Coders

Coders, The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

Coders is the latest book I read. Its about computer programmers. What it takes to be a programmer, what programmers actually do, which could be blue-collar work, hackers, etc. The book takes a much darker tone at the ending chapters about the rise of AI in modern society. 

Coders is written by Clive Thompson, a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a monthly columnist for Wired. A tech writer. 

The book starts out with a chapter titled The Software Update That Changed Reality. This, of course, is Facebook. Clive goes on to talk about how the Like button feature came to be. Its interesting but the Like feature itself is kind of a dumb feature. Then there are The Four Waves of Coders which basically tells the history of coders starting from the female lead 1960s to the rise of the nerdy male dominated field programmer in the 1980s, to today, where the field is being filled with just slightly more women and minorities. 

Myspace is mentioned as an important happening in the early 2000s but isn't given nearly enough attention. Likewise, gaming is only mentioned in the Neopets context until the very end of the book. Not saying much about gaming makes this book a little lacking, because for the most part gaming has become the most popular entertainment system in the world, surpassing movies even in revenue and sales. That makes it worthy of a entire chapter in this book.

There's a great chapter called 10x, Rock Stars, and the Myth of Meritocracy which basically states that there's a myth of the rock star programmer, who by himself, is better than 10 or 20 coders. Surprising some of the best programs and software have been written by only a one or two person team. This rock star myth can be true but Thompson goes to lengths to state that this "better than thou" attitude 'great programmers' are hard to deal with, and besides, most companies need a team of programmers to do their work. Sometimes its difficult to get these rock stars to work well with the less sophisticated co-worker.

The last couple of chapters gets more philosophical. The Rise of AI, Scale, Trolls, and Big Tech. These are the more dystopian aspects of the book. How Facebook got used by Russian bots to swing American perceptions during the 2016 election, possibly swaying favor to Trump. How Twitter is used by white nationalists to spread hate. Machine learning algorithms have taken a big role in modern society but there are inherent biases in therein. When Google tried to create a face recognition software it scanned a picture of a black person and labeled it as 'gorilla', which is, of course, laughable because you realize how incredibly machines and people are but its also horribly racist. There are some leaders in tech who think if the real world is racist then shouldn't these things reflect that? Of course, this brings a lot of ethics into the equation. Which is the reason why we need more women and minorities in tech. The general consensus is that having white programmer dudes create everything we use is a bad idea because they've made mistakes like not thinking of the rise of hate on their platforms, like how Twitter ended up being used by white nationalists and such. Programmers tend to be pretty mixed with their political beliefs. Some are libertarian but for the most part, accept the democratic policy. There aren't many conservative programmers. A lot of them think government should get out of the way but still apply social policies. They see through their work that a person shouldn't be shunned because of their race, gender, sexuality, rather by the strength of their code. This is a good thing. 

The book ends with Blue-collar Coding. At the very end, he mentions how the creators of the videogame Minecraft wanted to create a game that was fun. But kids were doing more interesting things with Minecraft than what the creators expected. Kids were learning how to build all kinds of grand buildings and displays using the game's lego block-style engine. At the end of the day the coders of the future might not all come from 4-year college institutions, but rather milennials/middle age folks looking to change their careers, young gamer nerds that want to code their own games, and people who do it a lot in their spare time for fun. In some ways, the programmer of the past resembles that of the programmer today because in both contexts the programmer's credentials don't matter, only great coding skills. It's one of the only jobs where you can find an employee with a college degree working with another employee who has no degree. Of course, if a programmer was trying to get a job at Google that college degree wouldn't hurt. 

No doubt this is a pretty boring nonfiction book not nearly as exciting as my science fiction novels I go through. However, this book got me more interested in programming, learning some programming languages, maybe trying to create my own games and apps, or find a job where I can tinker around writing code in whatever context. There's a future in programming and I'm in front of the computer a lot anyways so I might as well look into it. I also find it fun and exciting. Another book that is similar to this one is Steven Levy's Hackers, a very good book about the early computer revolution going back to the 1950s and into the 1980's Apple II computer and it even has extensive chapters on videogames like the first MMO [massively multiplayer online game], Richard Garriott's Ultima Online. That book was very engaging and exciting whereas this one was more informational. Now I have a very good idea of what it takes to be a programmer: good knowledge and experience of the languages and error messages, logical thinking skills, patience, ability to deal with frustration, and the ability to find and fix bugs, an act known as debugging. 

This is a new book from 2019 May. Definitely worth the read if you're into tech and interested in programming.