Another one bites the dust

As a developper, I got unabatted ambitions about software engineering : being agile, producing modular, ready-for-deployment, future-proof and endorsing state-of-the-art coding schemes1. Some time ago, someone in the internet was like a “role-model” to me. His nickname is vector-of-bool and he embodied everything I wanted to be as C++ developper. He authored recent successful C++ tools, some of them had become vital for a lot of us in our jobs.

Alas, it came to my attention than he just throwed in the towel and explained why. There is really a lot to discuss in his post, about different subjects, which are a little intertwined. Let’s enumerate a few :

  • The community open-source model as unpaid/non-status volunteer work
  • The social perception of the developper job and the acknowledgement the society or the work environnement about the involved efforts in software engineering
  • The burn-out as a result of this discrepancy between the personal investement and the outside (society/workplace) perception
  • The resulting depression 2

His story struck a chord with me because I recently experienced the type of discrepancy he describes. Let’s detail.

Context

I work as a software engineer in a research environment. On the project I’m in, the keyword there is “inter-disciplinary”, and it’s related to a specific field which mixes itself several scientific speciality fields. One of those fields is what we could call the “driving” one, and it’s ultra-specialized, with the following charasterics3 :

  • high-profile, broadcasting fundamental tools and concepts in a lot a related speciality fields
  • requiring very specific sets of skills and difficult-to-grasp concepts, with nowhere the semblance of a corresponding course or academic teaching to be found.

Problem

The fundamental problem I had to face (and it took years to me to understand it), is that my own field of expertise wasn’t considered at the same level as the “driving” field in the project. In fact, this implicit hierarchy introduced a lot of bias from my side and from the other one due to a single reason : complete mismatch of objectives.

As a software engineer, I wanted something lasting, modular, something everybody with a coding and or thematic interest could easily contribute to. The other person in the project wanted essentially something that just works, and publish the results, completely oblivious of how to transmit the knowledge to build the tools we used to get the results. It’s not just about experiment reproductibility, it’s about the pure sustainability of the technological environment in which you’re experimenting and getting results.4.

This biased hierarchic mismatch, adding to the normal “inter-disciplinary” friction, fed an uneasy feeling over the years. This feeling wasn’t said, wasn’t understood and ultimately triggered a serious crisis.

Context, part II

Once the dust settled, I realized that I invested a lot of psychological energy not exactly to get the job done per se, but simply to keep at least the faintest motivation to precisely get it done. I wasn’t even aware of this because from a pure general and abstract point of view my reasoning and my brain were still telling me that the project was worth it, in its scientific and thematic aspects (even if I couldn’t grasp all real intrications related to the involved speciality field) : it took myself a long time to get rid of the hierarchic bias in my way to view and think my own role in the project.

Why I’m telling you this? Because I want to put it in perspective. I worked in my leisure time in an artist collective where the hierarchic bias is inexistent5. I felt as important as an engineer than the artist themselves, in fact, the distinction turned to be artificial because I became myself a source of artistic proposals, equally involved in the design and realization of the works. The comparison isn’t convoluted at all in the sense it is precisely a “research collective”, and the work done there is as important for our society and building our everyday vision of the world as it is in pure “scientific” work. In fact, it’s real working inter-disciplinarity, not just a claimed one.

So, if we step a little back and take a rational look, the so-called “driving” field is only driving not because of his intrisic merit or superiority but because of its social status and the difficulty to access to the data and underlying concepts. This is reflected by the fact that most of the persons I encountered in this driving field had reached some recognition status, are satisfied with it and don’t see the pedagogic question (transmission of expertise or at very least assessing an academic basis for this) as a vital one.

Perspectives

The so-called “complexity” of our world is just this : an untractable and generalized level of interdependencies we now live in. And because of this, it is now no-sensical to establish a practical hierarchy of our knowledges fields. That’s not saying they are all equal, that’s absolutely not true : but if there is an objective hierarchy, it is unrelated to any established hiearchy in which we may fit, as person, coworkers, collaborators of those different knowledges fields. Those fields are arbitrary separated, and their respective boundaries are determined by social, academic, historic or even economic reasons.

But for the most part we still think and act like this arbritrary breakdown of the knowledge is something objective and given “as is”.

Whatever the scope, we pay a high price for mismatching reality with an unquestioned and imaginary hierarchy.

footnotes

  1. Only if you live and die by this language, you’d know it’s matter of years and years of steep learning to get to this. ↩

  2. I feel we should separate the burn-out and the depression topics even if they are obviously related, because the burn-out is socially relevant and the depression is more like a personnal consequence. ↩

  3. I didn’t name the fields, they don’t matter in my argument. ↩

  4. It isn’t enough to publish some ready-to-use binary or some quick-and-dirt code, only accessible by some speciality field guys. It’s like you’re a mechanic for some rare and discontinued cars, you just want to have strict garage-client relationship with the people you’re in business with and you give them ready-to-drive cars. But the day you stop doing your job or shut down, nobody could repair and ultimately drive those cars anymore. You still could get information sheets with nice photos, specs and so on: it doesn’t matter, it became dead technology, with nobody with motivation and competences enough to make it still live. ↩

  5. I’m not saying all artist collectives are the same and that I would also have experienced this in other collectives. It was just the case for the one I got into. In fact the implicit manifest of this particular collective was to precisely not involve any hierarchy in his operating rules. ↩