Why I Cannot Be Technical

With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of an anomaly.^[1] Also at the end of the day I have mischief in my heart and I love to ask Bad Questions. Kind Technical people are attuned to exclusion because they’ve been beaten around enough by it and they’re still kind enough to want to do something about it so they frequently intervene on my bad questions. I recognize that in these moments what Technical friends wish to do is usher me safely inside of the Technical tent. There is a core of such goodness to this, dare I even say sweetness. In many cases packaged inside of this kind of statement is a hand outstretched, seeking to extend protection to me. Mama didn’t raise no fool: I know that on any quest we should accept protection. In your outdoor voice, please continue to tell people I’m Technical. If we meet inside of a meeting or inside of a decision, and being called technical is the dividing line between people who get to stand on the high ground when the water comes in and people who don’t, I don’t care what type of line you throw down to me.

However, mama didn’t raise no fool. What I know–because my form of expertise which creates the basis for your extended hand in the first place is expertise for this exactly–is that I cannot be Technical. Not really. This is because Technical is a structural designation that operates outside of any actual problem-solving you and I are doing together. Being Technical is about being legitimate. Or to put it more simply: it’s because you are Technical that I can’t be. We have created the identities this way. A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate.

One of the psychology professors who first inducted me into the field gave me advice about studying things. He was a very dialectical thinker: everything for him had to be understood in pairs, like Noah’s Ark. I was hanging around after class because I was a teacher’s pet kind of college student. But hanging out with authority is a way you can pick up the actual rules as people drop them, the actual game. It’s like if you stay in your seat at a theater while everyone else leaves and wait for the lights to come on so you can see the seams in the backgrounds and the faces of the people cleaning to whom this is just another day at their job. The actual game is also what I am listening for when I’m listening to Technical people explain things to me. At any rate, this faculty member said, “Everything worth studying has an opposite that’s necessary to understand what you thought you were studying.”

I have found this to be true. If you want to construct a psychology theory that truly describes marriage and our beliefs about it as stable, romantic, supportive and lasting, you cannot ignore the fact that many human relationships rupture and many relationships are violent. How we think about marriage is shaped as much by divorce as it is by the meet-cute. Your theory has to ask why, so your theory has to include repair. A description of the things happening for technical people and technical work has to include a realization of boundaries and how they are policed. This helps you start to see. Despite how real it feels, despite how carefully we have knit supposedly objective judgments of performance and evaluation and delivery of work into these words, Technical is not an assessment of reality. Labeling someone Technical is a reality-transforming weapon. I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.

Very frequently in my reckless excursions into tech social media I say something that is aware of this and that touches a nerve with some Technical Person who experiences contact with my mind like a live wire. In this exchange, Technical seems to see as its only possible recourse the activity of going absolutely ham in my mentions. One of the great joys of being a psychologist, however, is that everything becomes material. I suggest you listen to the tone as not auxiliary to, but as central to the content of these rants (I suggest you do this in general in tech). Like every born-different or made-different kid with poverty origins who lives in the airlock of the Technical I can swiftly recognize the tone of the guy standing on the spaceship side of the door slamming the eject button at me. One of these people recently proposed a future in which I would run out of clean water and electricity, presumably because at that point I would learn to be subservient enough to engineers. The problem for Technical is that I have already run out of water and electricity in my life, so I already know what I would do and who I would do it for. Do you?

This is why the caring people around my work instinctively and accurately feel that for my work to succeed, someone will have to fight. However the very fact that you are Technical means that this fight cannot be won by you. I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but if my belonging in tech is fundamentally unacceptable yours is uncertain. If you as a Technical person seek to stretch the Technical label it will dissolve in your hands like a wet piece of paper because what you are doing is breaking down the fundamental units that create this label in the first place. To preserve its integrity, a Technical system will reject you sooner than it will accept me. This is why you can’t fight it. You are it. The moment you win that argument you get shoved out the airlock to join me out here in the dark.^[2]

