Silicon Valley does appear largely Liberal, or at least, that's what they would have us think. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror, founder of Stack Overflow, actually jumped onto the anti-Trump bandwagon. However, after the recent electoral victory by the Republicans on the 5th of November last year, Big Tech has quite handily changed their tune. As I've often suspected, that's not the tech part speaking; that's the business part. That the appearance of Liberal domination in Silicon Valley was a veneer, and ran no deeper than that.
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| Nothing deeper than that! |
And thus the question was begged. The answer, of course, that software developers, like many people, identify with both. They have some positions that are Liberal, and some that are Conservative.
The funny thing is that I identified three positions that could be considered both Liberal or Conservative, depending on one's perspective.
How Software Developers are Liberal
Identity does not matter. Software development is a field where logic reigns supreme. At some levels, it does not even require a particularly high I.Q, just the ability to do basic math and thick logically. Gender, race and sexual orientation don't determine an individual's ability to do math, and as such, are irrelevant when it comes to the ability to code, test and deploy software. A software developer is not going to automatically think that another software developer is competent based on identity. |
| Software development isn't just mens' work. |
In fact, one of the most baffling (and frankly insulting) things I have heard as a developer is being told that I should be better at the job because I'm a man. What, and my years of hard work count for nothing? I'm naturally supposed to be better at it because God made boys engineers by default? Well, that's not what this tech thinks, and any male tech who tells himself that kind of rubbish, does himself (or anyone) no favors.
Innovation versus tradition. Don't get me wrong, we do have our traditions. But technology itself is a result of innovation and experimentation; daring to try new things. Thus, you will never hear a software developer saying that we should do something this way just because that's how we've always done it. That kind of argument holds no water for us. It runs counter to everything that drives a techie.
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| Tradition has its charm. |
We may respect tradition, but we are not slaves to it. There are no sacred cows. Tradition has its place, but tradition should also know its place.
We have tech innovations today precisely because we dared to go against tradition. We dared to challenge the pre-existing ideas of what was possible, or acceptable. What separates us from the herd is the willingness to ruthlessly drop tried and tested methods in favor of demonstrably better methods.
The collective versus the individual. Skillset-wise, you will never see a more diverse group. That's because in the tech landscape where there are very frequent changes and new things to learn, people end up learning across different (but often related) tech disciplines or going deeper into existing ones.
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| Tech skillsets come in all shapes, sizes and colors. |
There are no unifying standards as to what makes a techie, though there's been no shortage of would-be gatekeepers trying to keep things neatly classified. It's a lost cause.
Take any two developers, even from a broad collection of, say, back-end developers, and you may end up with one mostly trained in Java and one trained in Python. Take your two developers from a less broad group of Python developers, and you might get one who's more of a web scraper and one who's more of a data analyst.
Yes, tech itself is a huge domain, and evolving as I write this. Consequently, its practitioners are similarly varied.
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