Part I of Hegel, Coding and Managers: The Blindness of Coders

This is a real rant from a techie who works for a company in San Mateo:

Recently our CTO (who also is a word class fool) promoted a guy to the position of lead product architect. I would like to mention that the product whose architect he has appointed has never contributed any work worth mentioning.

If you take a look at the only feature he has managed to make and he was the only resource assigned on that feature so I suppose he had all the options to take his decision and come up with a word class implementation, comprises of one file only. Yeah just one file and this one file contains tons of classes which have methods reaching 1K lines.

So you can imagine where the focus is. It clearly shows that this guy has never programmed under a good leadership. He is so worried about getting this fact disclosed that he managed to convince the CTO to not allow anyone to even see his code let alone suggest improvements. That’s one of the reasons I call the CTO a fool too 🙂

God knows what more is to come from this word class duo.

— source an anonymous lead engineer in San Mateo

The first thing that struck me is this. Why is this guy telling me this? Why isn’t he telling the CTO? One of the mythologies that Hegel pedals is the idea that the status quo is a result of a life and death struggle with the result being a great inequality. The time for talk has passed long ago, and what we have is this:

[O]ne is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is the master, the other is the slave. (Phenomenology of Spirit, s. 189)

Hegel’s way out for the slave is the work that the slave does on things. Hegel characterizes work as “desire held in check, fleetingness staved off… It is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own… having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self-will, a freedom.” (s. 195 – 196) Through service and discipline the slave makes herself stronger. The slave working on her work sees herself as essential and the master as unessential. This sets the stage for the slaves escape to freedom or possible domination of the master. In Marx, this is when the workers rise and take over all ownership of the means of production. The unessential, i.e. the owners, are done away with or made into workers themselves. Nobody is any longer master nor slave.

On the PHP Meetup list, I asked the question, “Have there ever been coders who have coded their way to freedom?”

I was given two examples, neither of which answered the question, and show that yes, a lot of coders do falsely believe that coding leads to freedom.

1) John Gilmore, a founder of the EFF which is an organization I support with donations.

2) Richard Stallman.

I’d say neither is free because although Gilmore made a fortune at Sun, coding didn’t lead to that freedom as a necessary condition. There are coders as good as Gilmore who don’t have that cash. The fact that EFF had to be founded points to the un-freedom of coders.

As far as Stallman goes, I admire his work. I use a lot of GNU software. However, I don’t have enough fingers to count the companies that close source GNU software and try and re-sell it as their own.

So, as you can see coding isn’t enough. Yet coders feel their coding makes them qualified to call CTOs fools. Ya, I can see that putting 1000s of lines of code into one file can be dumb. I can also see that promoting a bad coder is a bad idea. Good coding allows you to see this, but this guy in San Mateo has bought into the idea that he can’t talk to this CTO, that somehow the solution to the problem is technical, i.e. better code.

If you’re a coder, my advice to you is that the time to talk isn’t over. It hasn’t been settled in a Hegelian life and death struggle where the inequalities are currently fixed. If you talk, you still have a chance. Email your gripes now, and you might even be surprised.

In my next post, I talk about the prejudices that managers have towards coders.