I’ve been in tech long enough that some engineers have described me to my face as a bargain, an anomaly, an idiot, a problem, an ethical affront to the profession of psychology.^[3] Others have told me about all of their problems because I continue to give a shit about them and because all of this illegitimate psychology work is doing something that deeply needs doing. More often than you would think the two groups overlap. In my research and writing on how technical identities are both constructed and policed, I gave a round of talks about how I see Contest Cultures in software spaces, naming the routine hierarchical nastiness that we experience under the guise of technical arguments as real and important. In a conference hall, a woman in technical leadership came up to me and held my hand so tightly that it hurt. She struggled to find words, and I understood, because some things are too difficult for words and can only be felt together. I will never forget her. It is because I am not Technical that I can have these moments and I would not trade them for anything. Closely after this I heard from an engineer who told me that my work had named and helped him set a boundary around a years-long experience of pain in his career. These moments also mean everything to me, although there are so many more of the second than the first. As someone who has been known to be a human being myself, sometimes I go home and cry after I deliver a piece of the psychology of software teams. This is hard work. And at the same time to be in this field is to understand that I can provoke this second kind of reaction from a man who never would have offered a job to the me of ten years ago. In the Technical world, men have told me quite openly that who they were twenty years ago would have hated me from the moment I came into their visual range, that they would have believed that they knew everything about my mind without knowing me at all.

An engineer once asked me whether I felt physically safe at a specific technology conference because while talking to me about the fact that the basic methodologies of my research had included women he had looked around and realized (for the first time?) that it was a male space. My answer sounds dismissive but it is anything but, it is very serious: I already knew. That’s my secret Cap, I’m always unsafe. I understand I can never take off my spacesuit in these Technical places. Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled up intentionally fast and close to me and I hopped out of the way, scared. The men with me who did not jump roared with laughter, and this sparked a conversation (monologue) about innate personality differences (rather than, say, height differences). In that moment it was impossible for me to be a PhD who studies how we maintain beliefs about innate characteristics and generates empirical evidence around them and their impacts, even though I am. We are always constructing. In that street, my identity could not be made real against the identity that was offered out of the situation that aligned with a world they preferred, one in which some men could laugh at scared women. Similarly despite the existence of bad measurement that systematically undermeasures the abilities of many people, for Technical as a system, whiteboarding interviews can never be a measurement activity that is failing to correctly create a situation in which technical skills are both elicited and identified. Rather, it is merely people who are capable of failing to perform, as if the technical interview was not designed and implemented by people.

I know this essay is a hard read so far and I want you to take a breather if you need it so let’s do it in this paragraph together. A different story: I have a very dear friend–an engineer–who is capable of looking at a picture of my new house and sending me a laundry list of things he considers technically insecure and wrong with it. This is skill, access and knowledge I do not have and I appreciate it. But I know that I trust my friend as much as I trust anyone in the world because I trusted him when I was sick and making choices about equipment that had a causal relationship to my own life. He sent me an entire box of supplies, more safety supplies than a single person could ever need. That generosity that exists inside of technicality as a possibility is a wonder. That idea of mapping a terrible world and solving some of it is beautiful. Creating safety in someone else’s life is perhaps among the greatest of possible human activities. The ability we have to build on each other’s problem-solving is delightful. This too is theory-forming for me when I think about software. By Technical I am not talking about my friend helping me stay safe in a hospital while I had a life-threatening illness, a software developer giving themselves eyestrain fixing an update that helps a grocery store operate because they care about people getting their groceries, the countless teams that write to me because they suffer and they want someone to know they are suffering, a person who made a road safe that I drive on, a person who stood in front of their leader at great personal cost and said no. I am not saying I do not want to be in community with you. It is because I do that we are in this hard essay together. I cannot forget about you even when you never see me.

In this current version of tech we built–which is to say the overwhelming jungle of rituals and group identities and normative behaviors and seemingly abundant but actually restrictive sociotechnological covenants that make up what we pretend will eventually feel like belonging in tech–someone else will always control genius. There is no earning out of this; there is no mathematical proof that I can generate to change this structure because my ability to be on that stage showing you that proof in the first place was determined entirely by what Technical decided could be real. When software organizations introduce me, they speak to my degrees and the quantitative^[4] impacts that my work has had. But when I think about how I understand tech it is bookended with two realities: in my first tech internship a woman who was acting like an authority on technical hiring^[5] told me not to come out of the closet if I wanted to be afforded the opportunity to do my work as an applied scientist and in this current version of tech right now I have begun to fear whether I can speak plainly and out loud with Technical people about what is happening to the work of my wife in science. No amount of applied science done to serve the humans of software will be enough to exchange at some merit currency counter for the luxury of simply existing in our humanity. How is it possible to be so valued and yet so disposable, to have my hands inside of the machine and yet feel unable to talk to the person next to me? Hamster wheel-ass exclusion. I hate that I need to keep understanding it.

