I need another label
Aug. 25th, 2011 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteFor two decades of my life I have identified myself primarily as a "computer geek".
At first I was into it just for the thrill of exploration; computing for computing's sake. Making the lights blink and the sprites dance. Then, I embraced the holy wars, and the one-upmanship of coding as close to the metal as possible; choosing hardware for political reasons, wearing my self-assigned outcast badge with pride and without a hint of irony as I stuck close to my own insular tribe of fellow outcasts. I felt that my friends and I were "the real deal", because we didn't just talk about coding, we wrote it, in copious sugar-fueled bursts, inventing techniques from blank graph paper that would later emerge - to our delight - as entire paradigms in textbooks and APIs and hardware. We were on the forefront of something big and exciting and we knew it, and I reveled in it. I was pretty cocky about it. It gave me a direction, self worth, and a set of employable skills, above and beyond what high school supposedly provided.
After barely graduating high school due to my obsession with my extracurricular computer activities, I cast about for the next step. The obvious choice for my career path was to attend university and get a Computer Science degree, so I went for that. People told me it was possible to get a job without the degree, but I would be forever relegated to a lower pay grade, and I wouldn't have time for school later, so I better get the degree up front. After a false start I eventually gained admittance to UCSC.
Then, a funny thing happened. As I branched out into the environment of college, I was surprised to discover that I had a vast appetite for social interaction. I had been starving for it. I was welcomed into a crew of people who were smart, excitable, enthusiastic, and refreshingly uninhibited. They became my second family. I was also shocked to discover that I was in high demand as a romantic partner, after years of isolation and self-doubt. I was surrounded by fascinating people and things, and every day was full of debates and lessons and joy and laughter.
I dropped out of UC Santa Cruz after three years with no degree, because the upper division math classes overwhelmed my cavalier study habits, and I ran out of money. Even so, I look back on that time as a triumph, a great blast of positive change and activity that fortified me for the wider world. It put a lot of good tools in my toolbox, and surprisingly few bad ones.
But also, with the advantage of hindsight, I identify that time as the era in which I stopped really being a "computer geek". If anyone had ever challenged my possession of the label, I would have been forced to admit that it was a sideshow at best, among equally inspiring pursuits like singing, sketch comedy, music composition, anthropology, poetry, various natural sciences, autobiography, all kinds of photography, wilderness exploration, political advocacy, and definitely romance. I had seen and done too much; there was no fitting back into the box.
A few years later, someone - I can't remember who, exactly - told me something very interesting about that time. She said that I had been a member of a big cohesive group mostly because I had a kind of penumbral force to my personality that made people around me behave that way. She said that she always felt better when I was at a gathering - no matter where it was, no matter who else was there - because my attitude seemed to insist that everyone around me play nicely with everyone else.
I was surprised to hear this, and I had to think about it for a while. I do dimly remember some incidents where I acted as a self-appointed referee, when people exchanged angry words or got a little too sarcastic with their tone, but mostly, I had been oblivious to this habit. Where had it come from? Had my "crew" of friends really been a delusion of my own making? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I know the effort wasn't all mine. My friend Ken did what he called "recruiting", which was to walk up to random geeky-looking strangers at large events, introduce himself, and then ask them point-blank to come hang out with the rest of us. Somewhere I have a group photo of my "crew" on the promenade of the Beach Boardwalk at night, during a UCSC orientation event, our ranks swelled with a dozen people all posing in the photograph like old friends even though we'd just roped them into the group hours or minutes before. Ken was amazing with that. Many of those people became regular players in our social circle.
The point of this digression is, I developed a "cooperative" aspect of my personality, but I wasn't aware that I had it. And, I had branched out far beyond the label of "computer geek".
But in my post-college life, I doubled down on that label. I sought jobs in the computing industry exclusively. After a few years, I entered into a wonderful stable relationship and found that a lot of my life had fallen into easy order, and with energy and enthusiasm to spare, I felt restless for more challenging work. I wanted a career. As luck would have it, one of my oldest friends gave me a foot in the door at Apple, and I hovered nervously on the welcome mat for a while, then pulled the knob and barged eagerly inside.
