimum.
What I say is; It is time to get rid off the illusion of ‘engineering mindset is the holy-grail of the humanity!’. Life without engineering is almost impossible for us anymore, but if we keep not applying past achievements of human race to the tech products we create, what the engineering provides us will never go beyond putting bunny ears to your selfie taken by a hardware miracle that you carry in your pocket everyday.
We are humans. We have a lot of great achievements in our history as a race. We created art, we created philosophy. We are not ‘animal’s. We are complex. We are complicated. We have feelings, we have real connections with each other. We are not and can not be limited to 0 and 1. We should have been able to create better products that solve our specific problems which might not be solved before the high technology we currently have.
You probably know, there are efforts to make of more people software engineers and even adding coding classes to traditional education. I think it is a wrong approach to our ‘problem’. What we need to do is NOT making of more software engineers, what we need to do is teaching as many as people the possibilities and capabilities of high technology of our time and let creative ideas emerge. We need more people who can find problems. We need creative and innovative people who are gifted with ability to think out of the box.
Back to cave-men analogy, we need to find ‘The Artist’ cave-men! We already have tones of ability, tools and power. We just can’t find better ways to use them and worse thing is we don’t have enough people to look for those better ways. This is our problem.
Only people who have easy access to software engineerings skills are aware of huge possibilities and they have opportunity to create them. A potential ‘Artist cave-man’ would be just ignored if he wouldn’t have development experience or a CS background or at least a co-founder with CS background in the industry. But CS people are just supposed to be only the inventors and creators. They are not supposed to be ‘problem/reason finders’ which they are not. ‘Start-up’ phenomenon seems to be a partial solution to our problem but it should go beyond being a ‘nerd activity’. And of course business guys and holy investors should reconsider their values and priorities, too.
We have a really long way to go. Just like axe wasn’t thought initially to be a tool as they it is used after some amount of time; high technology — the axe of our time- will keep being used primitively for a quite more time. I hope it doesn’t take centuries.
PS: I don’t think that many people will read such a long article like this which is written by someone who doesn’t have a charming business or academic title but if you happen to read it all, thanks :)
