GoGaRuCo Fist Shaking

Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past few days this is a pretty good summation of the situation so far.

I must admit that I was initially confused as to what the fuss was even about, and none of the avalance of commentary I've read from the start till now had changed that position. I thought Martin's post on the issue raised a fair few interesting points though that at least warranted formal consideration.

The take away point here really needs to be that people are responsible for their own reactions to things like this.

The power dynamic does not change this relationship, how often is the paradigm of the put upon geek bandied about in similar contexts? Ask your high school football team what they think of the social power of geeks as a group. Once you get done explaining the big words in your question, the result should make my point well enough.

The funny thing is if you had asked me about this issue a year or two ago I would've just shrugged in a completely nonplussed fashion. I never cared if women were interested in becoming involved in technology, it isn't that I wanted them to avoid it, I've worked under female managers at various tech companies before and to be honest one of them was about the second best manager I've ever had, she was the first manager I'd ever had that actually had the technical skills necessary to elicit due respect for her position, and I was not satisfied with any other management thereafter for about three years.

At the same time, we got saddled in that department with a woman who really did not seem to know anything about the job she found herself in. I don't know what possessed that woman to pursue this career path but I heard enough under the breath cursing from the aforementioned female manager that I didn't think it was just my sexism shining through with regards to my evaluations of her performance.

Now, though, I hack from home, meaning a large amount of the time I sit directly next to my significant other, and in a lot of cases the input of a feminine psyche is greatly desirable. Many times I've had to choose between two equally meaningless things to me and she took one look at them and made a strong choice in one direction and then explained the reasoning in a way that I'd not at all considered. Estrogen can be totally useful when you're attempting to write software that deals with humans because it gives you a nice perspective on 50% of them that over 90% of hackers don't have.

So yes, I care that female coders as a group might be offended by the content of the presentation, but I feel that that conclusion alone isn't sufficient enough to automatically condemn the presentation itself. It really is possible for otherwise decent and rational people to overreact to a perceived slight when in all fact that was absolutely never the original intention of the communication.

I understand that there is an inclination to then single out the communication as ineffective, but actually if it were not for this entire debacle of the various presentations I've viewed this week that would definitely be the one that would stick the most firmly in my mind. This is the very essence of what an effective communication is all about. This is exactly why the scourge of corporate blandness must be wiped from the face of the earth, because the nth time you've heard about synergising values for b2b return on investments, the first *syllable* of the line makes your eyes glaze over and your tongue hang slack from your jaw.

In light of this fact, and with the observance that noone seems to be actually of the opinion that any offense was *intended*, merely that it was perceived, is it not reasonable to give a little latitude to speakers in order to encourage experimentation designed to keep us awake during their talks? Even if it isn't perfectly executed?

Here's a thought experiment for you; What if the group taking unintended offense were entirely different, if there was a martyrdom slant in the talk with a picture of Jesus Christ with his crown of thorns focused on the face looking morose (This guy used to program in ColdFusion) and then the next slide he was running along the top of a couple of sand dunes with two legionaires in hot pursuit jumping for joy and clicking his heels with the thorny crown long since discarded (But then Rails set him free).

Was offense intended toward Christians? In the event that they were offended, would they be told to harden up a bit and take it in the obviously humorous fashion it was meant? Would we be asking if it mattered that they were offended or mattered that the intent was not to offend, but entertain and communicate effectively? Would their contributions simply be dismissed out of hand? Matz is a mormon, Larry Wall is an evangelical, these are things that would actually have some kind of bearing upon the community.

Why Apple actually does *not* suck.

This puzzled me for the longest time before I finally figured it out. My position basically ignores windows and puts it in the "you use it because the company who bought you a computer and subsidises your environment bought it for you" but maybe I could imagine some permutation of the same kind of argument for windows users, also.

I call it the Segway argument. ;)

Marathon runners, the type that train obsessively for days at a time, fly to exotic high altitude locales to starve their bodies of oxygen, etc, and are at the absolute peak of human conditioning, are quite capable of running very long distances without much effort, in fact a case could reasonably made to say that they actually enjoy doing so.

Try sell one of those people a Segway.

It will have no tangible benefit aside from getting in the way of that person, and in fact just the idea of trying to sell one to that market shows the entire thing for the charade it is. It is not designed to service people like that.

The thing is that you can fairly make an argument that Marathon Runners like that are probably wasting their lives / time developing that degree of ability simply to do something like get from A to B with a reasonable level of rapidity. Thus something like a Segway can actually make sense because it isn't targeted at marathon runners, but a completely different type of person.

Now I don't want to be overly bragging, but I am only comfortable speaking for myself in this debate so that is what I am going to do. Once you've been using Linux since 1994, keeping well abreast of all the changes and benefits that have been added to the platform between then and now. Once you've mastered that environment so thoroughly that the regex flows from your fingertips as easily as a normal user's expectation of a tooltip hover on a pretty OS X widget. Once you've become accustomed to the almost limitless flexibility and control of the platform, and all the niggling problems and voodoo that one must occasionally confront when dealing with such a fluid platform slips so silently into the unconscious competence basket that you cannot personally even define the fact that it actually requires any competence at all without thinking about it really really hard.

Once you've got all that, the idea of someone making a cut down variant based on the BSD code base and making everything "just work" instantly, providing a contiguous user experience, doing a ton of things that basically all group up under the heading of "eliminating the need to acquire any indepth computer literacy at all", the idea of switching to a mac is as puzzling to you as the idea of the marathon runner picking up a Segway.

The critical thing to take away though, is that this is all value neutral, the marathon runner is not a hero, he probably wasted a ton of his life and time that could be spent better elsewhere acquiring the conditioning and abilities allowing him to accomplish the feats that he can. The same could be said of people in my situation with regards to computers, I am prepared to accept that if something like OS X had existed back when I wanted a "real computer" in 1994, it would indeed have been a waste of my time to develop all these skills. Further fair arguments could be made that I've wasted a ton of time developing all those skills now when you can get it "almost" as good just by paying a little premium on top of your average computer's cost. I get all that, I want to be as absolutely non-elitist about this as I can be. Taking all the above information into account I can totally see how it makes sense for normal people, and even up to a threshold some pretty extraordinary people even in this particular sphere to choose OS X as a platform.

That is definitely something that was in my blind spot not long ago, just as surely as Segways were an utterly bewildering concept to a marathon runner, but I'm aware of it now. The fact is of course that your average person is generally a lot more interested in stuff like walking around and fitness than advanced computer science, thus the relative success rates of Segway and Apple Computer.

But just because that market exists, is real, and has genuine value propositions for a large swathe of humankind, should not be taken as a reflection of it's value for everyone regardless of experience or situation. People like me will probably always prefer what we've developed this intensely powerful unconscious competence in, and everyone else will look at us and say it was a waste to do that, and although I don't agree with that position, I can at least see how the conclusion would be reached and accept it.