Keeping you running in that hamster wheel is the goal of Technical, because that is its lifeblood. This whole place is like that gag where there’s a car and you pop the hood and under the hood is a bunch of hamster wheels and that’s what we’re all running on. Technical wants to live and advance itself on you. I also want to live and not be consumed by it. This is why I can cherish being able to text a Technical friend and ask what stupid new thing I should buy or what stupid software thing I need to worry about^[6] and see the utter humanity in that exchange, yet reject even the kindest offers of my friends to give me Technicality and their protests that my accomplishments are extraordinary enough that I have earned it. Of course I’ve earned it! If we are talking about effort most people around the planet have lived their lives in such a way that we would struggle to even find words to describe how hard they’ve worked. Earning it is actually not unusual. The point is that you were not in control of the fact that you got to be Technical. So you absolutely do not have the power to give it to somebody else.

If the work for someone like me isn’t finally becoming Technical, what is it? The real work is to remain capable of seeing the full humanity of people who do not see my full humanity in return, and to never forget that I am here only as long as I can remember to think about the people I love who are not loved by this Technical system, and to not lose my heart in the process. It is a really high bar but so was surviving as a minimum-wage server in a dying town with a crappy car and the brain of a fifteen-year-old trained on instability and the casual cruelty that said my sharp edges meant I was stupid instead of a baby genius. Anything less ambitious than this high bar would be false psychology. I am not interested in giving you false psychology. I am not interested in the psychology that only makes you feel good. I am not interested in doing a science for developers that puts developers at the center of the universe at the cost of their full humanity. We can get sold for a while on the promise that being a robot is better than being a human but that coolness expires when what you experience is simple dehumanization. Robots sound pretty desirable unless you describe them as factory workers which is what most of them do.^[7] I recommend thinking about what you do as much as you think about what you think you are. At this point perhaps we’re starting to see being Technical isn’t a solution even for those of you who are allowed into Valhalla.

Lest at this point you are feeling that software is under seige, that this multi-trillion dollar shifting construct of beliefs and imaginaries has taken one too many hits to be fair in an essay from a 5’4” brunette who as a teenager was a goddamn barista^[8] not a coder so like how could she even, rest in the reassurance that Psychology has set this trap too. We can rewrite this entire essay to be about my field, Psychology, if you need that. Psychology has been a willing partner in the agenda of dividing Technical people from not-Technical people as evidenced by the fact that most people in software assume that someone like me can only work for HR even after I have worked for academia, startups, government teams, nonprofits, big tech, small tech, doesn’t-know-it’s-tech, and basically everything except HR. Psychology has with a straight face proposed that we measure people’s potential with bigoted tasks and such approaches shafted both our own selection and had undue influence on early selections of supposed programmer aptitude.^[9]

Because psychology doesn’t have trillions of dollars it hovers around tech a bit like a horsefly. If tech engineering wanted me to be a waitress, tech psychology wanted me to be my worst nightmare which is a People Person. One of the specific traps I saw in spending such a career as a Tech People Person doing internal research programs–and this could be HR or UX–that truly horrified me was the secret job requirement of affirming the narrative that engineers are more special than everyone else.^[10] An example of this is every time evidence of efficacy is not able to exert any power versus the votes of engineering disengagement. You could put your diligent little psychologist heart into it and make a good program or policy change and muster up extremely critical evidence for something no one else bothered to measure but you could not demand that all of the engineering managers do it, for instance. The engineering managers always had the power and always would. This is what I mean by Technical being a structural designation that operates outside of problem-solving: not only do the structurally empowered eighty-to-ninety-percent-men of technical organizations (100% in a great deal of the research about software topics) get to choose emotions over efficacy, they get to do so while also maintaining the notion that they never have emotions in the first place. Actually to be fully consistent and safely within the Technical they have to do it.

And that is key. That is dehumanization doing its own dehumanization. That is the real renewable energy miracle of tech. We may not talk about it but we sure market the hell out of it. If you are one of the people who needed to ask what the fuck is he talking about, this is that Zuckerbergian masculine energy. It feels incoherent but asks a completely coherent question of us. What can we do if we never have enough? This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough. I am not saying that suffering isn’t real, I’m saying it teaches us what all that richness will never fix. I have been afraid to check the mail and see a bill and afraid to go to the doctor and afraid for the future of our science is what I’m saying, and that is not how Technical feels, and yet I am the one who knows what I have enough to care about it. Without the ability to feel, part of the “enough” that Technical craves is continually novel ways to make people like me afraid.

The paradoxes of software engineering haunt me. Tech is intensely hierarchical and demands performance of flat culture. Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities. Tech sets out a vision of changing the world and cannot change the demographics of its own engineering function. Statistically speaking I was supposed to be a waitress, while most of the people who listen to my research and take comfort in my words and thank me for my work were supposed to be engineers. Why did that happen for me but not all the other people who are just like me? That haunts me. But mama didn’t raise a quitter either.

