professionalization & celebrity: some links & thoughts
professionalization
see this excerpt from Marie Hicks's Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (h/t Ted Lee's 2019 books retrospective):
‘The pay scale of the Senior machine Operator is increasingly causing us unease,’ wrote an executive officer at the government’s Central Computer Bureau in 1969. ‘Politically, we are sitting on a powder keg and something must be done as a matter of urgency,’ he continued. ‘It is out of proportion that these girls, academically unqualified with clerical staff, should so quickly be able to reach salary levels above those of Clerical Officers and even Executive Officers,’ he argued (154).
As this example shows, the rationale for changing the composition of the computer workforce had little to do with talent and everything to do with prestige. in the effort to make computer work comport with the importance now being accorded it, the talents and experience of many women computer operators were squandered. Their isolation in the machine grades meant that despite their greater technical skills they were seen as worse candidates, even for jobs they were already successfully performing. A key part of computer posts becoming professional and firmly white collar was their being elevated into the power structures of the state and of industry. Now that the jobs were more technocratic than technical, workers with actual computing experience lost out to ones who were seen as having management potential (159).
see also some tweets from Aurelia Augusta:
This is one of my biggest problems with the mainstream humanities/ethics in tech conversation - it washes out to 'let's send the tech nerds back to their place', on the assumption that traditional decision makers (lawyers, policy wonks, philosophers) would be better . . . the entire domain of tech policy has developed into an elite power squabble with little attention towards systematic solutions
i do not like what professionalization does to things, basically. there are elements i find frustrating but probably necessary or at least useful-i probably do want someone to verify that the folks building and designing bridges, sewage treatment planets, etc, are not incompetent, and i probably want some mechanism for holding them accountable.
but there are so many elements of "professionalization" that are stultifying, confusing, or just feel plain wrong. so much bullshit statistics, without particular care for what those stats actually mean or what we should infer from them. so much regulatory capture. so many people helicoptered in without any on-the-ground experience or actual domain knowledge, to "ideate" and "analyze solutions" or whatever-and nine-times-out-of-ten these helicoptered-in {managers, consultants, commissioned officers, etc} don't offer any particularly obvious skills besides "being from the managerial class," "talking like a manager," etc, which surely is just something you could teach one of the people you already have to do? (see: the death of promoting from within, etc)
and even if everyone agrees the value-add of a Professional MBA is limited, you still end up with some MBA-type folks at some type of helm, because all the other businesses only listen to those types, and it's hard to play ball unless you buy in too.
see also the weird history of MBA programs, see also the military whose two-tiered commissioned/enlisted hierarchy has confused me since approx forever, etc
(see also my incoherent grumblings on the topic of credentialism != intellectualism, and also my periodic grumbling that "ethics classes will not fix engineering's ethical issues" which i can't be bothered to dig up a link for)
* * *celebrity
see this Ursula K Le Guin interview (esp around 13:20 onward), one of the last before her death, where she discusses how much she dislikes celebrity as a *thing*. how often it's confused with achievement.
& see this tweet from a professional musician, which makes the interesting & depressing assertion that, with the rise of streaming/tiktok/etc, people increasingly want to follow artists based on who they are, rather than just the music-"rebirth of the author", so to speak.
& see also the weird feeling i get whenever i see a new venture or startup or whatever, from someone who's "twitter famous" or particularly well-known on the tech-talk circuit, because, well-
okay, maximum salt incoming.
there are a lot of trivial and boring and lame talks in the "tech talk circuit." most of these seem to be done as some sort of masturbatory thing? building clout, building a brand, screaming into the void "hi my name's robin and i do technology" with a slightly louder megaphone than a plain damn resume would do?
and mostly i hate it because it seems to produce this intense sense of anxiety in so many people. you'll see people who are like, 23, and freaking out because they must give four talks this year or no one will believe they're technical enough!!! and this will secure their career and also they must hang out with The Right People and yada yada...
...this despite the fact that a lot of the technologists i most admire, who i'd be desperate to hire, who have empirically done both the hardest work and the grungiest work there is... they don't give talks. or they give a talk, like, once every few years. the only talk when they've actually got something to say, and coming up with something to say can take time. if i want to learn how to set up Kubernetes, there's like, 800 tutorials online for that. if i want to hear how you tackled really knotty, horrible architectural issues in migrating some massive org from something else to Kubernetes... well, first you need to do two years' worth of work, don't you?
and the hard parts of technology are always always those really time-consuming knotty things.
but like, the tech-talk circuit is A Thing, and there are people who go to so many of them you sorta wonder if they find times to do their jobs (backchannel, you hear that some of them don't-and like, okay, more power to them, "drinking and hanging out with people at conferences" seems like a fine gig if you can con someone into backing it)-
-anyway, idk, i can never tell how much fire there is behind the smoke, but it seems like you can raise bajillions of dollars in venture capital with a lot of smoke regardless of the actual fire, so maybe i'm the rube here!
and, back to the "rebirth of the author" thing-see the Ye Olde terrycloth mother experiments & also recent studies on parasocial relationships more generally.
see this excerpt from Marie Hicks's Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (h/t Ted Lee's 2019 books retrospective):
‘The pay scale of the Senior machine Operator is increasingly causing us unease,’ wrote an executive officer at the government’s Central Computer Bureau in 1969. ‘Politically, we are sitting on a powder keg and something must be done as a matter of urgency,’ he continued. ‘It is out of proportion that these girls, academically unqualified with clerical staff, should so quickly be able to reach salary levels above those of Clerical Officers and even Executive Officers,’ he argued (154).
