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The Profession and the Larger World
People will take you seriously. What you do is complex, is cool, and is changing the world. You're plugged into that. Doors will be opened for you. You should take advantage of this. You should think carefully about how you use this power, however.
You may have noticed this already, but as a computer person, people will look to you to explain everything from how their hard disk works to what the role of computers in education should be.
I suggest you give thoughtful answers to these questions, because in a way you are answering for all of us. We're counting on you to give responsible answers.
If you don't know the answer, say so. Qualify your remarks if it isn't your area of expertise. And put some thought into it. If you give somebody a wrong impression of how their hard disk works, that doesn't matter much. If you confidently give someone a wrong impression of how computers can be used in education, you can do a great deal of harm. Your words carry power. People will believe you. You are walking around with a big ladder on your shoulder. Be careful how you swing that thing.
Here's a story about both power and responsibility. In 1993, I received a call from Washington DC. The caller said, "You were mentioned as someone who knows about computers and elections." Well, I had done a little research in my spare time on electronic voting as a member of the Portland chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. I even wrote a paper.
Long story short, in March 1994, I went to South Africa to work on the elections that made Nelson Mandela president. I crashed the ANC’s victory party. I heard Mandela speak in Cape Town. Two billion people worldwide saw election numbers on CNN that went, live, through my code. It was very cool.
That short time in Africa was when I grew up. We're all works-in-progress, but there I learned how to be someone you can count on, someone I can count on. There were also risks involved, of course, but I wanted an adventure and that's what I got. A car bomb was detonated in front of my hotel. One hundred people were injured and a few killed by another car bomb two blocks away.
At one point, someone tried to fix the election via the results database. Our boss resigned, our ops center was closed at gunpoint, and two of us took off across the Transvaal in a Volkswagen with the elections database on our laptops. In the end, of course, the ANC declared victory, and everything worked out pretty well.
Computers took me halfway around the world and into the pages of history, if only as a footnote. Computers are powerful stuff. Consider how you can leverage your computer knowledge into opportunities you might not at first think of. See the world, if you want. Have an adventure. Make the world in some way a better place.
This power and responsibility applies to work, too. Computer people are about as ethical as people generally, which means there are always some unethical and cowardly people around. Sooner or later your principles will be tested, and you'll have to decide whether or not you're gonna show some courage. This is true of everybody, but the power of software means that you can have a surprising responsibility for people's lives.
For examples of this, you don't have to look any farther than the mentality gripping many startups: the customers don't matter, the investors don't matter, the employees don't matter. All that matters is build it and flip it.
Not that startups are a universally bad thing. I'm on my third, and they can be fantastic, assuming you like a work environment that's a combination of The Seven Samurai, Citizen Kane, and Apocalypse Now.
Let's take another look at Shawn Fanning and Napster. Napster’s terms of use are widely ignored, and if taken literally would crash Napster overnight.
There's nothing new about this. New industries have often been built on questionable legal foundations. Years ago, DuPont got going by making dynamite without paying patent royalties.
Napster is helping people break a clearly defined law. True, it's hard to feel much sympathy for record companies that sue MP3.com for imaginary damages, settle for $100 million, then decide not to share any of the money with their artists. That's not my point. My point is, in a big-money environment where the law doesn't work well, it gets broken a lot. People lose respect for law. This environment feeds on itself. Folks get caught up in all the excitement and some of them go to jail. It's not always the folks who do the baddest stuff who go down. Big-time baddies know they're bad and they cover their tracks. Small-time baddies take the fall.
You can feel the power of the new economy coming through Shawn Fanning's raised fist in Newsweek. In the world of serious power and serious money, breaking the rules is not like cheating at checkers and it is not like jaywalking. Be a little careful what you to agree to, what you to sign off on, what you do. It might be illegal. It might be wrong. What is right and wrong worth to you? You need an answer.
Here's another example: one company I worked for made software for industrial robots. We had a customer who wanted us to modify our software so that an operator could insert and remove parts from the robot's work area while the robot was in motion. They would get a little bit higher productivity this way.
The problem was, a robot operated in this way could take somebody's hand off and that person would have to live the rest of their life without one hand.
We were customer-focused. Some engineers took the position that we should do what the customer wants, and the safety concerns were not our responsibility. Some took the position that we should do what the customer wants, but put a warning in the manual. The most junior engineer took the position that implementing the feature was irresponsible, and we should tell the customer why we couldn't implement the feature.
In the end, that's what we did, and the customer accepted our answer. They weren't ogres who wanted to cut their workers’ hands off. They probably hadn't thought about the likelihood of that happening.
As usual, standing up for what you believe in pays benefits. I slept better knowing that I stood up for what I believed in. I paid no price for my actions, but even if I had, I'd still be happier than if I had caved. You have to act on what you believe in. People will respect you for it. Even if they don't, you will respect you for it.
Thinking this way is a big part of what a profession means. Every profession has a role in society, and some responsibilities regarding that role. For example, doctors treat the sick, including the infectious. For this we reward them with a handsome living. Doctors who take all the goodies but refuse to treat people with scary diseases are usually regarded with scorn, and well they should be. It's unprofessional.
Compared to doctors, you have it pretty easy. You do have professional responsibility. But unless you go out of your way looking for it, you won't risk your safety to discharge your professional responsibility. Rarely, your principles might lead you to quit a job, but getting another job is pretty easy. It's unlikely you'll ever be fired for a principled stand; what you do is too rare a talent. The likely scenario is, you'll feel compelled to stand up for what you believe in, risking ridicule, or possibly some money.
You gain something more important, of course, a firmer idea of what you believe. You need that to grow as a professional. More importantly, you need that to find out who you are. So finally we make it back to the big questions, which are always in front of us. Who am I? Why am I here? Software has a dreamy, game-like quality. Sometimes, this obscures those big questions, then suddenly snaps them back into focus. The only defense is to live your life as if it is important, which it is. Your friends and family are most important, but your work life is important too. What I have said today is pointed at making your work life a meaningful part of your life. Work should never be your whole life, but still something that contributes more than money to your sense of yourself.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. Best of luck in what lies ahead.
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