Warning: wild, rambling, and only vaguely supported opinion ahead. Take it as you will.
Also, some of this addresses the reader in second person; in doing so I am envisioning my peers: people who have mastered (or are in the process of mastering) some arcane technical art but might have to work up a head of steam just to manage a proper mingle at an office social.
I have always been a geek/nerd/strange-introverted-kid. My high school experience sucked (it was both better and worse in various ways than is depicted in popular media, but that story is probably more interesting to me than to my readers). It didn’t help that I was uninterested in the kind of socializing that most of my peers enjoyed and inept at what socializing I did participate in, but it was also a simple fact that I was an outlier in a system ill equipped to do much for such people (despite real effort and interest on the part of some of my teachers.1) and didn’t have a lot in common with most of my school mates.
Unsurprisingly I resented the “cool kids”. Somehow I convinced myself that knowing how to “do things” I was going to end up running their world.
Right. Sure, kid. Good luck with that.
In reality, of course, it is mostly a lucky few of the cool kids that run the world2 and the geeks are just the most able of the henchpeople. The geeks are valuable to the bosses because they are harder to replace than some other job descriptions, but all it buys you is a higher salary and a looser dress code.3
Tech skills run the infrastructure, but people skills run the world.
So it’s high school forever, then?
God, what an Orwellian image, eh?
No, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, you are not bound to the artificial community of your school. You can (and should, and for the most part naturally will) find a set of social settings where you fit in.4
And secondly because your intellectual and personal development is not circumscribed by the program of the institution, and you have the personal where-with-all to take it as far as you care to go.
Where am I going with this?
Geeks don’t run the world, but they do run the infrastructure, and when you do that there are consequences. Some of them are good: the infrastructure knits the economy together and makes us all richer. Some of them are bad: some of the bosses are (intentionally or not) driving toward a slightly different Orwellian future in the name of glory or riches.
You may be bound to the wheel of life as a keyboard poking wage slave, but you don’t have to do it for anyone in particular. And many techies are in a better position to change jobs than other office workers.
You have, to some degree, a choice about who your work for. It may take some time to get away after you make the decision, but the option is there. Polish up your paper and get it on the street.
I decided some time ago to not work for jerks; call it my long delayed and largely ineffective revenge on the cool kid’s table. In any case, it is why I am a not doing Stack Exchange right now: I concluded that I had good reason to think that the managers were treating their top-flight technical talent badly, and that is good enough that I won’t do any free work for them.
But … hope!
Now, we just had the most promising smoke-signal from the secret lair in weeks, and I’m trying to not be impatient because I know these things take time. But … we’ve had previous reasonably promising smoke signals that presaged what appears to be highly jerkish behavior.5
Not sure what I will have to say if they send me the promised survey.
1 I wish I could find and apologize to a few of them. And in one case I also owe props to a woman who played my youthful resentment like a virtuoso and led to my markedly reduced suckage in her field despite my best efforts.
2 Of course many of them don’t make the grade and end up even more expendable and less respected than the geeks. For a unlucky few high school might really be their glory days, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
3 If you are thinking about tech giants and thinking that the geeks really did end up in charge, think again. Those guys had to develop the same “people” skill set of the popular kids. They’re might have been too late blooming to have a seat at that table in the lunch room, but they have as much in common with the cool kids as they do with the nerds.
4 If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a “third place”, look it up.
5"Appears to be" is as good as it’s going to get. The company isn’t telling and those most affected are too professional to tell tales out of school. But they don’t get to blame us for making do with what we have., because it is what we have.
Written with StackEdit.
No comments:
Post a Comment