Thinking About #6 ... Practitioners, Love of Phones and Trump?

Sharing a number of things I've been thinking about lately. Getting them out of my head. This time is about the role of practitioners, how we love our phones and *sigh* trump...

This entry explores three interconnected themes: how technology professions evolve from specialist to mainstream tools, our complex relationship with mobile technology, and brief thoughts on political change. These reflections examine how we adapt to technological and social evolution, questioning common narratives about progress and resistance to change. [Summary generated by Claude on Poe]

This post is part of my “Thinking About Series”. This is a semi-regular post where I get all the thoughts bouncing around my head onto digital paper. I don’t have a fixed publishing schedule or template. Comments, suggestions and perspectives - welcome!

Practitioners and tools

Human history is equally a history of automation. Every time we discovered how to do something, we started finding ways to do it better, faster, cheaper. These cycles of innovation, seem relevant to cycles we see today with the evolution of software development and AI.

When any technology first appeared it played to highly niche specialists - the first printing presses were artistic, technological marvels. Eventually that transitioned to a mass market-ish labor where roles were standardized and large numbers of people did highly manual, skilled work to augment what the machines could not. Then eventually printing became a skilled profession with a small number of people who were highly skilled at working the machines. This simplistic view ignores all the ‘surrounding’ professions that maintain, manufacture and manage the equipment. Eventually, the equipment becomes so streamlined and automated, that it simply becomes a tool for other professionals to use. I don’t think many people today would refer to themselves as a printing professional, but are a graphic artist, a designer, an advertising or color specialist. At the edge there are highly specialized printing professionals and scientists.

Generated by flux.ai on Poe using a question generated by this text.

Today we see a similar cycle playing out with computer programming. The first programmers were niche specialist very close to the equipment itself. Then the field expanded to a mass of skilled who supported those machines. The movie Hidden Figures gives an excellent overview of this dynamic. Most of us have been living through a period of the last ~30 years where software engineering has become a skilled profession. During the last ~10 years we have seen the glimmers of it transitioning to a tool that other professions use. Now with GenAI, Citizen Development and Low-Code/No-Code becoming so dominate, it seems the transition will fully happen.

Every one of these transitions results in a market much larger than before and highly-skilled specialist surrounding it. As with the printing press, many industries went through the same transition at the same time.

It seems the result will be a large number of people - much larger than the present development ecosystem being "tool using" practitioners, hobbyists and casual users. This in turn will create much more demand for highly specialized scientists at the edges. In the recent past, the number of mid-level software engineers was massive and the demand for them was equally large.

Imagining the tech transition as follows. Each time the total number of people in the space increases while the percentages change:

1. Mainstream uses existing technologies.

2. The start is blurred between a hobbyist or typical person, specialist and scientist in a new area.

3. Then the specialist middle steadily expands with relatively less growth in the hobbyist and scientist sections.

4. Eventually, the technology transitions to fairly standard “tools” and the hobbyist portion explodes and specialists domain shrinks and the scientist portion expands.

At this point the technology has become mature and further niches can evolve from that new baseline. The key thing here is that the only shift is the percentage divide in the market. The entire pie gets larger as more people can enter the space as the technology transitions from a specialist invention to a ubiquitous tool. The barrier to entry goes down and the friction to competence gets less.

This makes me think about those people who claim we should be good at two or three things rather than a specialist at one thing. When you consider relative chance, it is best to be good at a few things than a specialist at one - there are dramatically more opportunities at in the middle of the market. Technology in the world progresses because a sufficient number of people are interested to be deep experts in one field and progress the domain. Without those people technologies won’t progress.

For the average, we are better off being good at a handful of things. Everyone has a different interest and potential to progress. We should celebrate those people who strive to be experts in important fields; those who aim to be specialists; and those who make use of available tools. Everyone contributes to moving the technology horizon forward.

Tools like Databutton, Zapier and may others are examples of how this horizon is ever moving forward and how technologies are under constant pressure to become universal tools. All this reminds me of conversations I had early in my career with software developers who were highly paid and well respected, often feared in the companies they worked in. Many of them would highlight how fearful they were for their future prospects. Their jobs were highly repetitive, detail-critical and seemingly at constant risk of automation. “It’s just a matter of time before the music stops” many of them would say. Yet for years this never changed. In some ways the demand for more software engineers seemed never ending. And maybe that was the most clear sign that something was going to break soon.

This is similar to how every market has always operated. Fears of “peak oil” gave way to new technologies and oil fields which made peak oil seem impossible. At regular intervals, we have faced severe shortages which quickly encourage solutions which give way to new horizons of innovation. Ever forward, ever new.

Is it so bad to love our phones?

We clearly dislike our phones in the way they have changed our social dynamics but have they really made the majority worse off? Could our phones actually be a net positive? I find that many people prefer their phones to their families, colleagues or strangers because by and large those interactions are terrible. It's painful and frustrating to deal with work, family and people we don't know well. Even dealing with people we know well is challenging. Most education and work is boring, frustrating and not especially fun.

