Listen:
I wrote this for myself because I think it’s important. I put it here because I think you and I are alike and I hope you think it’s important too.
I build software in the place that software gets built. I can take an hour break from writing this and go knock on the doors of the headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Apple. About 45 years ago someone started calling this place “Silicon Valley” and now HBO has a show with the same name. I’m living in a special place and do the thing that makes it special: I put the silicon to work. I'm a web developer, a software engineer for the web.
I care about software engineering but I also care about other things, because I'm human. I like eating and sex seemingly by instinct. I prefer seemingly arbitrary types of foods or experiences. Sometimes I’m sick, sometimes I’m depressed, sometimes I'm filled with hate, and sometimes with compassion. To me, I'm more than a software engineer. Reminding myself that I'm human connects me to everyone who is not also a software engineer.
This mentality has been especially important in Silicon Valley where seemingly everyone is in the tech industry. It’s easy to relate to software engineers when the conversation is about software engineering. This creates a tendency for people and organizations to focus on software engineering for the sake of software engineering, losing sight of other important topics.
Living in a community where many people share an obvious attribute can distort reality. That shared part of you gets magnified to such a degree that it starts to define you. If you give into it, you risk losing your connection to groups without that attribute. Without a connection, your actions are without consideration to those groups. For a hell of a long time, a large portion of white-colored humans couldn't accept that black-colored humans have the same basic needs and wants as they do. They lost sight of their shared humanity and obsessed over something as trivial as skin color and caused suffering which is still here. Think about the same mentality in other communities: “American”, “Christian”, “Democrat”, “politician”, “physicist”, “software engineer”.
Do Engineers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Good software engineers build secure software, they make it scale, and make it reusable. They optimize for maintainability, for space, for speed. Good software engineers do it for the love of software engineering. Do you know anyone like that? Please send me an email, we're hiring. Everyone is looking to hire good software engineers here.
Many software engineers, myself included, dream of better ways to engineer software. We've all been working hard to make it happen. Just look where we've come in the last 45 years: I can see and talk with my grandma halfway around the world in real time while the NSA records it all. These were once dreams, we've made them reality.
“Engineers turn dreams into reality.” — Hayao Miyazaki
What’s your dream? What are we, as a field, optimizing for? Is our ideal to be able to compute anything in as little time as possible, using the least amount of space as possible? What then? What do we do when we figure “it” out, whatever “it” is.
Consider the ear: that place where we hear sounds. Sounds are vibrations in the air, speakers are air vibrators, and computers give speakers instructions on when and how much to vibrate. Anyone with a computer now has the technical capability to generate any sound that is perceivable by the human ear. This is a new thing for us, there was a time when we were limited in the sounds we could produce, but today we're only limited by our imagination and willpower.
I didn't think about this profound fact by myself. My teachers didn't point it out at school. There was no parade to celebrate it, no holiday called We Solved Sounds Day. I read it in a book by Richard Hamming, a mathematician. The book is on Amazon for $3,000, it’s elsewhere on the web for free. Anyway, let’s have the author bring us back to the topic:
“It is now clearly a matter of what sounds are worth producing, not what can be done.” — Richard Hamming
Most of the sounds we think of as valuable aren't valuable because they couldn't be produced before but because they were sounds worth producing: your favorite song, a recording of an important speech. Keep in mind that “worth” and “value” are being used as in “What’s your life worth?” and “How much do you value your relationship with your partner?”, not green pieces of paper (though they play a part).
Broaden the concept by replacing “sounds worth producing” with “things worth doing”. Conquering the sense of hearing was worth doing, but it doesn’t seem to be recognized as important as other things in our society.
We're taught about Human Rights in school because that’s important. We have holidays to celebrate those who fought to recognize that humans with black skin are people too. We also have holidays celebrating those who claimed an already inhabited land as their own. We have gay pride parades and we have Nazi pride parades.
Musicians choose which sounds are worth producing. Individuals in a society choose which parades are worth attending and holidays worth celebrating. Software engineers choose what software is worth producing.
1945 versus citizenfour
70 years ago, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan were killed by the nuclear weapons developed at the Manhattan Project, of which Richard Hamming was a part of. Hayao Miyazaki was 4-years-old at the time.
Richard Hamming wasn't evil and he wasn't a fool. He was a thoughtful person and a brilliant mathematician. At the age of 30, he helped make the nightmare of nuclear weapons become reality. He lost his humanity in place of something else, take your pick: money, math, nationalism, a sense of security. Whatever it was, at least for the time that he was working at the Manhattan Project, he lost sight of the shared humanity which connected him to those people who happened to live in Japan.
Edward Snowden recognized that he was helping the nightmare of total government surveillance become reality. He reconsidered his priorities, and picked humanity. For him, the security value of total government surveillance didn’t outweigh the sacrifice of personal freedom, and yet he chose to sacrifice his own freedom in order to inform us of the programs. I would celebrate a holiday for Edward Snowden, 9th of June sounds good.
There are many in positions similar to that of Hamming or Snowden, but many more engineers are in more benign positions, and that’s just as problematic. Why is it that HBO has a comedy mocking Silicon Valley? We're arbiters of nightmares on one extreme and clowns on another.
I used some extreme examples to make my points, but let me be very clear: I am talking about sites that my girlfriend uses, that my friends use, that my mom uses, that my grandma uses, that our firefighters use, that our teachers use, that small business owners use. I’m talking about the impact of digital rights management, behavioral advertising, banking websites, backdoors which delete ebooks, EULAs, non-existent privacy controls, minimal viable security, thoughtless UIs, unenforced codes of conduct, flashy infographics, and undocumented APIs. These are just some of the things we have built which need more thought and recognition of humanity at large.
So, what’s your dream? A web that connects or a web that traps? Are you on it or under it? These are just analogies, the web is what we make it. Let’s make a web for us, humans.
