Understanding the Coders, Understand the Remaking of this New World We Currently Living In

“Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and Remaking of the World” by Clive Thompson was my 17th book that I’ve read this year. The combination of the long pages and the fasting period followed by the holidays made me procrastinate a lot in finishing this book and writing the summary. Nonetheless, it’s a very interesting book to read and a useful one to me in my current role overseeing the HR Business Partner for the growth industry that mostly running heavily using technology with the coders are in the center of it. By reading this book I could get a better understanding about them in a broader perspectives: historically, culturally, psychologically and a bit technically.

As we are now living in a world made of software, coders (or programmers) are thus the most quietly influential people on the planet. They are the architects who guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard of impossible to do something, we do less of it. I f we look at the history of the world, there are points in time when different professions become suddenly crucial, and its practitioners suddenly powerful. The world abruptly needs and rewards their particular set of skills. The time for the coders is now and I don’t think it will be gone anytime soon. This book explore deeply about them: who exactly are they? what makes them tick? what type of personality is drawn to writing software? How does their work affect us? and perhaps most interestingly, what does it do to them? Please do read the book yourself to get the complete answer of those questions as this article will only answer some of it in a very concise manner.

Coding is surely a form of engineering, but unlike in every other type of engineering—mechanical, industrial, civil—the machines we make with software are woven from words. Code is speech; speech a human utters to silicon, which machines come to life and do our will. Coding isn’t easy. It requires sitting alone for hours, trying to mentally inhabit the twisty nuances of a piece of software—how this loop over here is triggered by that input by the user, unless this other subroutine is currently running, in which case this function ought to fire up. More than introversion or logic, though, coding selects for people who can handle endless frustration. Because while computers may do whatever you tell them, you need to give them inhumanly precise instructions. When we meet a coder, we’re meeting someone whose core daily experience is on unending failure and grinding frustration.

In the other side, code is really good at making things scale. Computers may require utterly precise instructions, but if we get the instructions right, the machine will tirelessly do what we command over and over and over again, for users around the world. Code makes efficiency and scale easy, seductive, almost inevitable. That is also why programmers fit so easily into business building and part of why some slide so frequently into libertarian thinking. Their talents are torqued perfectly for capitalism’s central trick, which is basically. “do something marginally more efficiently than before and then skim off the profit”. 

This book explains about four waves of coders:

1. The first wave is in the ‘60s when those who do the coding didn’t yet necessarily think of it as a career and part of enormous teams. Computers were the province of institutions, and the ones who were allowed to touch them were institutional. It’s often a surprise to people today, but at that time most of the “career programmers” were female. Part of the reason men weren’t full-time programmers is because in the ‘60s, the sexy, high glory part of the job was regarded as building the hardware. The actual act of programming the machines—telling the hardware what to do—was, if not exactly an afterthought, seen as a subordinate activity. Another part of the reason is that most computers’ capacity back then was quite limited; the IBM 704 could handle only about 4,000 “words” of code in its memory. Writing a program was like writing a haiku or a sonnet. A good programmer was concise, elegant, and never wasted a word. Characteristics that fit more with woman.
2. The next wave of the coders, though, were the “hackers” of the ’60s and early ‘70s. They regarded themselves as renegades—the one who wrested computing away from dour, restrictive institutions. There’s a “hacker ethic” which they believed that there was a hands-on imperative, that everyone in the world ought to be allowed to interact directly with a computer. They also believed in radical openness with code: if you wrote something useful, you should freely share it with others. Much of the culture was born at MIT, as one of the institution who possess computers. 
3. By the ’80s, the nature of computers changed again, The devices were becoming cheaper and cheaper, as a new breed of manufacturer decided it was time to truly bring computers to the masses. When you take a cheap machines that can do nearly anything you tell them to and hand them over to teenagers with essentially no adult supervision—because their parents had no idea what computers were—you create the infinite-monkeys experiment software. This was a big shift in the culture of who became a coder and why. For the first time, programmers were emerging in living rooms, as teenagers, propelled by the culture of making, acquiring and sharing software.
4. The fourth wave of coders—the one that still reigns today. These are the programmers who grew up during the age of the web and mobile phones and used as their on-ramp to programming.    

What type of personality, what type of psychology, makes someone good at programming? Some traits are the obvious ones. Coders tend to be good at thinking logically, systematically. But if you had to pick the central plank of coder psychology, the one common thread in nearly everyone who gravitates to this weird craft? It’s a boundless nigh mashochistic ability to endure brutal, grinding frustration. A frustration that comes from finding an often tiny bug that preventing the program for running as expected. Therefore, the programmer personality is someone who has the ability to derive a tremendous sense of joy from an incredibly small moment of success. For many programmers, a profound allure of coding is that it’s a refuge from the unpredictability of humans, from their grayscale emotions and needs. 

Last but not least that I want to highlight here is the “dark side” of scale and growth brought up from a successful codes in the form of softwares or applications. Take a well known example of Twitter and Facebook for this and we will all understand that those big tech companies are products of coders whose business models focus on both advertising and growth as their two pillars. It’s then nearly inevitable that they’ll seduce us as their users into endless, compulsive use—or “engagement,” as it’s euphemistically called. Watch Netflix’s Black Mirror Season 5 episode 2 “Smithereens” for an enjoyable watch to understand more on this.