I have blogged about this era before, both the good and the bad aspects of it. Mostly it was another triumph. But I don't wish to repeat myself; I have something else to say about it here:
I now have nothing left to prove, as a "computer geek".
At age twelve I was hacking machine code in hex with a sector editor and bridging pins inside game consoles. At fifteen I was chatting with Russian computer engineers and Australian teachers over the precursor of the internet. Fast-forward two decades, and at age 34 I was lead developer and designer for a development toolchain that became so successful it was spun off into its own department, and I was granted - without asking - a spontaneous raise that pushed my salary into six figures. This, at the most competitive and respected computer company in the world, and as of a few days ago, the most valued company in the entire world, period. Go up to the third floor of Building 2. See that poster in the lobby, of Abraham Lincoln holding a ghetto-blaster over one shoulder, labeled "think different"? I put that there.
I have to ask myself: Did I ever really have anything to prove, though? I always did it out of an enthusiasm for the activity itself. The politics and the one-upmanship just came with the territory, and were set aside as soon as I stepped into my job at Apple. From there it was just a marathon to make things better, faster, and more flexible. I did eventually move within earshot of some of the old guard, people who had been Apple employees for decades, and got a rude helping of their poisonous self-satisfaction. It was around that time that I also began to dream of ... escape. A nagging voice appeared from the back of my mind, repeating a question:
"Is this how you want to spend the rest of your adult life? 50 hours a week, behind gray walls, for twenty years, until your hair goes white and your spine bends and you turn into one of the self-satisfied old guard with no memory of the world beyond your fancy house in the suburbs and your sacred pieces of legacy API? Is this where you will stay, while the rest of everything happens in distant silence around you? Is this the top of your game?"
I was sitting pretty in my geek pursuits, but it just wasn't enough. In fact, once my social and home life became stressed, it wasn't nearly enough. The money made life easier, but it didn't let me reclaim my mind from deep space to attend to the fires on the ground.
So, in light of what's happened, I think I have to drop the "computer geek" banner. It's been pissed on by too many of the younger crowd anyway. Handy tip: If you call yourself a "computer geek" because you obsessively check Facebook, you're Doing It Wrong. In fact, just to vent my own spleen for a minute, here's a totally self-aggrandizing list.
* Being employed as a contract web designer does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Awareness of an emerging meme before it appears on meme-tracking websites does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Employing a cheat-code in a console game does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Staying indoors to watch movies on your laptop when your friends are outside playing does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Being attracted to computer geeks does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Enjoying XKCD, Doctor Who, Super Mario Brothers, Slashdot, Reddit, Monty Python, anime, electronic music, Xbox, Burning Man, Weird Al, Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants, raves, steampunk, Tron, World of Warcraft, twitter, blogging, your iPad, Red Bull, comics, Pixar movies, your Android phone, or anything to do with The Matrix or Star Wars or Star Trek, does not actually make you a computer geek.
What actually makes you a computer geek? Exercising a strong interest in how computers do things, so you can make them do more things, because that is fucking fascinating. If it isn't fascinating, then get out of my office. Go back to making web layouts in Dreamweaver for beer money with all the other dot-com wankers.
If I come over a bit angry, it's because I am a bit angry. A label that used to signify devotion to a craft is now used as a cover for sloth and/or incompetence. On the other hand, that label is something I am distancing myself from anyway, so, why should I care?
Moving "computer geek" to the background leaves a gap in my self identity; a pretty big one. And recently I've had a few revelations that may have finally showed me the way to go, from here.
I'll write about those next.
At first I was into it just for the thrill of exploration; computing for computing's sake. Making the lights blink and the sprites dance. Then, I embraced the holy wars, and the one-upmanship of coding as close to the metal as possible; choosing hardware for political reasons, wearing my self-assigned outcast badge with pride and without a hint of irony as I stuck close to my own insular tribe of fellow outcasts. I felt that my friends and I were "the real deal", because we didn't just talk about coding, we wrote it, in copious sugar-fueled bursts, inventing techniques from blank graph paper that would later emerge - to our delight - as entire paradigms in textbooks and APIs and hardware. We were on the forefront of something big and exciting and we knew it, and I reveled in it. I was pretty cocky about it. It gave me a direction, self worth, and a set of employable skills, above and beyond what high school supposedly provided.
