Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

If you haven’t noticed, something is happening. Things are comming together. Listen! while you read, then
watch. Skip the
intermediaries?
“
Spontaneous Integration“?
Indeed!

        — thank you
Shanon,
Sam,
Jon,
Dave, etc!

I was awoken this morning by a phone call from a Surgeon. Most surgeons are not very strong on people skills. People say: “Your not hiring them for their personality, your hiring them for their hands.” I entirely appreciate this. Some - most? - of the the very best software engineers I know have a similar profile. The person who dives into your innards with a knife and rearranges things, well, you want him to be really confident, really sure, of what he’s doing. People that sure of how to draw the knife thru the inside of a complex system ought to be experts in those kinds of systems, and that might not leave time for becoming skilled at people skills.

The surgeon was calling to get my permission to operate on a relative. I figure the medical industry makes them do this just out of spite. The poor guys are paid to be absolutely sure that they are doing the absolutely right thing; and then they make them call up complete strangers and nicely ask permission to do it using the people skills that are almost fundamentally contrary to craft skill. I suspect the nursing staff enjoys observing these little morality plays.

He poured a torrent of words over the phone to describe the procedure. After a few minutes he paused to take a breath. I informed him that he really needed to speak with my sibling who has taken this responsiblity. He then launched into another torrent of words. Toward the end of that round paused and he said “Did you say I should call your sibling?”

Bertrand and Mullainathan’s paper showing how a white sounding name vs. a black sounding one is far more likely to get called back when submitted on a resume just won’t get out of my head!

Table 2, on page 30 of this paper has a table I just can’t stop thinking about. It reports that if Brad submits a hundred resumes he will get 16 calls, while Rasheed can expect to get 3.

People like to talk about how hard working and dedicated immigrants are. Well now we know why Rasheed’s so hard working. He’s scared! He’s going to have to work five times harder than Brad to find a new job if he looses the one he’s got.

It suggests something about why there seem to be so few participants of non-european ancestry involved in Open Source. They are common in Silicon Valley. Just maybe they don’t want to take the risk.

Power-law distributions, like the one seen in names, seem to arise from preferential attachment. For example parents tend to name their children with names that are already popular. I think we can assume that parents prefer to give names to thier children that will serve them well; I certainly did. A thought provoking example of this can be seen reflected in this report in the New York Times on this study. Resumes submitted with ‘black’ names were significantly less likely to be invited in for an interview than resumes with ‘white’ names.

Steven Noels says something key in the midst of many other interesting things on his blog.

“My recurring argument is that Free Software should be more than just using LAMP, it should be based on the willingness to invest more into employees instead of external suppliers.”

Open source is about shifting ownership around in the supply chain. It is about putting some of the ownership into the hands of the people that do the work. This is analagous to the way that professional societies sometimes write standards. It’s analagous to the craft knowledge of a guild. It is hard for firms to grapple with since they find it much easier to think of the world thru the simple dialectic of buyers and sellers. Adding a third element into the mix - the craftsmen - makes things a lot more complex to think about.