A prophylactic measure against stupidity
As usual, there are a lot of interesting things in this Paul Graham essay, What the Bubble Got Right.
If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.
And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”
Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity. […]
A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance. So what’s the connection between nerds and technology? Roughly that you can’t fool mother nature. In technical matters, you have to get the right answers. If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can’t finesse your way out of trouble by saying that your code is patriotic, or avant-garde, or any of the other dodges people use in nontechnical fields.
The substance of what he says is correct but the fact is that just because technology is a scientific field does not mean that tech is immune to stupidity. Usually the people who know what does what and why are not the people who make the decisions regarding where the resources go... and further, they are not the people who hire and fire the people who do supposedly know what is going on. Maybe it was different in "the bubble", but for the tech industry in the rest of the country, the new economy was saddled with all the worst problems and tendencies of the old economy, and no amount of smart will make up for bad management, or firing the only people who know how your system works because they aren't part of the "in club" with management.
If this kind of stuff interests you, you should look into the rise and fall of Williams Communication, a spin-off of Williams Energy based in Tulsa. Total cluster fuck in every way imaginable, and yet sadly symbolic for many of the problems in the post-bust bust that happened in the year or so following 9-11.
Posted by Tim O'Neil on March 10 2005 08:12