After barely graduating high school due to my obsession with my extracurricular computer activities, I cast about for the next step. The obvious choice for my career path was to attend university and get a Computer Science degree, so I went for that. People told me it was possible to get a job without the degree, but I would be forever relegated to a lower pay grade, and I wouldn't have time for school later, so I better get the degree up front. After a false start I eventually gained admittance to UCSC.
Then, a funny thing happened. As I branched out into the environment of college, I was surprised to discover that I had a vast appetite for social interaction. I had been starving for it. I was welcomed into a crew of people who were smart, excitable, enthusiastic, and refreshingly uninhibited. They became my second family. I was also shocked to discover that I was in high demand as a romantic partner, after years of isolation and self-doubt. I was surrounded by fascinating people and things, and every day was full of debates and lessons and joy and laughter.
I dropped out of UC Santa Cruz after three years with no degree, because the upper division math classes overwhelmed my cavalier study habits, and I ran out of money. Even so, I look back on that time as a triumph, a great blast of positive change and activity that fortified me for the wider world. It put a lot of good tools in my toolbox, and surprisingly few bad ones.
But also, with the advantage of hindsight, I identify that time as the era in which I stopped really being a "computer geek". If anyone had ever challenged my possession of the label, I would have been forced to admit that it was a sideshow at best, among equally inspiring pursuits like singing, sketch comedy, music composition, anthropology, poetry, various natural sciences, autobiography, all kinds of photography, wilderness exploration, political advocacy, and definitely romance. I had seen and done too much; there was no fitting back into the box.
A few years later, someone - I can't remember who, exactly - told me something very interesting about that time. She said that I had been a member of a big cohesive group mostly because I had a kind of penumbral force to my personality that made people around me behave that way. She said that she always felt better when I was at a gathering - no matter where it was, no matter who else was there - because my attitude seemed to insist that everyone around me play nicely with everyone else.
I was surprised to hear this, and I had to think about it for a while. I do dimly remember some incidents where I acted as a self-appointed referee, when people exchanged angry words or got a little too sarcastic with their tone, but mostly, I had been oblivious to this habit. Where had it come from? Had my "crew" of friends really been a delusion of my own making? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I know the effort wasn't all mine. My friend Ken did what he called "recruiting", which was to walk up to random geeky-looking strangers at large events, introduce himself, and then ask them point-blank to come hang out with the rest of us. Somewhere I have a group photo of my "crew" on the promenade of the Beach Boardwalk at night, during a UCSC orientation event, our ranks swelled with a dozen people all posing in the photograph like old friends even though we'd just roped them into the group hours or minutes before. Ken was amazing with that. Many of those people became regular players in our social circle.
The point of this digression is, I developed a "cooperative" aspect of my personality, but I wasn't aware that I had it. And, I had branched out far beyond the label of "computer geek".
But in my post-college life, I doubled down on that label. I sought jobs in the computing industry exclusively. After a few years, I entered into a wonderful stable relationship and found that a lot of my life had fallen into easy order, and with energy and enthusiasm to spare, I felt restless for more challenging work. I wanted a career. As luck would have it, one of my oldest friends gave me a foot in the door at Apple, and I hovered nervously on the welcome mat for a while, then pulled the knob and barged eagerly inside.
I have blogged about this era before, both the good and the bad aspects of it. Mostly it was another triumph. But I don't wish to repeat myself; I have something else to say about it here:
I now have nothing left to prove, as a "computer geek".
At age twelve I was hacking machine code in hex with a sector editor and bridging pins inside game consoles. At fifteen I was chatting with Russian computer engineers and Australian teachers over the precursor of the internet. Fast-forward two decades, and at age 34 I was lead developer and designer for a development toolchain that became so successful it was spun off into its own department, and I was granted - without asking - a spontaneous raise that pushed my salary into six figures. This, at the most competitive and respected computer company in the world, and as of a few days ago, the most valued company in the entire world, period. Go up to the third floor of Building 2. See that poster in the lobby, of Abraham Lincoln holding a ghetto-blaster over one shoulder, labeled "think different"? I put that there.
