The Geeks Won

When is the movie coming out?

It's hard to believe, but we won.  We geeks have lurked in the shadows for so long that the harsh light of day is quite disorienting.  Consider the following:  Hollywood seems incapable of making a movie without basing it off a comic book, Phillip K Dick novel, or prior zombie flick.  Game of Thrones and Big Bang Theory are two of the most popular TV shows.  The average video game player is 37 years old--your parents or grandparents probably have a Wii or iPad.  Even the way we 'talk' has been shaped by geeks, as textese was standardized years ago on #IRC and BBSs (think emoticons, for starters).

For someone who grew up playing Zork and reading Dark Sun books, it's all a little strange.  It has somehow become cool to be a geek.  What the hell happened?

It's hard to say for sure, but I offer the following: First, it's a fact that the rise of geekdom has paralleled the spread of computers and the growth of the Internet.  Is it a surprise that the Matrix and the iMac were released in the same year?  Second, and especially since geeks on the west coast started making a lot of money, being a geek has been a good career choice.  Finally, we worked so long doing our own thing--and getting made fun of for it--that there's a treasure trove for non-geeks to pillage.

Now that we're at the top, what next?  With great power comes great responsibility, after all.

The way I see it, there are a few options for geeks.  One is to descend into infighting, like the punk rock kids and food activists have done.  What does it take to be a real geek?  Is it based on knowledge?  Do you have to know some Linux commands?  Can you buy your way into it?  How many board games must you own before you are a true geek?  Is it related to a period in history?  Did you have to see Tron in the theater?

Another option is to go back to the Ur-geeks.  One of the reasons I like reading guys like Donald Knuth or Dan Tow is that you can see them carving out their own thing largely on their own.  They quote Aristotle and tell stories about the Early Days.  Douglas Hofstadter was drawing connections between Gödel, Escher, and Bach, a few proto-geeks.  How cool is that?

Even with the addition of these ancient geeks, geekdom still seems like a bit of a boys' club.  One of the principles at the heart of geekery is that it's OK to be who you are.  Let's not forget that the first computer programmer was a woman (even though we don't seem to be very good at keeping them around today) and the first hardware designer killed himself because being gay was a crime.  Let's also not forget the Afro-futurists like Sun Ra or Octavia Butler, or the South American geeks like Jorge Luis Borges who showed us what the future could be like.

Let's let a thousands geekdoms bloom.

Why Career Advice Sucks

It's not easy to give or receive career advice. I've talked with loads of people, read stacks of books, and even tried to offer guidance to a hapless few. And I've come to the conclusion that it's all a bunch of cliches.

For instance, everyone knows that they should be good communicators. Communication is what gets you a good job and it helps you figure out whether or not a job is a good fit for you. If your interviewer doesn't see the interview as a two-way street, get out!

Communication is essential on the job. If you don't understand requirements, you'll waste valuable time coding. You have to talk with your boss about what's going right and what's going wrong. If you can't communicate with your boss, get out!

Finally, you have to be able to communicate in order to get ahead. The powers that be need to know what you're excited about and where you want to go next. If you're unable to discuss your future at your company, get out!

But everyone knows all this. Two thoughts:

One is that it's not easy to see how to become a better communicator. I really like Michael Lopp's idea of a 'Trickle List'. This is a list of things you try to do every day, which you check off regularly and use to track your goals over time. For example:

• People — Have a random chat with someone
• Write — Write something, anything
• V — Take a vitamin
• Biz — Learn a part of the business
• Book — Read something in a book

I've copied Lopp's list exactly for myself, but the item I want to focus on is having random chats. I tend to get in early, put on my headphones, and am in the Zone by the time most people arrive. If someone starts talking to me, I think, "Why are you bothering me? I'm trying to work!"

Now I'm trying to have at least one random conversation a day. This improves my skills, helps me understand what's going on and, hey, I might make a friend or two. The point is that the Trickle List is a simple way to do something every day to improve something you want to improve. It helps achieve a cliche.

The other thing is that obvious truisms like 'be a good communicator' are easy to 'know' but harder to do. David Foster Wallace pays a lot of attention to cliches in his mammoth Infinite Jest, which is about addiction and takes place in a halfway house. Everyone knows the AA slogan 'One Day at a Time,' but until you actually have to work on just getting through the day without touching a substance, this cliche is meaningless. The people who stay clean longest are the ones who stop over-analyzing cliches and just repeat them until they actually mean something.

You don't have to be an addict in order to make sense of this. Every issue of the Harvard Business Review says exactly the same thing as every previous issue. Every management book repackages every other book, whether it's Seven Habits or Good to Great. You will not learn anything in a management class that you can't read on a bathroom wall.

This isn't a bad thing. You shouldn't stop reading. While skimming a blog post, you may just come across the truism you need in order to solve the problem you're currently facing. Since we face different problems all the time, we need to be reminded that we should work on our communication skills, or make sure we're prioritizing our time better. (Again, Duh.) We can always improve, and the things we need to improve are all obvious. It's the way you need to improve that can only be figured out by you.