PyCon Day 4: Morning Keynote
Keynote: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
10 years ago we gave a talk about “interntal tools” we were developing in Lawrence Kansas, and “those tools” turned out to be the very popular web framework now called Django.
But it turns out that, “I don’t deserve to be here”
My main motive here is as the Director of Security for Heroku. But there’s still a bit of me that says I shouldn’t be here.
This voice is called: “The little hater” that lives inside our head and tries to set up traps for us.
The insidious thing about this voice is that a little bit of it is right.
You think I’m here because I’m the “Inventor of Django” or if you’re being generous to others on the project I’m the “Co-creator of Django”. But really I’m just the “Person who started working on Django a year after Adrian and Simon created it”.
Maybe you think I’m a “Rockstar” programmer, a “Code Ninja” or whatever the recruiters are calling it these days.
Hi, I’m Jacob, and I’m at best an average programmer
Jacob describes Ultrarunning and the Western States 100m. Talks about the accomplishments of Ann Trason. So I’m not in the same leage as Ann Trason, but I can still use the same label.
Hi, I’m Jacob, and I’m an average runner.
Let’s take a look at Ultrasignup which gives us some stats about how I might compare to others. It turns out peoeple’s ranks follow a Normal distribution. Most people fall somewhere in the middle and there are a few exceptional people and a few people that are really bad.
“Why do you assume I’m one of the exception ones?” With the absense of any data, why would you assume that?
What are our metrics? Lines of code? Story points? What even is that? The truth is, we don’t have any meaningful way to measure what we do. So we make up stories. People suck at programming. People rock at programming. The upside-down bell curve. Most people are average at most things.
This is a talent myth. This keeps people from programming and prevents our development. The talent myth keeps people out of tech. By 2020 it is estimated that there were will be a massive (1.5 million jobs) gap. The talent myth leads us to believe that you are either born with a natural talent or you are not. It leads us to believe that we have to always be working on our off hours, we have to always be studying in our off time, or we will suddenly slide down the upside-down bell curve and move from awesome to terrible.
A while back I went to Kansas University’s GIS Day. There were great talks about people doing awesome stuff with Python. Why aren’t those students here?
I was hiring Python programmers, and after this woman gave a great talk about using the same sorts of tools that we use (AWS, Python, etc.) I asked this woman whether she wanted to interview. “Oh I couldn’t, I’m not a programmer”. But she had just written a cluster-distributed data processing pipeline. Programming isn’t a “passion” or a “talent” but a collection of acquired skills. When a person “isn’t a programmer”, we assume that they are the minimum of their skills. “You don’t know how a linked-list works, so get out of the building”.
The talent myth drives people out of tech. (This is the part of tech that is a little bit of a downer). The tech industry is rife with sexism, racism, homophobia. The “brilliant asshole” who people hate to work with, but have to because we need their skills.
What does a 10x programmer look like?
- [picture of Jesse Eisen…]
- [picture of Andy Samburg…]
- [picture of Mark Zuckerberg]
I’m trying to be funny here, but essentially I’m saying that the young white man archetype is so common that we need two other people to play the third one. All of the women here have some sort of story about how they are asked, “which guy they’re here with”.
- 50% of women who held a CS BS were not employed in a STEM field.
- 41% of women leave tech companies after 10 years of expereince
- Over half of women leave before the midpoint of their career
There are all sorts of runners, they are all capable, have their own individual metrics for success and run to meet their own needs.
Lynn Root: this is all rooted from a conversation that I had with Lynn a few years ago. At the time PyLadies was relatively new, I said “It’s great to see all these badass programmers”. Lynn said “Yeah that’s true, but we’ll know that we’re successful when we have a whole bunch of average programmers here.”
Q: How does the dimension of depth/experness intersect with breadth/generalist
A: Yeah, the myth is that we need someone who knows everything about everything.
Q: What is it that we can do to get rid of this myth back at our workplaces? So that the VCs and others that determine who enter into the community are aware of this.
A: I’m a believer of work/life balance and that we should be able to do our jobs adequately and not have unbounded expections placed upon us.
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