
Programmers are tiny demons
Programmers are tiny gods. This phrase is an arguably harmless metaphor written by “Powazek” in 2009 on their now dead website. You can check an archive here. It’s a short, not so well-written and dated account of how programmers should be treated if you want to get something out of them. For quite some time, I believe at least between 2012 and 2014, Google’s auto complete for “programmers are” was “tiny gods” being among the first suggestions. I managed to find one mention of it from 2013. And another from 2018 without it.
One of the reasons for this could be is that in the last decade, other people didn’t understand our profession. Not to say they do now, but it is much more ubiquitous and I don’t get the same basic questions I was getting at family gatherings in 2013. By being lazy, arrogant weirdos —taking other examples from Google’s auto complete— I think the collective of the internet meant, at that time, that programmers were nerdy white young men. Middle class enthusiasts, as Searls intelligently put it.
In a sense, programmers kind of were ‘tiny gods’. In other words, enthusiasts in the neoliberal world. That means they came from privilege of being able to have enthusiasm and live off of it. They were tiny in perspective, looking only at their own realities, and often reproduced the inequalities of reality in their products. We are living with the consequences of that now. The use of the word gods and the time period reminds me of a curious story that happened in 2011 Rio de Janeiro: a transit agent fined and apprehended a vehicle from a driver without his driver ID and license plate. The driver identified himself as a judge, and tried to get out of it. The agent said “[you’re a] judge, not a god” and, some time later, she was found guilty of the crime of contempt just by saying that obvious truth, having to pay damages (source). Quite some time later, the sentence was reverted in an appeal. But, for years, and in that time period, the fact (judges are not gods) and how the system works in practice (saying that gets you in trouble) were symbolic.
The 2010s were the decade of emergence of new careers, for better or worse: content creation, gig economy, social media managing for brands, cloud computing… In that sense, programmers were gods and looked mighty, the target of the aspirations of some young people. I was one of those young boys.
When I saw one upper class friend writing stuff on his computer and the computer ‘obeying’ him, I immediately got interested. I wasn’t the stereotypical nerd, although a nerd. I never had a videogame console at that time. I didn’t have internet access at home. I was 13 and my phone wasn’t ‘smart’. The year was 2007, and I got into programming school. Bending a computer to my will was the motivator for me pursuing this career. It is something that resonates with my colleagues when I mention it. Maybe we have something here. The ‘tiny gods’ and the other previously mentioned google’s autocompletes being a symptom of a broader phenomenon. Maybe, programmers are (or are becoming) actually tiny demons, in some senses of the word.
Mythologically, demons are deceitful. They trick people into thinking they have more power than they actually have. They create illusions that look very real. They create scenarios where people do their worst. While I’m not arguing for an exact swap of the metaphor here (people get too attached to metaphors anyway), just that this would be a good frame to analyze the problematic ways our profession is portrayed and try to get to two issues: the promises of infinite stable work, much like industrial work some 40~50 years ago and the way the media treats us like we’re the geniuses of our generation.
From my experience, programmers are not incentivized to trust people. We joke that the problem is most often found between the chair and the screen. In Portuguese, we have an old joke that BIOS is the Bicho Ignorante Operando Sistema, which would translate to “stupid animal operating the system”. When trying to overcome human limitations and mistakes, we treat the human using the system as an animal, and create guardrails not for their own safety and comfort, but for the safety and comfort (that mainly translates to profit) of whoever owns the system.
Some time ago, I wrote an article (in Portuguese) on the XY problem, the horrible attitude some experienced programmers have when invoking it, and how it’s often misused as a forum policing tactic on beginners and experienced people alike. My main argument there is that when assuming intellectual honesty, there is no such thing as a stupid question, and policing how to ask better questions is not the same as having a dialectic exchange and looking for opportunities to grow. No one should put themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge (or worse, behavior) and people should read more Paulo Freire. As another example of this behavior, let’s look at this abomination of a website: dontasktoask.com.
Dontasktoask is a plagiarized website made by a tiny demon. It’s original source is in a tiny link, barely visible, and the content of the site is the exact copy of its source. The goal of the site seems to be that other tiny demons have a cheap way of policing someone’s attitude by replying with a link. That has actually happened to me once. It complains about asking “who is good at X” and then goes on suggesting that you actually ask the thing you supposedly want. It does not consider any reasonable motivation the person might have when asking something, and takes offence in the question, making it sound like a big deal. I wonder if photographers complain when you ask who is a Nikon expert in a group chat if you’re only familiarized with Canon? Has any other profession a known hostility of the way people ask questions like us, demons?I could just want to identify the experts on the subject. I could have some anxiety on asking about it on public. There are multiple reasons to do something like that.
These are examples that illustrate the underlying behaviors some IT people have that in other fields, you couldn’t get away with it. Is not so surprising that we are portrayed as isolated, introspective and magically talented people in fiction. And on mainstream journalism, we are conflated with the bourgeois “founders”, revered for supposedly being innovative, ahead of their time. On the first Jurassic Park movie, Nedry could be considered one of the first examples. Although in my perception he is somewhat of an exception,portrayed as an inept villain. Mostly our fictional peers are quite competent, often misunderstood geniuses. The well reviewed sitcom “Silicon Valley” (2014-2019) showed both types —magically talented and rich founders— throughout its seasons. Gilfoyle and Dinesh, the frenemies developers are at the beginning shown as the first example and ultimately becoming the second one. And there is also a CEO with a very interesting quote: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are”. Demons are very idiosyncratic. And a lot of us aspire —even knowing to be practically impossible— to be like our leaders.