Here's a lovely, heartbreaking 20-minute read by Cat Hicks about her not being Technical, despite the efforts of Technical people to include her in Technical spaces and encouraging her to adopt that identity. I talk a big game about making an inclusive space for people of various levels of Technical to come participate in dreaming about better computers, but this piece makes me question whether the effort is inherently flawed. A taste:
In my research and writing on how technical identities are both constructed and policed, I gave a round of talks about how I see Contest Cultures in software spaces, naming the routine hierarchical nastiness that we experience under the guise of technical arguments as real and important. In a conference hall, a woman in technical leadership came up to me and held my hand so tightly that it hurt. She struggled to find words, and I understood, because some things are too difficult for words and can only be felt together. I will never forget her. It is because I am not Technical that I can have these moments and I would not trade them for anything. Closely after this I heard from an engineer who told me that my work had named and helped him set a boundary around a years-long experience of pain in his career. These moments also mean everything to me, although there are so many more of the second than the first. As someone who has been known to be a human being myself, sometimes I go home and cry after I deliver a piece of the psychology of software teams. This is hard work. And at the same time to be in this field is to understand that I can provoke this second kind of reaction from a man who never would have offered a job to the me of ten years ago. In the Technical world, men have told me quite openly that who they were twenty years ago would have hated me from the moment I came into their visual range, that they would have believed that they knew everything about my mind without knowing me at all.
I talk a big game about making an inclusive space for people of various levels of Technical to come participate in dreaming about better computers,, this piece makes me question whether the effort is inherently flawed
It is not flawed! This article articulates why we need to coordinate differently than the predominant tech culture, here is a great place to start.
This article is helping me feel a lot of things about computing. I'm going to let this sink in for a while.
