On Software And “Neuroticism”
I have been told plenty of times that I am in the right career as a software developer. Fanatical about cleverness and elegance, enraptured by well designed machinery and with a strong propensity to tunnel vision it would seem like that analysis is right. And underlying those surface traits, a pounding thrum of urgency and anxiety blasts inside my brain every hour of every day. I took a five factor model (FFM) personality test recently and it told me something that seemed totally obvious: I am “neurotic”.
The term “neurotic” derives from “neurosis,” a defunct label for a variety of mental disorders. As a sufferer of anxiety disorder, I fit the now-deprecated medical definition of “neurotic”. While I have not done this experiment, I would expect that asking many of my closest acquaintances if I was neurotic would elicit a convincing “yes”. Despite being not at all surprised about my internet-awarded diagnosis (backed by multiple in-person professional medical diagnoses of various anxiety-related conditions), it got me thinking about how this has affected me as a professional. Am I a better engineer because of my neuroticism, or in spite of it?
I encounter a lot of other engineers who I would describe as having this quality to at least a small degree, and in general I would say that it seems relatively helpful in a lot of scenarios specific to programming. The forceful desire to overcome a technical problem, motivated by a fear of being defeated, is necessary when staring down totally incomprehensible issues buried inside a dozen layers of Node frameworks, whose log output and stacktrace have been suppressed by another half-dozen layers of minifiers and production-level log frameworks.
It has its negatives: in most people I think it crops up as the desire to work long hours. It’s easy, at least for me, to feel that stepping away from work with a task unfinished is “giving up,” showing weakness, being beaten, and it sends a pang of anxiety shooting through me. The drumbeat of “you didn’t finish that” in my head can ruin a whole day. But despite this, I still think neuroticism, a very negative sounding term, has on the whole made me more successful at work.
So when I read a page of former Google employee James Damore’s misogynistic bro-culture exclusionist manifesto where he explains women’s statistically higher neuroticism as not only a reason that they appear less often in high stress jobs like engineering and management but as a reason that they should not hold those positions, I was incredulous. You know, even more than I already was at reading his massively unhelpful attack on thousands of his co-workers and their competence.
I find every part of Damore’s screed to have deeply flawed logic and to be little more than a hurtful attack on his fellow Google employees’ intellects and belief systems. But there are a handful of things about this particular assertion regarding neuroticism that do bother me a lot. I present arguments that are anecdotal, not statistical — but I’ll assert later that there are problems with approaching personalities from a statistical level anyway.
It is startlingly easy to find people with high base anxiety levels, worry-warts, neurotics, whatever you’d like to call them, in high stress situations. I personally have known people who have this kind of outlook as concert musicians, public speakers, high-profile managers and executives, and stock traders. People who are stereotypically neurotic shy away from stressful situations a surprisingly small percentage of the time. People with high anxiety levels are often driven by fear of failure or disappointment, which can push them into stressful, high-difficulty situations and intensely motivate them to succeed.
Likewise, how a person’s anxiety manifests not only depends on a given situation but a person’s collective experiences. Someone brought up in an environment where they are highly encouraged to succeed as a professional may find an outlet for their fear of an upcoming job interview by pouring themselves into preparation, studying intensely, which could make the interview easier for them (it would certainly help at a Google interview!) On the other hand, a person brought up believing that their professional success is a less important part of their life may respond to the stress of interview prep by procrastinating or doing something else to take their mind off it, which could leave them unprepared. It’s not hard, from here, to map this onto the modern discussion of gender roles.
Finally, while I have no data to back this up, I have always taken a problem with statistics like “women on average are more neurotic,” then applied haphazardly as an assumption about the neuroticism of specific people. The statistic can itself become a bias, allowing someone to unintentionally prescribe a person’s action to a negatively-connotated emotion like neuroticism if they already disagree with that action. It also is easily translated into the notion of “I’m a man and you’re a woman, therefore you are more neurotic than me,” which is an attribution underlying the justification for women reporting higher on-the-job stress because they are inherently more stressed. These statistics, also, are not based on well-tuned, well-controlled data for the given population that is women at Google, or even women in Silicon Valley. Women in Silicon Valley do not, statistically, form a good snapshot of all the women on the planet: not in their race, their age, their socioeconomic status, their national origin, or any number of factors that contribute to their outlook on life. And, in fact, the subset of women who have taken the FFM test and recorded their levels of neuroticism are most likely not a very good snapshot of the roughly 3.5 billion women on the planet right now.
I won’t assert that being an anxious, nervous person is fantastic, but it’s ludicrous to say that it’s responsible for the crisis that is the utterly terrible representation of women in Silicon Valley, and STEM as a whole. I do honestly feel that if harnessed properly, that nervous energy is behind the success of many people in the Valley, including myself.
And Mr. Damore, your manifesto is hot garbage.
