“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone,” it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Today, blizzard is ours!
Patrick Logan writes:
Agreed…
We’re not so much building on the programming state of the art as continually have each generation of programmers rediscover it.
–Bill de hOra
This old fart agrees too. A far more interesting question: why. Why hasn’t a core of professional knowledge emerged in this industry? Isn’t it normal, even natural, for a craft to transition into a profession? Why am I not a member of the Association of Computing Machinery? My friends aren’t either. Why when hiring we have a strong preference for people who have built things rather people who are well certified? Why do project managers see little, if any, value in having a few doctors of Computer Science on their teams?
I see three reasons for the absence of a professional class: fast growth, a culture of anti-professionalism, and competing institutions. I’m sure there are others reasons. I’m sure that at this point I wouldn’t pick one of these as dominate.
This outcome is not necessarily a bad ting. The craft much more egalitarian than most highly technical crafts. It’s easier to get into this field. Training barrier is lower. The tools tend to be simple. They have to be. I see forces in play which keep it that way.
Fast growth has meant the demand for skilled craftsmen, tools, and knowledge has continually outstripped the supply. The rapidly expanding frontier of the industry continually creates a new frontier where amateurs can achieve huge success. In this situations it’s much more important to get there and build something than it is to build it well. In new markets the quantity of your customer relationships always dominates the quality of your technical execution. The fresh frontiers plus scarce labor creates a demand for simpler tools.
Anti-professionalism – man you could write a whole book about this! The mythology of the hacker, open source, the American cowboy. Libertarianism, the 60’s youth culture. etc. etc. But possibly I can say something a bit new. The scarcity of skill results in loose social networks. On the frontier everybody is new in town. So the fabric, the social networks, that interconnect the craftsmen are thin. But, new technology – network based social interaction tools – have enabled much to compensate for that. One of the theories about the function of a profession is that it act to create knowledge pools. The network’s social tools have allowed knowledge pooling inspite of thin social networks. This is new and might well cause other professional networks to erode as they are less necessary.
Another story people tell about professions is that they are a form of union, which naturally leads to realizing that any profession competes against it’s complementary institutions. Other institutions in high-tech would like to be the source of legitimization in the computing industry. This is a pattern I first noticed in the Medical profession. Medical doctors managed over the course of the 20th century to gain hegemony over their industry. Today that control is falling apart as other players – insurance companies, drug companies, etc. etc. are competing to take control of the huge amounts of money in flux. Today my HMO sees to it that a person who’s not even a nurse does any minor surgery. In high-tech large vendors play a similar game; and they don’t have to bother to compete with a existing strong profession. Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, etc. etc. all provide certification programs that substitute for the legitimacy of the professional society working in tandem with universities.
Some of this I think is bad; but other aspects of it are great. It’s very bad for the respect and income that highly skilled practitioners can command. While it certainly holds back the median level of skill – it appears to entrain a larger pool of practitioners. We get a longer tail. And, as open source projects demonstrate, we are getting better at aggregating knowledge from an extended tail.
Mostly I think it is great that we remain a craft that sports a reasonably low barrier to entry. It makes my coworkers a more interesting diverse lot. I think it’s healthy to keep the problem solving closer to the problems. Down in the mud not up in the ivory tower.
It is healthy that the righteous prideful status riddled behaviors of most professions are somewhat more rare in this line of work.
Scarecrow: I haven’t got a brain… only straw.
Dorothy: How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?
Scarecrow: I don’t know… But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking… don’t they?
… much later …
Wizard of Oz: Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got: a diploma.
I’ve never quite gotten the hang of this “political correctness” meme. I’ve not been able to distinguish “polite” from “politically correct.”
Larry Summers, president of Harvard’s, gotten with the program though. Noting that women aren’t found in assorted roles, like in the ruling class at Harvard, he opines that maybe they lack some innate skills. Which reminds me of the the just so story that women are fundamentally more child like because, well, it makes them better able to relate to the children their raising. So much for the powerful in the halls of academia.
Bill Thomas head of ways and means for the US Congress has gotten with the program. He floats the idea that mabye should segregate the old birds into a special class when it comes retirement benefits. So much for those with political power.
And while this one doesn’t rise to the level of the first two Paul Krugman likens a large number of American voters to a naive girlish bride swept off her feet by a mendacious older man. So even the powerful in the fourth estate don’t quite get it any more.
So that’s it! I’ve been confused. I thought “politically correct” was a substitute for “polite” but nope, it’s a mnemonic for stupid, evidence free instal-theories, stereotype and naive metaphors used to reenforce oppression by those in positions of extreme power and their apologists. The point is that powerful people need to be much more careful about speaking outside their areas of expertise; and since there is zero credible evidence for most of the fanciful theories about this or that class being somehow better or worse they should be particularly careful in when it comes to playing with that fire.
Larry Summers’ “apologized,” not for the stupid groundless unfounded statement but for the “any adverse impact.” That’s outrageous. First it indicates that he’s not admitted that he’s clueless in this domain. Expertise in economics, his field, is not expertise in all the social sciences. That’s such a basic part of academic good practice that it make you wonder. Secondly Larry Summers is not just some random academic. Larry Summers is a professionally power broker. He knows how to use the power of his position, his voice, his authority and his reputation. That apology reads like the artillery captain apologize for “any adverse impact.” He knew exactly what he was doing. It was not correct, it was wrong.
