Of impostor syndrome and running in circles (part 1)

I just got back from SmartWebConf in Romania. I gave the closing talk. I wanted it to be of a slower pace and more reflective than what I normally deliver. I messed that up, as I got passionate about the subject again, but it was for the better. I am happy and humbled about the feedback I got. Many people thanked me for putting their worries into words. That’s why I offer the recording and slides here, and write a longer post about the ideas covered in them.

This is part 1 of 3.

• Part 1: never stop learning and do it your way
• Part 2: you got what you asked for, time to use it
• Part 3: give up on the idea of control and become active Update The video of the talk is now out.

This unhealthy focus on technological solutions for all our problems lead to a change in our hiring practices that annoy me. It seems we celebrate social ineptitude in our hiring and training. We have ridiculous brain teaser questions in interviews like the Fizz Buzz Text, which helps

filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can’t seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag.

Arrogance like this doesn’t go unpunished. For example Estelle Weyl showed that a few lines of CSS can solve the Fizz Buzz test. That she jokingly framed her tweet as a “CSS interview question” scares me. People might not get that sarcasm and consider it an invitation to do CSS interviews from a pure programming logic point of view. CSS is not about cryptic coding puzzles, it is about describing interfaces and interactions. Once more we bring something that has an important role to play back to “code”. Thus we make it more palpable for the engineering crowd. A crowd that had not much respect for it in the first place.

Interview questions like these are scary, arrogant and short-sighted. We keep complaining about a lack of diversity in our market. Yet we put trip-wires like these in our onboarding process instead of celebrating diversity. And don’t get me started on the concept of hackdays to increase diversity. There is no silver bullet to force integration. If we want to be more diverse, we have to change our hiring practices. We also need to adapt our promotion and compensation paths. Right now our market values the “rockstar ninja coders” who are in constant competition with their peers. That’s not a good start to build teams.

Diversity isn’t a goal – it is a beginning. Your products will be more resilient, interesting and delivered faster with diverse teams than with a group of likeminded people. You add spices to food when you cook it. This is what diversity can bring to our market.

The way we teach shouldn’t be about hypothetical examples but about the medium we work in. Three years ago Brett Victor released Learnable Programming, a hands-on training course taking a different approach to learning to “code”. We should have more of these, and less of yet another resource to learn the coolest and newest.

There is no shortage of resources to learn our craft from these days. The problem with a lot of them is that they assume a lot of knowledge and expect a certain environment.

Learning is a personal thing. If you feel stupid trying to follow a learning resource, don’t use it. You’re not stupid – you’re using the wrong resource. We all are wired differently. If you don’t understand something – ask the person teaching the subject to explain it. If there is an aggressive answer or none at all, you know that the goal of the teaching resource was not to educate, but to show off. That’s fine, but it shouldn’t be something that frustrates you. Maybe you don’t need this new knowledge. Find something that makes you happy instead. Something that you are much better at than others are because you like doing it.

Continued in part 2, where I will look at what we have and why we don’t use it.