I have to ask myself: Did I ever really have anything to prove, though? I always did it out of an enthusiasm for the activity itself. The politics and the one-upmanship just came with the territory, and were set aside as soon as I stepped into my job at Apple. From there it was just a marathon to make things better, faster, and more flexible. I did eventually move within earshot of some of the old guard, people who had been Apple employees for decades, and got a rude helping of their poisonous self-satisfaction. It was around that time that I also began to dream of ... escape. A nagging voice appeared from the back of my mind, repeating a question:
"Is this how you want to spend the rest of your adult life? 50 hours a week, behind gray walls, for twenty years, until your hair goes white and your spine bends and you turn into one of the self-satisfied old guard with no memory of the world beyond your fancy house in the suburbs and your sacred pieces of legacy API? Is this where you will stay, while the rest of everything happens in distant silence around you? Is this the top of your game?"
I was sitting pretty in my geek pursuits, but it just wasn't enough. In fact, once my social and home life became stressed, it wasn't nearly enough. The money made life easier, but it didn't let me reclaim my mind from deep space to attend to the fires on the ground.
So, in light of what's happened, I think I have to drop the "computer geek" banner. It's been pissed on by too many of the younger crowd anyway. Handy tip: If you call yourself a "computer geek" because you obsessively check Facebook, you're Doing It Wrong. In fact, just to vent my own spleen for a minute, here's a totally self-aggrandizing list.
* Being employed as a contract web designer does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Awareness of an emerging meme before it appears on meme-tracking websites does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Employing a cheat-code in a console game does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Staying indoors to watch movies on your laptop when your friends are outside playing does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Being attracted to computer geeks does not actually make you a computer geek.
* Enjoying XKCD, Doctor Who, Super Mario Brothers, Slashdot, Reddit, Monty Python, anime, electronic music, Xbox, Burning Man, Weird Al, Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants, raves, steampunk, Tron, World of Warcraft, twitter, blogging, your iPad, Red Bull, comics, Pixar movies, your Android phone, or anything to do with The Matrix or Star Wars or Star Trek, does not actually make you a computer geek.
What actually makes you a computer geek? Exercising a strong interest in how computers do things, so you can make them do more things, because that is fucking fascinating. If it isn't fascinating, then get out of my office. Go back to making web layouts in Dreamweaver for beer money with all the other dot-com wankers.
If I come over a bit angry, it's because I am a bit angry. A label that used to signify devotion to a craft is now used as a cover for sloth and/or incompetence. On the other hand, that label is something I am distancing myself from anyway, so, why should I care?
Moving "computer geek" to the background leaves a gap in my self identity; a pretty big one. And recently I've had a few revelations that may have finally showed me the way to go, from here.
I'll write about those next.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-25 12:22 pm (UTC):*!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-08 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-25 08:35 pm (UTC)Sure. But these are just words, against the words of millions of idiots...
no subject
Date: 2011-08-26 11:39 am (UTC)That's what keeps the place going. The whole company is carried on the backs of people who are driven to work harder than they need to. Some are true workaholics who would hold the same insane "heroic" work schedule anywhere, some have bad bosses and lack the willpower to push back on unreasonable workloads and demands, but most do it because they really want to.
It's not that these folks don't know when or how to stop working, it's that they really want to put in that extra time to get that one more thing done each day. The company gives you all the rope you want. It gives you the power and flexibility to create and nurture some project, component, process, or idea. Having seemingly unlimited resources at your disposal clears a lot of obstacles and really lets you focus on just the problems you enjoy tackling. The satisfaction that comes from turning an idea into something real is intoxicating and powerful. To see your work recognized, praised, and appreciated by others is incredibly gratifying.
It's certainly a double-edged sword, though. Getting caught up in it is easy. Too easy. The fabled "work/life balance" is homeostatic when everything is shifted to the work side. Far too many people let their vacation time fill up, max out, and vanish without even taking it. I can't even imagine myself ever being like that. I enjoy relaxation and free time far too much to ever fall into the well-laid workaholic traps. I can always finish the work later.