No Follow is a darn fine example of standards making. Ten. That’s all, ten. They only had to get ten organizations on board. And it’s very simple too; so they didn’t have to spend months in oddly illuminated rooms discussing character sets and industry politics. Nice thing about small numbers, like 10, is they can execute the entire project in private. They don’t have to polish the idea in the face of millions of bloggers. They can just do it.
I wonder if it took this long to happen because we needed to wait for the blogger and search engine industries to condense to the point that the number fell to ten or less?
All this reminds me of a posting I made a long time ago – “Feeding the link parasites is a sin“. (For about a year after I wrote that posting it was a magnet for spammers experimenting with innovative new attacks.) When I wrote that my concern was how the open posting policy of blogs was creating a plate of agar for various lower live forms. A substrate just like Outlook, Internet Explore, and Windows 99.
At the time it did occurred to me that the right answer to the problem was to mark up the out bound links, I suggested an author=”unknown” attribute in the link. But I really thought that the right thing to do was to mark up all the added content. Then the search engine would be able to distinguish which portions of the site the site’s owner wished to have accrue to his identity.
My hope was that site maintainers would strive to find a solution to the open posting problem because their identity was at risk; and to a large extent that’s been true. But the problem remains really hard – casually usable open systems are hard.
The rel=”nofollow” solution adds weight to the model that the search engines don’t particularly care about the content of your pages, that in end it’s who you know, not what you know that counts. Probably so.
This posting (critiquing the business models of the firms in the RSS search space) is another way to think about the provocative idea of open business models. The lesson here is that if your highly visible other people will go to work cracking open your business model for you.
Or consider this quote from a venture capitalist: “Good ideas often arise in more than one place. If we sign overlapping nondisclosure agreements, it can become impossible to work with a company without violating covenants with someone else.” Most VC communities are running an odd highly competitive open business planning consortium. it’s weird because most of the knowledge exchange is bracketed insulting the idea being transfered.
To me the two fundamental barriers preclude open business planning. The first is that small emerging businesses are not consistent, they are light on their feet. The business plan is only there, as I like to say, “so everybody knows the plan from whence we are deviating.” If you make it public it get’s harder to revise it fast and often.
The second reason are the typical reasons why full disclosure is rare in markets, why middlemen thrive. Each exchange demands that the seller and buyer’s model of value are different; that the buyer sees more value than the seller does for the good exchanged. In that context it is insane for the seller to reveal his model of the value. Since selling the company is always an option for a firm it would be very weird for the firm to be extremely open about it’s model of the business.
If these are the more common reasons for holding your business model close to your vest then it helps to explain why the leaks are so common. Framing the leak as gossip allows the actual plan to change without having to go back and rebind the leaked detail. Framing the leak as a secret plays frames it nicely as part of the on going valuation process.
That said I think there are some very interesting possibilities where industries are more aggressively open about their business models.
Ted put’s it well.
So, the next time you hear “open source development”, think “the most economically efficient method for matching resources to construct information products”. The next time you see “XXX Software Foundation”, think “people constructing a software commons (protected by intellectual property laws) that the rest of use can use and extend”. There are more things that you should think, but that’s enough for one post.
This isn’t what I expected from the block of sawdust I got for christmas. I did expect to get shiitake mushrooms from the block and indeed I did. But instead of getting a flush of 6-12 mushrooms I got this one magnificent one. It appears that the other ones which got started all aborted as soon as this one announced he was in charge. He was very tasty.
Now I let the block dry out for a few weeks and then see if can get another flush out of it.
Something has been bugging me about Chris Anderson writing on the long tail. Part of what helped to clarify my concern was the recent postings seeking a fun short definition for the long tail. Most of these are economic – so that’s part of my problem the long tail isn’t just about economics. It arises in all the social sciences. Mapping all the social sciences into economics is lame. It arises outside the social sciences as well, in physics, geology, in network systems, to take a few examples. Of course it’s fine if he want’s to focus on the long tail as they arise in markets and pseudo-markets; it just makes me a bit uncomfortable.
If you focus down in on power-law distributed systems that appear in economic frames there are at minimum four flavors to be taken seriously. Consider the supply chain: producers, consumers, distributors, and standards. All four are power-law distributed. All four have long tails. You need to think thru all four. In this case my discomfort is lame. You have to start someplace, so starting out by noticing the long tail in the suppliers is as good as anyplace to start.
Failing to think thru the four players leads to a blind spot about the architecture of the emerging market.
The internet is disrupting existing distribution channels. I believe that when the dust settles the distribution channels will be much much more concentrated than they are today. That the power-law’s slope will be much much less egalitarian. If true the distributors will capture most of the revenue enabled by the supply/demand found in the long tails. That will create some really cruel power imbalances. For example; if the only way to get your back listed catalog into the hands of consumers is Amazon why wouldn’t Amazon demand a large share of the sale price. To put this another way, I suspect that Amazon’s margin is much higher on long tail sales. Such sales are a double win for Amazon.
Modern economies have a design flaw. If the economy begins to tank people become afraid to invest, so they hide their money under the bed. Money under the bed doesn’t get invested. The productive capacity of the economy goes under utilized – labor and capital equipment is under employed. That helps it sink further into the tank. Repeat and you have a major problem on your hands.
Various prescriptions for this malady exist. For example, the Bush administration likes to use happy talk. A less faithbased approach is for the government to pump money into the economy. Buy stuff! This can work nicely, prices are low. If they shop wisely, buying useful infrastructure it’s all for the best.
The Japanese have been in long recession. They have bought a lot of concrete. Apparently they bought a huge underground water catch basin. It’s big!