I can generate evidence that yields up for organizations millions of dollars and can quantify the value of that work; I have motherfucking made it and that is not good enough. Curing cancer at the most famous university in the world, the literal symbol of the good smart thing, is not good enough and all this anti-science contains a who-is-Technical argument pure and simple if we the airlock folks have ever seen one, don’t act like it doesn't. The whole thing was designed so that people trying to solve my kind of problems with my kind of tools would never be good enough. I will never be good enough for Technical people no matter how good I ever am. I know this because I need to study success in tech intimately, like a scientist, and not let this eat my heart, my soul, or my mind. Standing behind a counter working my low-wage job with a special job permit in a state that allowed children to work instead of go to school, the older women I worked with hugged me and cried when I told them about the very first scholarship that I ever got. It has taken me a long time to realize that I never left them behind and, embarrassingly, longer to be grateful for that. I will always be closer to being those women than I will be to Technical and I am best served by never forgetting it. A good number of the people who decide what work in this industry means look at someone like me and ask if they can get coffee service, or note taking, or fear they can laugh at, before they are interested in anything about my mind.

If you have lasted this long reading my words the paradoxes must haunt you too. This newsletter isn’t going to fix it. This essay isn’t going to answer your questions. But it may tell you they are real. Let us at least fight to be able to see what is being asked of us so we can have the capacity to choose our own answers. Let us describe our ghosts. The shadow and the other half of the dialectic is still there even when we never talk about it: that which is not Technical, that which counterweights your world, that which is not you. The quiet slicing away of humanity in tech does not have to be as dramatic as a boss screaming that you have no choice (although it can be). It can be as quiet as having to forget about having a mother-in-law who worked long days outside of Philadelphia holding other people’s babies and devotedly caring for them for years and being paid next to nothing for it, and knowing that no part of the decision apparatus that is happening around you in technology includes this daycare worker as a person when the primary way she interacts with the targeted advertising infrastructure created by tech is getting scammed. It is being asked to forget that you know that woman’s daughter grew up and taught herself to pull magic cures and socioeconomic mobility for other people’s children out of the harsh landscape of science and that the industry you work in wants to kill her work. It is being asked to forget that you were invited to serve psychology at a tech conference in the same city where your sister was working in a grocery store and their managerial chain forbid them from wearing masks because it made the rich people feel bad and your sister’s union fought for their right to do so at the exact same time as an authoritative man in tech told you it was unacceptable to ask them about masks. These women are a nonentity in tech, which is to say entirely nonexistent to the Technical. This is not an imaginary example. This is my family.

The Technical needs to exclude women in daycares, women in cafes, women in grocery stores and now even women in labs in order to continue its own existence. It needs to be separate from all other areas of work in order to get different rules for itself. After all, objects do not suffer. There is a very direct connection between explaining the experiences of the people I care about in tech and explaining to the people in tech about the people I care about. And because of who I am and who I love, I cannot be Technical here and now for the exact same reasons that I could not be smart back when I was fifteen and working instead of going to school no matter how obvious the proof of smartness was. In some systems otherness causes smartness to dissolve because otherness is more useful to the system than the smartness. It is therefore not very difficult for me in this system to understand why software looks at me and gets surprised when I know what code is, and then gets angry when I don’t care about code all that much and instead care about the people so much more. Caring about the code is supposed to be what you do to earn being here and I refuse that. I cannot be Technical because I put my caring, my hope, my love, and the center of my universe somewhere else.

My project with Fight For the Human is to create a space for tough but healing conversations about rehumanization in tech. A space for hope as a living practice and an activity, specifically the hope that there is a future when we in tech will be something other than all of this. I am not certain where it will lead but I am very certain that I need to try something; we are losing too much right now to not try everything. This space is just something that I want to exist right now and maybe you do too. If you subscribe, I will try to give you more tools to fight with, and you will make this space a little bit more real. Because I’m a researcher I will weave in research, resources, and things I think will be helpful for the people concerned with this fight. But I will also try personal storytelling because I think that it is a big part of how we think, and our kind of tech, I mean the real work that is happening outside of The Technical, has lacked shared thinking and storytelling for too long. We might have to wear spacesuits to clamber around on the outside of the megastructures that have defined our lives. This design was never fully explained to us but I have been reliably informed that you are builders. Builders know that even the biggest structures can be understood and reconstructed. So let’s try.