Will the Real Technical People Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Technical People

Please Stand Up?@lhawthorn - Eurucamp 2015

mikecogh

Good morning, everyone! I’m here to talk to you today about a phrase I find just as problematic as I find my enjoyment of the singer whose music inspired the title for this talk. I’m here today to ask that all the “real” technical people in our industry please stand up.

$PERSON

isn’t

TECHNICAL

How often have you heard this phrase? Do you find yourself using it? I’ve been hearing it for the past 15 years, which coincidentally is just as long as I have worked in the tech industry. I’ve never really felt like it fit me. I had the immense privilege of having access to a computer almost from birth, and growing up in Silicon Valley meant I had access to a computer lab filled with Apple IIes, writing my first programs more than 20 years ago. (Sheesh, I’m getting old.)

What’s even more surprising is how often I hear this phrase from women at technical conferences like OSCON. They’ll visit the booth I’m standing in and the first words out of their mouths will be “I’m not technical, but ….” I don’t really think of non-technical people as attending OSCON.

So, I find this phrase really problematic, because when I hear it, I immediately think of ….

My Parents*

* Not Drawn to Scale

thedailyenglishshow

Unix Programmer Learned to use the ATM when I was 14

My Mom. My Mom, the Unix programmer, the one who worked at Visa International for more than a decade attempting to bring chip enabled credit cards to the United States. The ones you folks here in Europe have had for years, but we’re just rolling out now.

And I think of all of her patience with my Dad, who has no relationship whatsoever with computers. Even today. My Dad, who so embodies the definition of non-technical that his Nokia candy bar mobile is *never* charged and I had to teach him how to use an ATM when I was in secondary school because he’d never gotten money from a bank without standing in line to make a withdrawal from a human teller.

© D. Taranik used with permission

Or, I think of these lovely women, my dear friends from the US. These are the women who I see not often enough, but definitely each year at Christmastime. The ones who rapidly hand me their smart phones to install a myriad of software updates, uninstall various spyware programs and to introduce them to such wonders as the Yahoo! mail app.

And yet, when I really think about my friend the vet, I remember she was required to do more years in university than doctors who perform medicine on humans, and she heals patients who cannot speak to her to tell her what is wrong.

And yet, when I think of my friend the high school teacher in Florida, teaching youth who have recently come to the US as refugees from places like Haiti. A woman who has learned to navigate a desperately underfunded public school system to ensure her students are able to learn, while balancing their human needs as recent immigrants, living in poverty, and learning English as their second language.

And yet, when I think really think my friend the office manager, I think of all the times I have watched her work around bugs in her office’s software. If you think every expense reporting system you have ever used is terrible, try using software to manage dental records that has to maintain compliance with patient confidentiality laws while speaking to any number of different backends for various insurance corporations. You’ll run screaming for Oracle Financials immediately.

It’s very hard for me to say that these women are not technical. I feel like their work is very technical, just not my flavor of technical. I certainly cannot do any of the things they do every day.

What does $PERSON isn’t TECHNICAL

even mean?

see also its ugly relatives: “not very technical” and “not technical enough” and “not as technical as $SOMEONE_JUST_LIKE_ME”

So I have a real problem with this phrase. And I suppose my biggest problem with it is that I actually can’t tell you what it means. As far as I can tell, it’s completely meaningless, entirely subjective and randomly applied.

Does It Mean ….

• Doesn’t have a university degree in Computer Science or Engineering of some sort?

• Doesn’t write code? (Or doesn’t do it for their career?)

• Can’t solder and has no idea what thermal compound is?

* What about all the self taught people in our industry who are successful programmers? All of our idols who never attended university or dropped out of school?* What about civil engineers and civic planners? They don’t necessarily write software. And I don’t know about you, but it would really frighten me if the people designing

roads and building bridges for me weren’t technical. * Doesn’t administer their own mail server? How many of us now only use Gmail or another web email service? * Does anyone else remember when the only people Google would employ were able to build their own computer from scratch, and everyone else wasn’t technical

enough?* There are people who will tell you that anyone who thinks Emacs is a viable text editor aren’t really technical, either, nor are people who run OS X or Windows instead

of Linux, etc., etc. * Is everyone in these categories really “not technical”?

$PERSON isn’t TECHNICALimplies some kind of immutable binary

Which is completely false. Not a single one of us was born knowing how to program. Every single one of us is capable of becoming a developer, as the fine folks in mentoring programs like Rails Girls SoC and Rails Girls Berlin have demonstrated to us again and again. Why would we ever use language that suggests otherwise?

hape_gera

This phrase is toxic.

So, I submit you, fine folks of Eurucamp and beyond, that this phrase is toxic. It should be stricken from our vocabulary. Just like we’ve learned not to say “this code is lame,” we should find better words to choose than “$PERSON isn’t technical.”

This phrase is code for…

• “I don’t have to challenge my own biases”

• “The work $PERSON performs is much less valueable than my own work”

• “$PERSON is a woman / person of color / not enough like me to ‘fit in’”

* “I don’t actually have to think about what $PERSON is or is not capable of doing”* “I don’t have to expend any effort to teach or better inform $PERSON and there is no value in doing so”* It is amazing how often this phrase is applied to underrepresented groups in the technology industry, even along the lines of devaluing professions that are seen as

more accessible to women: documentation, user experience design, program management and business operations.* Have you ever heard a member of an underrepresented group tell you that their not technical? I can guarantee you that this isn’t a phrase that they came to

themselves. They’ve heard it over and over, and in hearing it repeated they’ve internalized it and come to believe it to be true.

This phrase prevents us from …

• Having better educated and more empowered colleagues

• Fully respecting the value of our team mates

• Having more effective collaboration throughout our organizations and projects

* Achieving pay equity* Achieving our greatest level of success due to causing demotivation, burnout and impostor syndrome* This language fails to serve us. It’s time to edit it out of our vocabulary and take the time to think about what we really mean when we say “$PERSON is not technical.”

Perhaps what we really mean is “$PERSON doesn’t know how to program - yet!”

Why would I stay in an industry

that defines me by what I can’t do instead of all the things I can do?

Read awesome things by Kara: http://bit.ly/AlcoholAndInclusivity Kara’s Twitter bio pic used with permission

In closing, I’d like to share some wisdom from my friend Kara Sowles, a community human at Puppet Labs. When she heard I’d be giving this talk, we shared some thoughts on the topic at the recent OSCON conference, and yet again Kara’s wise words really stayed with me long after we spoke.

In an industry where we hear constant complaints about a lack of pipeline to create diverse teams and, more accurately, a leaky pipeline when it comes to retaining underrepresented groups, why would we ever devalue the contributions of people who will frequently learn to program or choose to become professional developers after beginning their career with so-called non-technical job functions?

I’d like to ask everyone in the audience to edit the phrase not technical out of their vocabulary, challenge others - gently, with mutual respect and kindness - to do the same, and to explicitly, vocally value all the contributions of their co-workers and collaborators. We will all be the better for it, and so will our projects, companies and industry.

86979666@N00

Thank You!

Further Reading & Legal Bits• Fantastic related article:

The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee (http://bit.ly/MythNon-TechEmployee

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