As this example shows, the rationale for changing the composition of the computer workforce had little to do with talent and everything to do with prestige. in the effort to make computer work comport with the importance now being accorded it, the talents and experience of many women computer operators were squandered. Their isolation in the machine grades meant that despite their greater technical skills they were seen as worse candidates, even for jobs they were already successfully performing. A key part of computer posts becoming professional and firmly white collar was their being elevated into the power structures of the state and of industry. Now that the jobs were more technocratic than technical, workers with actual computing experience lost out to ones who were seen as having management potential (159).
see also some tweets from Aurelia Augusta:
This is one of my biggest problems with the mainstream humanities/ethics in tech conversation - it washes out to 'let's send the tech nerds back to their place', on the assumption that traditional decision makers (lawyers, policy wonks, philosophers) would be better . . . the entire domain of tech policy has developed into an elite power squabble with little attention towards systematic solutions
i do not like what professionalization does to things, basically. there are elements i find frustrating but probably necessary or at least useful-i probably do want someone to verify that the folks building and designing bridges, sewage treatment planets, etc, are not incompetent, and i probably want some mechanism for holding them accountable.
but there are so many elements of "professionalization" that are stultifying, confusing, or just feel plain wrong. so much bullshit statistics, without particular care for what those stats actually mean or what we should infer from them. so much regulatory capture. so many people helicoptered in without any on-the-ground experience or actual domain knowledge, to "ideate" and "analyze solutions" or whatever-and nine-times-out-of-ten these helicoptered-in {managers, consultants, commissioned officers, etc} don't offer any particularly obvious skills besides "being from the managerial class," "talking like a manager," etc, which surely is just something you could teach one of the people you already have to do? (see: the death of promoting from within, etc)
and even if everyone agrees the value-add of a Professional MBA is limited, you still end up with some MBA-type folks at some type of helm, because all the other businesses only listen to those types, and it's hard to play ball unless you buy in too.
see also the weird history of MBA programs, see also the military whose two-tiered commissioned/enlisted hierarchy has confused me since approx forever, etc
(see also my incoherent grumblings on the topic of credentialism != intellectualism, and also my periodic grumbling that "ethics classes will not fix engineering's ethical issues" which i can't be bothered to dig up a link for)
* * *celebrity
see this Ursula K Le Guin interview (esp around 13:20 onward), one of the last before her death, where she discusses how much she dislikes celebrity as a *thing*. how often it's confused with achievement.
& see this tweet from a professional musician, which makes the interesting & depressing assertion that, with the rise of streaming/tiktok/etc, people increasingly want to follow artists based on who they are, rather than just the music-"rebirth of the author", so to speak.
& see also the weird feeling i get whenever i see a new venture or startup or whatever, from someone who's "twitter famous" or particularly well-known on the tech-talk circuit, because, well-
okay, maximum salt incoming.
there are a lot of trivial and boring and lame talks in the "tech talk circuit." most of these seem to be done as some sort of masturbatory thing? building clout, building a brand, screaming into the void "hi my name's robin and i do technology" with a slightly louder megaphone than a plain damn resume would do?
and mostly i hate it because it seems to produce this intense sense of anxiety in so many people. you'll see people who are like, 23, and freaking out because they must give four talks this year or no one will believe they're technical enough!!! and this will secure their career and also they must hang out with The Right People and yada yada...
...this despite the fact that a lot of the technologists i most admire, who i'd be desperate to hire, who have empirically done both the hardest work and the grungiest work there is... they don't give talks. or they give a talk, like, once every few years. the only talk when they've actually got something to say, and coming up with something to say can take time. if i want to learn how to set up Kubernetes, there's like, 800 tutorials online for that. if i want to hear how you tackled really knotty, horrible architectural issues in migrating some massive org from something else to Kubernetes... well, first you need to do two years' worth of work, don't you?
and the hard parts of technology are always always those really time-consuming knotty things.
but like, the tech-talk circuit is A Thing, and there are people who go to so many of them you sorta wonder if they find times to do their jobs (backchannel, you hear that some of them don't-and like, okay, more power to them, "drinking and hanging out with people at conferences" seems like a fine gig if you can con someone into backing it)-
-anyway, idk, i can never tell how much fire there is behind the smoke, but it seems like you can raise bajillions of dollars in venture capital with a lot of smoke regardless of the actual fire, so maybe i'm the rube here!
and, back to the "rebirth of the author" thing-see the Ye Olde terrycloth mother experiments & also recent studies on parasocial relationships more generally.