Building Tech Together

I supervised almost 200 senior undergraduates’ projects at the University of Toronto between 2002 and 2010. Based on that experience I wrote a student’s guide to developing software in teams. I revised it several years later to try to make it relevant to scientists without a background in computer science who found themselves building large libraries and applications for research, but in the end I decided not to publish it. I didn’t think the world needed another bunch of “just so” stories from one person’s point of view, and none of my attempts to talk other teachers into contributing went anywhere.

Then Trump became president, in part because tech companies thought race hate and conspiracy theories were OK as long as they increased page views. In 2017 I tried to get a bunch of people in tech to write a chapter each to explain why the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, why no one from the Sackler family ever went to prison for selling opioids that killed tens of thousands of people, and how Silicon Valley managed to persuade us all that mass surveillance was OK. That effort eventually ground to a halt: we didn’t know enough of this stuff ourselves to teach it, and the people who did weren’t interested in making their thinking accessible to newcomers who weren’t yet sure it would be useful.

The second point was and is important. Software Carpentry, It Will Never Work in Theory, and Teaching Tech Together all succeeded because they aimed to give learners a ball-and-stick model rather than teaching them quantum chemistry. What I wanted, in effect, was Scratch for the social sciences, but the people who could write it seemed to fall into three camps:

1. They didn’t know programmers well enough to talk to them.
2. They didn’t see why they should dumb down their work (which is like programmers who look down on tools like Scratch because it’s not “real”).
3. They were (justifiably) afraid that if they simplified and cut corners, their colleagues in Group 2 would tear strips off them for being sloppy and unserious.

Six years, four books, and one pandemic later, I think it’s more important than ever to find a way to explain how the world works to privileged young men who are mostly OK with the present arrangements. I know how to get them to parrot back what they need to say in order to get a grade, but that’s just going to annoy them.

Which brings us to the latest version of that guide I wrote, which I have tentatively titled Building Tech Together. It is currently an uncomfortable and out-of-touch mix of technology (“how to use Git with other people”), process (“how to run an effective meeting”), and polemic (“how preparatory privilege keeps power in the hands of those who already have it”). It doesn’t draw nearly enough on recent research on developer thriving, much less the work reported at NWIT, and doesn’t even try to describe alternatives to Silicon Valley’s self-justifying bullshit.

It could, though. For example, I think that an explanation of how to run more effective meetings could segue into a discussion of the way that who interrupts whom depends on perceived or desired social status, which could in turn give students tools for thinking about who has power and how it is manifested. The same “bait-and-switch for good” approach has a better chance of getting the unconverted to pay attention than anything else I can think of. For example, an analysis of how (not) to do performance reviews could easily turn into a discussion of how students in a team project should be evaluated, which in turn could lead to discussion of how to design safeguards against sociopathic teammates and Elon Musk.

I don’t know enough to write this, and most of the people I know can’t help: when I asked recently for suggestions about a new programming stack and teaching team leadership, thirty-one people offered ideas about the former and none about the latter. I could continue trying to learn enough on my own, but nobody has ever been willing to back proposals like these two, and there aren’t as many years or words in front of me as there are behind me.

On the other hand, I’m still angry. I’ve read eight books on how to be an engineering manager in the last sixteen months. None of them talked about what to do when your employer is helping white supremacists stay in business or tries to cover up a case of sexual assault. It’s been a privilege to spend so many years thinking and writing about teaching and software design, but I think that with great privilege comes great responsibility, and that if I don’t accept that responsibility, I’m the asshole. I don’t know what to do next; if you do, I’d like to hear from you.