The majority of people now work in roles where they have limited ability to impact much. They do their jobs, go home and rest. For everyone outside of an hourly work environment, their value is distant to the time they put in. Even in service jobs there is a lot of dead space in the average job. Was sitting around day dreaming better than having a phone to entertain yourself?

Now what about all that research that shows people who get off their phones have better wellbeing - the majority of participants in those studies fallout. And the completion rates are tiny. So like most technologies, it's reasonable to argue that phones are a problem for a small percentage of people, dramatically better for a small percentage and marginally better but not really better or worse for a majority. If Books Could Kill has a great deep dive on this when they cover the Anxious Generation.

And those digital isolation retreats where influencers and celebrities claim they have changed their lives because of it? It stinks of selection bias. To have the money and interest to do such a thing feels like they are likely part of the small minority who do face real life problems because of their phone. Or they simply are riding a social trend and finding something to signal their status.

Maybe what we don't want to admit or we struggle to accept is that life is better with our phones and social media. All the social problems we had before, the difficulties with our teens and social interactions - haven't gone away.

The unspoken appeal of technology is it will solve all of our problems. Then when it doesn't, we blame those problems on the new technology. Technology isn't to blame, we had those problems to begin with. It is and was foolish of us to think technology would fix all those problems.

Just like how we regulate other things that are harmful for people at the edges, so should we regulate technologies. We don't let everyone drink alcohol and take whatever medicine they like for the same reasons we should regulate technologies like mobile, internet and social media. Not because those technologies are inherently bad and life was better without them but because technology doesn’t fix our very human problems.

We have regulated every new technology for these very same reasons - broadcast TV, radio, printing and publishing - all have been regulated to strike a balance between the benefits of the technology to the majority and the negatives to a minority.

It's important that we help those who fall at the negative end of the spectrum. Regulations, new social norms and governance help to control for the issues at the edge. This came up recently during Chinese New Year. Some of the kids have phones. The eldest kids spent a lot of time texting with their friends. My daughter asked me why. I asked her “why don’t you ask them?” These are the social norms we need to create. Once people are comfortable questioning each other’s phone usage in different situations, asking people to put away their phones when it matters, and having that kind of dialogue, we will be better for it.

People enjoy using their phones because they are a better life experience. We should stop demonizing technology itself and have more honest debates about how to regulate (and discuss) technology to benefit the majority and minimize the negatives to the minority.

In this respect, the tech companies themselves are largely amoral. They like any company attempt to maximize profit operating within the regulations and governance of the society. If we dislike the behavior of social media companies and technology companies, we need to change those rules.

The fear is that dominate firms will manipulate public opinion and protect themselves and their profit maximization strategies at the expense of the public. This is a normal and historically accurate fear. Humans do this. We are likely to fight to maintain any good thing we have rather than willingly give it up. If we did this naturally, we wouldn't need cultural warnings and reinforcement stories reminding us to be selfless and willing to sacrifice for the betterment of the majority.

I also struggle to see how the dynamic today is any different to the past. History is riddled with wealthy and influential people who bribed, corrupted or otherwise attempted to influence the social discourse in their favor and in service of their opinion and or industry. Eventually, they all suffered the same fate.

The monopolist can only survive so long as they can convince a majority to believe. There is a natural time limit on that - when your position is absolute, it’s too easy to find exceptions. Arguments against this reasoning seem to be based on a view that our society is fundamentally fragile and "this time" wealthy, powerful people will ruin it all.” Instead, a more logical argument would be “wealthy, powerful people ruin it every time and we rebuild, better”.

We shouldn't feel so bad about gaining so much from social media and our phones. We should embrace it in a conscious manner and we wary of the downsides to anything positive - the risk of too much of a good thing.

Trump…

I reluctantly write this brief reflection about Trump. I’ve tried to avoid writing anything about him. This previous post pretty much summarizes my view on the whole thing:

Yet, I cannot help thinking about it. Partially because I’m fascinated by things that I get wrong. And while distant to the whole thing, I did expect Harris to win and was surprised when Trump won.

Many others have written in exhaustive detail as to the why and how this happened, so I won’t repeat those posts and arguments here. Instead, I’ll share some of my reflections.

I think this is most clearly an example of a majority of people rebelling against the status quo. The political narrative in many countries has been a version of “Don’t worry. We can fix it together. It just takes time. Things aren’t that bad. You know how these things are.” And that is the narrative which Harris embraced and Trump opposed.

I think a majority of the people who voted for Trump oppose a lot of his views, values and comments. But I do think they feel strongly that “things aren’t right”. And the “let’s fix it together, slowly” narrative has worn out.

I’m certain Trump will do a lot of damage during his term but that seems to be what a majority wanted. They voted for a chaos agent because just rolling with the status quo wasn’t convincing enough. Like the post on fragility - it really depends on how fragile you see the whole thing.

Until next time…

I’ll continue to explore these and other topics in future “thinking about” posts. Do let me know your additional perspectives and we can continue to explore.