YAA YAA FTW

Reading today this post describing the coffeeshop fallacy made think today about coffeeshops (haven’t had any coffee this morning).

I don’t know who are the best coffeeshop managers. Like many of you, I can probably list several attributes that will make someone a decent coffeeshop manager.
But I can’t git rid of  my gut feeling that the best coffeeshop manager is the stereotypical client or at least the stereotypical seller. When I’m going to a Hummus restaurant, I don’t expect it to be a former programmer that manages it (which is the case in the best Hummus in Tel-Aviv, where I live). When I walked into Think Coffee around NYU in NYC to get some of that urban college vibe, I was expecting for someone that looks part of the college scene or I feel that I’m being duped.

I don’t seem to be alone in feeling this as a customer. I do claim that when people are in other position of power (as a customer holds a certain amount of power, if not all the power) they not always, but many times, are acting by the same feeling I have as a customer - Bosses will empower their employees in certain decision because their employees “just seems to know this area” and investors will be more willingly to invest in people that look like experts in a certain domain. Even if that expertise is mainly composed of drinking coffee and being hip(ster). Even if the idea they are proposing is just plain old stupid. How can it be stupid if someone we perceive as an expert is suggesting it? This perception of expertise is hard to define, especially when talking about coffeeshops, independent movie production companies and software.

How wrong is that common gut feeling? well, you really can’t tell. The cool-looking customer might adapt or might not to being the manager. She might be willing to put up with whole lot of day-to-day grinding micro-tasks that are part of running the coffeeshop for the sake of being able to produce the best espresso she can make to many people and make an honest pay (or more) of it. If she’ll adapt then everyone in the posh espresso bar will agree that it’s because she looks like this rather than like this. 

In the post, Max Lechvin of Paypal is quoted saying that one needs to passionate about the idea running a business as opposed to be in love with his business idea. Well, there aren’t a lot of people who are passionate about running a business, simply because the entry price tag into running a business is rather high. Compare this to athletes that play and practice their sport many many times before ever becoming professionals. They dream about becoming professionals like all of us, but unlike those that eventually do become professionals, the rest of us don’t know what we were dreaming about. When these athletes are part of a professional effort (be it a team or a campaign) they already know that they enjoy the process (even though it’s now very much different then their early days playing and practicing). 

This is also true for passionate programmers and designers who are fortunate enough to have a go at their profession because of the low entry price. With the rise of the internet and open-source, they are even able to become more proficient in it by experimenting with the latest and greatest technologies and reading the best knowledge they have to offer. Sadly, for every one beautiful young person that would like to be a professional athlete or a movie star, there are many more who wish to become something a bit more tangible (because they aren’t that pretty, agile or just a bit more realistic).

Say, I dunno, programmers.

Why? Because of the idea of being one (including the obvious benefits of a nice salary, good conditions in the form of the leased car) and not because of the process (of programming). Upon reading this, most of these people won’t think of themselves because they do enjoy programming to some extent and they do enjoy the environment and think (like all of us) that they are better than (at least some of) their peers. But we can’t help but notice that there aren’t a lot of mediocre professional athletes out there (and I feel for every one of them, because they have to display their mediocre in public at least once a week) and that’s obviously because there isn’t that much of a demand for them (and because of several other reasons, including my self-made metric/buzzword collection - Cost Of Time Until Competence Level, which is a notion that deserves its own separate post).
 

In contrast, for the last 20 years there’s been a surge in the demand for programmers as there were many tasks to be carried out as part of the great movement of digitalizing pretty much everything. Many of these tasks required from programmers no more than basic knowledge of tweaking a few toy examples to bring a lot of benefit to stakeholders. These stakeholders were mostly people who had very little knowledge of computers but could suddenly see how they are making money from some guys punching keyboards.  Just think how impressed everyone was, or maybe still are when you do something really trivial that fixes their computer (or their evil printer of doom).

Just think how impressed everyone (including the gods of the markets) is with the online storage solution that Dropbox provides. Please compare the complexity of the technology behind Dropbox in contrast with your favorite car manufacturer. Or your favorite sports equipment maker. But unlike your car or your jacket, Dropbox does something really good in almost an entirely new area and it has been able to innovate and invent a whole rather new market around it. And still, the technology aspect of Dropbox is remarkably well executed but is nothing too complex or groundbreaking. To illustrate, I can take someone who is in desperate need for a simple online storage solution and teach him in a rather short period of time to write his very own Dropbox clone. I can’t do the same for someone to develop his own car engine. It’s more complicated and the price of entry is just too high. Obviously I can’t make him (or myself, so far) build a multi-billion dollar company around that piece of code, but I guarantee he’ll be able sync files comfortably. Just like Dropbox is able to become such a highly values company, so mediocre people, who are happen to be programmers, are able make a lot of dollars for a not-such complex work. It doesn’t matter whether they are outsourced workers in India that are paid 10$ a hour (just compare that to others around them) or if they are fully-paid “knowledge workers” in the West. In Israel, this seems to becoming more and more of an issue and poses a major threat to our high tech industry, one of the engines of the Israeli economy.

All of this doesn’t change the fact that many of the people that chose (and are choosing) to become programmers aren’t really living their dreams. They are, at best, living someone else’s dream and more probably are just getting by the daily grind. The current state of affairs allows this, but this won’t last forever. Winter is coming.

As we all know from internet bubbles and from reading The Passionate Programmer (with it’s much more suitable 1st edition title - “My Job Went To India”). Many areas of programming are losing their black-art status fast (but I trust programmers will continue their pursue of inventing more obscure areas) and that will drop the ability to arbitrarily charge for tasks related to these areas.

Going back again to the expert impression that we so easily embrace - at this very post you are reading as an example - I’ve started by mentioning how I read a blog post that is around an area that seems to interest me. Reading that post was a passive action, like watching sports or drinking coffee while looking remarkably dazzling. If you haven’t read that post and especially if you aren’t in the habit of reading this sort of startup/business/deep-theories-of-decounstrcting-money-making materials then this made some of you feel that I’m more qualified to talk about this subject than you are (at least in this moment in time). If you are familiar with this sort of materials (and I’m honored you’re still reading so far) than you probably wanted to see where I’m wrong or making an uncalled for argument. But for many people writing this blog post is enough for me to be regarded as some sort of an expert on this issues. It’s something between first impressions and TL;DR, we just tag stuff as “good” or “bad” and get on with our lives. I believe we do this even when big decisions are at stake, like deciding on who should be the president, whether he is good or bad at his job and even where we should invest our money in.

This latest example is beautifully illustrated in the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry decides that an inventor is trustworthy enough to invest in because his wife is fat, making the inventor an obvious man of character.

Final Notes

Still, something made me engage in writing as a result of reading that post. Why is that? Some part of me probably wrote this since I thought that it won’t be that difficult to write a few words on a subject that I feel connected to and invested (some) time reading. Some part of me wrote this for the comments and reactions from potential readers (so please consider making that part happier). Some part of me wrote this in an attempt to start writing regularly about stuff I care about in order to consolidate my ideas, thoughts, better master my english and possibly contribute back (to someone, anyone really) after passively absorbing many, many lines of text.