Moving over to COFF from TUHS.  The following was Larry McVoy:

 

It's hard not to feel like the bar is lower.  I feel like since Steve Grandi retired at NOIRLab, I and Josh Hoblitt are the only people left who actually understand how IP networks work.  And I'm not great, never was, but I know a lot more than...everyone else.

And kids these days, well, I'm not very fluent in TypeScript and I really don't understand why every damn thing needs to be asynchronous especially if you're just awaiting its completion anyway.  But, hey, it ain't that hard to do.

But again, there's a part of me that wonders how relevant the skills I miss *are* anymore.  I'm a software developer now, but I always thought of myself as basically a sysadmin.  It's just that we had automated away all of what I started out doing (which was, what, 35-ish years ago?) by 20 years ago, and staying ahead of the automation has made me, of necessity, a software developer now.

But I was also thinking of Larry saying he wouldn't last a week in today's workplace, and I'm not sure that's true.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you once COULD say that would these days get you a quick trip through HR and your crap in a box and a walk to the curb...but I am a pretty foul-mouthed individual, and I have said nasty things about people's code, and, indeed, the people who are repeat offenders with respect to said code, and nevertheless I have had surprisingly few issues with HR these last couple decades.  So in some sense it really DOES matter WHAT it is that's offensive that you're saying, and I am living-and-still-employed proof.

If you generally treat people with respect until they prove they don't deserve it, and you base your calumny on the bad technical decisions they make and not their inherent characteristics, then it really ain't that hard to get along in a woke workplace.  And I say this as an abrasive coworker, who happens to be a cis het white dude from a fairly-mainstream Christian background and the usual set of academic credentials.

Let's face it: to do a good job as a software developer or generally an IT person, you do not need a penis.  You do not need to worship the way most people at your workplace do.  You do not need a college degree, let alone in CS.  You do not need to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex.  You do not need to have the same gender now that you were assigned at birth.  You do not need two (or given the current state of the art, ANY) working eyes.  Or hands.  You do not need to be under 40.  You do not need to be able to walk.  You do not need pale skin.  And anyone who's saying shit about someone else based on THAT sort of thing *should* be shown the curb, and quickly.  And the fact that many employers are willing to do this now is, in my opinion, a really good thing.

On the other hand, if someone reliably makes terrible technical decisions, well, yeah, you should spend a little time understanding whether there is a structural incentive to steer them that way and try to help them if they're trainable, but sometimes there isn't and they're not.  And those people, it's OK to say they've got bad taste and their implementations of their poor taste are worse.  And at least in my little corner of the world, which is quasi-academic and scientific, there's a lot of that.  Just because you're really really good at astronomy doesn't mean you're good at writing intelligible, testable, maintainable programs.  Some very smart people have written really awful code that solved their immediate problems, but that's no way to start a library used by thousands of astronomers.  But whether or not they're competent software engineers ain't got shit to do with what they have in their pants or what color their skin is.

And it's not always even obvious bigotry.  I don't want to work with toxic geniuses anymore.  Even if the only awful things they do and say are to people that they regard as intellectually inferior and are not based on bullshit as above...look, I'd much rather work with someone who writes just-OK code and is pleasant than someone who writes brilliant code and who's always a quarter-second from going off on someone not quite as smart as they are.  Cleverness is vastly overrated.  I'd rather have someone with whom I don't dread interacting writing the stuff I have to interface with, even if it means the code runs 25% slower.  Machine cycles are dirt cheap now.  The number of places where you SHOULD have to put up with toxicity because you get more efficient code and it actually matters has been pretty tiny my entire adult lifetime, and has been shrinking over that lifetime as well.  And from a maintainability standpoint...if I encounter someone else's just-OK code, well, I can probably figure out what it's doing and why it's there way, way more easily than someone's code that used to be blazing fast, is now broken, and it turns out that's because it encodes assumptions about the runtime environment that were true five years ago and are no longer correct.

That said, it's (again, in my not-necessarily-representative experience) not usually the nonspecific toxic genius people who get in trouble with HR.  The ones who do, well, much, MUCH, too often, are the people complaining about wokeness in the workplace who just want to be able to say bad things about their coworkers based on their race or gender (or...) rather than the quality of their work, and I'm totally happy to be in the "That's not OK" camp, and I applaud it when HR repeats that and walks them out the door.

Adam