I think I'm a bit lucky in that I have a position with very little actual responsibility but the flexibility to take on any exciting challenge I can find. I never have to work long hours or weekends if I don't want to. Nobody ever even asks it of me. I take my work seriously but my job lightly. One day I'll probably reach the point you did and decide to walk away. For now, I'm still having too much fun with the computers.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-27 11:50 am (UTC)I remember back when I was still working under the OpenGL department, in building 2, having ONE meeting every week, that consisted of four representatives from four departments, one manager who mostly acted as referee, the lab manager Fred, and me. For an hour I would field questions and feature requests from all four representatives, make up my own work itinerary in response, and give them all rough estimates of when they would see progress. The manager was there mostly to quash the idea that I was working directly for the representatives, thus giving me the freedom to argue back against ideas I thought were stupid, or demands that I thought were unreasonable. It was a strange way to do things - me versus four - but I totally loved it, because in a way, I was calling the shots.
For about three and a half years, I almost always worked on what I had decided was the most important thing at the time, within the scope of my wide-ranging duties as nearly sole owner of the build and test systems for the multiple imaging departments. If I decided it was more important to get drag-checkboxes working in the UI than to fix a rare crash in a build machine, or vice-versa, then that was what got done. And it got finished whenever I was able to get it finished - which was usually in good time, because my enthusiasm for my work was high. Nobody had hard-and-fast deadlines for improvement, which was generally OK because it was an internal support tool, not some product we shrink-wrapped and loaded into trucks.
That was a truly great time, and I loved it, and everyone I worked with gave me stellar feedback.
Then someone decided to build an entire department around the systems I'd been developing, and three months after that, the newly anointed management team began outlining specific milestones with specific features and specific "ship dates", and my work became narrowed by Deadlines and Deliverables. When I finished something early, it didn't matter. When I missed a deadline, I was subjecting my department to horrible dishonor.
Instead of a smorgasbord of large and small, high and low profile items, I was handed a procession of huge tentpole features that no one else could tackle, while the smaller, lower-risk items were spread to the junior developers, and hardware management was taken completely out of my hands. Then, I began an endless cycle of meetings with the people who had requested the tentpole features.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-27 11:50 am (UTC)I remember one tentpole in particular that started out simply as "keep a golden image and log an error if it doesn't match", and as soon as we "shipped" it, it became obvious that it generated far too many false negatives and was overwhelming to use. ... Just as I knew it would be. Even though the feature was "shipped", everyone who touched it filed enhancement bugs because it sucked, and one guy even wrote up a whole "golden image classification methodology" manifesto with a bunch of high-concept dithering about information processing paradigms, and a bulleted list of "suggested workflows" that was too vague to be of any use. When I saw the document I actually felt _insulted_ at first, but I couldn't blame him, because the guy clearly meant well, and the feature did, after all, suck.
After a YEAR of on-and-off development, we eventually ended up with an "image history, auditing, designation, and auto-inheritance management" system. I gave several presentations on it, and it worked pretty well, but that's because it was based almost completely on ideas from me and Alex, just sitting down for maybe two hours total and figuring out the whole problem between us. The other twelve or so people who were roped into that process because of its "tentpole" status did not really need to be there.
At the same time, I was also being pulled in countless directions by the internal needs of the rest of the rapidly congealing department. People who needed help understanding a system, people who needed help finding a bug, yet another group that had been ordered by the higher-ups to integrate with us and required half a dozen new features in order to do so, which in turn required milestones with a tight ship date ... and the code reviews, of course, sometimes a dozen each week.
In the midst of this I got divorced, went through a hellish double-breakup, quintupled my commute time, and developed a debilitating thyroid condition that made it very difficult to concentrate on anything for more than 2 minutes at once. At one point my boss asked me if I needed some sort of medical exception, to lighten my load or alter my schedule, and like a prideful fool I turned him down because it felt like admitting defeat. But that's the thing about medical conditions ... "fighting" them is just another word for "ignoring" them.