Nonfiction: A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

CODERSThe Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the WorldBy Clive Thompson
Code seems cold and objective, the raw logic of the internet, and Silicon Valley likes it that way. Programmers hunker down in low-slung Palo Alto office parks having signed a nondisclosure agreement at the door. The nation’s media capital is 3,000 miles away. When algorithms are implicated in a scandal — say, a new tool to decide jail sentences gives black people longer ones, or a web search for information about vaccines offers up noxious conspiracy theories — the playbook is simple: Blame the code, some off-kilter machine learning, an out-of-control A.I. spasm. Certainly no human hand was involved. Of course, this is a farce. Human hands are all over all of it. In his new book, “Coders,” the longtime Wired magazine writer Clive Thompson works to describe those humans and exactly what their hands do. ]
Every boom in the Valley gets a book, and this sober one is extremely 2019. It is not as fun as the rollicking “The Nudist on the Late Shift,” Po Bronson’s hilarious sendup of Silicon Valley culture of the ’90s. Nor is it slightly aspirational, like Steven Levy’s “Hackers.” But 2019 is not about fun in this town. Thompson approaches Silicon Valley as if he were performing an autopsy. “Why didn’t the engineers and designers who built these tools, back in the mid-’00s, foresee the dark ways their platforms would be used?” Thompson writes. He explains how they show off and how they got their jobs. He lays out some lines of code in the language Python. And he likes it. Coding begins to give him a “remarkably soothing sense of progress,” he writes. He starts to see how annoyingly complex humans are in comparison. But a few pages later he sours on his own brief joy as he realizes how it is perverting him. Image

The backdrop to this book is that something is broken about Silicon Valley. To understand what isn’t working for so many people it’s necessary to scrutinize the coders themselves, their personalities and biases. The very particular culture they’ve created infuses everything they produce for the rest of us. When dealing with an algorithm that can be built for one and scaled to billions, those idiosyncratic foibles matter a lot. Remember that Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought it. WhatsApp had 55. The mostly white men who built the tools of social networks did not recognize the danger of harassment, and so the things they built became conduits for it. If there had been women or people of color in the room, Thompson’s argument goes, there might have been tools built to protect users from the get-go. They were mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class kids from Stanford, and so some of the brightest minds focused on convenience apps, grocery delivery systems and on-demand laundry. There is the notion of a 10x coder, a genius who can do the work of 10. And then he dismantles the idea of the genius coder. He presents the case of a start-up ousting a “brilliant jerk” who was writing elaborate (and to everyone else, illegible) code, discovering they were more productive without him. The lesson was that if the team could work better together, “they wouldn’t need superheroes,” and this seems to be the moral of the chapter. It’s pleasing as he picks up each Silicon Valley cliché, each canard rarely questioned, and dumps it into this wood chip machine. Many Silicon Valley engineers are convinced that the work is done by males (and built mostly for males) because males are better at coding. They imagine a pure meritocracy. Code either works or it doesn’t. Good code rises. There would be more female coders if females were interested in coding and were a little less neurotic, the argument goes. The leading proponent of this is James Damore, a former Google employee who wrote a memo arguing that the reason there were not more women was that women are temperamentally unsuited for coding. “If women were so biologically neurotic that they couldn’t endure the competitiveness of coding, then the ratio of women-to-men in programming ought to be similar around the world,” Thompson writes. “The cypherpunks are paranoid, sure — but the rest of us probably should be, too,” Thompson writes. He ends by describing how coal miners are now learning to code. The new Brahmins lose their power if everyone knows what’s behind the curtain, and that seems to be Thompson’s goal with this book. “You think miners can’t figure out how to write JavaScript?” he writes. “Think again.”