[Noisebridge-discuss] Dijkstra's "There is still a war going on"

[Shannon Lee]

Dijkstra complains, as Gian Pablo points out, about the battle between
managers and marketeers, on the one hand, and scientists and engineers, on
the other hand; and how the former gets too much of the credit and the
latter get too much of the blame for an institution's success or failure.

While I think there's a lot of validity to this perspective, my
year-and-more at Noisebridge has demonstrated to me very clearly that if you
put a bunch of smart, capable people in a room together, and give them a set
of problems to work on, they'll all wander around with their thumbs up their
butts until someone actually says, "Hey, let's get this stuff done, huh?"

Power, in an institutional, social sense, is something that has to be
created in order to be wielded, and it must be wielded in order for any kind
of group to work.  It is created through trust relationships, social and
professional reputation, and personal presence, all of which are things that
can be acquired, skills that can be learned, in the same way that
engineering and scientific skills can be learned.

All of which is to say that Leadership *is* a technical discipline, in the
same way that Math and Physics are technical disciplines, which can be
learned and can be taught.  The fact that many technical people disdain
these skills as beneath them while bemoaning their own institutional
powerlessness is just as funny in its own way as your VP Eng who can't set
up his own printer.

--S

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Gian Pablo Villamil
<gian.pablo at gmail.com>wrote:

> It goes beyond division of labor: the technicians are mostly concerned
> with making stuff happen with THINGS, whereas business & marketing are
> mostly concerned with making PEOPLE do stuff. This is what Djikstra
> refers to as the "battle".
>
> Ultimately it is people who decide who to reward, not things. Hence,
> someone who spends all their time influencing people is likely to be
> better rewarded than someone who spends all their time influencing
> things. Those who use their influence over things to try to influence
> people tend to get treated rather roughly.
>
> Fortunately, there are organizations that reward technical skill, and
> in the medium/long term, this lets them do stuff better. Some places
> have figured this out, some have not.
>
> It seems to me that portraying this as a battle between scientists and
> managers is misleading: the scientists aren't even on the same playing
> field. Developing organizational combat skills (euphemistically known
> as "people skills") in scientists might be a better approach.
>
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jason Dusek <jason.dusek at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >  I am a great fan of Dijkstra's writing. Something that
> >  recently showed up on Reddit:
> >
> >
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1165.html
> >
> >  He makes such a strong case for the role of the technician,
> >  the scientist, as the creator of value that ultimately makes
> >  our modern world possible. Surely this is correct; but is he
> >  missing something? The dominance of the business/marketing
> >  side is undeniable; if technicians were really so powerful,
> >  would we not have managed to overcome our thralldom by now?
> >
> > --
> > Jason Dusek
> > _______________________________________________
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> > https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
> >
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-- 
Shannon Lee
(503) 539-3700

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."
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