The Evil JBoss Matrix

He's a Techie! [Permalink]

Wed Jan 28 13:07:38 EST 2004
Category [mfleury/]

When I was 16 years old, I was trying to decide whether I should study business or engineering. I was good at math and sciences, so I was drawn to engineering. Also, in France, engineering is viewed as a prestigious job path. I wanted advice, so I talked to my father about this. He was a French business school grad and a successful manager at Procter & Gamble, where he spent his entire career.

I remember that talk. He thought that, in the future, technical skills would be more important. He explained that it was easier for techies to become businessmen than the other way around. I needed to learn the hard-core skills, I needed hard science it seemed. That was the gist of the message.

So I went for it and was good at it. I liked hard-core stuff. Math, Physics. I was your typical nerd. At the time when American kids go to university, many French kids prepare 2 to 3 years for the competitive exams for the Grandes Ecoles, considered to be the country's top schools. I remember my 3rd year in "Mathematiques Speciales;" I remember doing industrial drawing on Saturday nights, a mandatory discipline at the time of my prepa "preparatory classes," around '86. In France, growing up as a geek was OK. It was even good.

In France, (as it appears to me to be in countries like Germany or India?), engineering is the top profession. In France, the social status of a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique rocks. The fact that you don't have to exactly prove much after graduating from Polytechnique or the other French Grandes Ecoles, and the fact most people will or will not have certain opportunities in France on the basis of what they achieved at nineteen or twenty years of age is another issue. I wasn't thinking about that. I was young and I happened to have the skills my country favored. If you are American, imagine Stanford or Harvard MBA, Law or MD and you are getting warm. You are looking forward to the money, the good jobs, the chicks.

Obviously, this is not the case in the US. An American who was visiting France once told me over lunch "did you ever realize that in the French word ingenieur you have the word genie or 'genius,' while in the American word engineer you have the word 'engine'?" That should have been a warning sign.

Like the Russian cabbie in NYC who was a nuclear engineer back home, I was somebody where I came from and I hadn't crawled through 10 years of differential equations to be talked down to by some pretty boy with half a brain. The reality of the situation was that I was in a second-class job at a large US technology firm.

I started out in sales in France, then transitioned to engineering, I was offered a full sales job at Sun, but wanted to code. For me, hard-core technology was always glamourous. I was in awe of anyone who could code. Through my position at the Sun/SAP Competency center, I started working in SAP Labs in the Silicon Valley, while still with Sun. At that point, Silicon Valley was pumping in engineers from the entire world, people who felt that they were going to "Rome," the center of it all, a place where their skills were needed and would be appreciated. With certain exceptions, a few teams, titles like "distinguished engineer," or a few icons, it didn't take me long to figure out that most engineering jobs there weren't "real." It was '98, the boom days and so many of us were part of "head-count" operations, whose numbers only served to justify the importance of the managers to whom we reported. I made friends among my colleagues, but started to feel like the Internet was where it was at, where I wanted to go with engineering.

'98 was the onset of the Open Source movement as a mass media phenomenon. There were the hard-core techies. I wanted to be one of them, I wanted to be Linus Torvalds. So I took the plunge, left Sun, consulted in the Valley for a little while and made enough money to start JBoss. I digged deeper and deeper and eventually found myself at a place where there was no digging deeper in Java. After three years, I had gotten to the place where I wanted to be in Open Source.

I remember when I left Sun, one of my friends telling me that I was "moving down the food chain". It seemed odd that people perceived my career as "going down" because, in my mind, I was going up. I am very proud I made it as a developer in Open Source, one of the most competitive grounds for developers.

I guess the point of this whole rant is to challenge the attitude reflected in He's Just a Techie-type articles. They demonstrate how engineers fall victim to reasoning along the lines of "I am down and probably deserve it, I am not sure if I am good enough, but please respect me..." Respect? Bah, as if respect was given. Respect yourself! Know your place in the information foodchain. Know your skills are UNIQUE. I was lucky enough to come from a society that puts engineers at the top, which gave me enough of an "ego boost" to cross the desert of a large tech company.

You don't beg for respect. Like the saying in the Godfather, "Real power can never be given, it must be taken," social positions are about power. So for the elite engineering ranks in the US to make it as one of the top professional classes, they need to assert their own power--not adopt a ghetto mentality and feel like they need to mimic the mediocrities in the management ranks, to whose positions they aspire.

For too many engineers the soft "social" skills seem glamorous. Like in a bad 80's commercial, they want to be able to "talk the talk" and imagine board rooms that applaud them for their "MBA brilliance" reflected by some bullshit in a piechart. In fact, I think the Microsoft commercials are great in that way because they spoof the "success guy". They crack me up.

It's a lot easier to become a good presenter than wrap your head around important technical issues. I have seen technical people who were mediocre presenters become superior teachers. It comes with practice. What makes those people UNIQUE is their abililty to create and understand technology in a way that others cannot. THAT is unique, that is hard. Compared to that, the rest is a piece of cake. Engineers, don't throw away and undervalue hard skills and real knowledge just because people who don't have them downplay them. Remember the American Indians in Manhattan who gave up their land for a couple of shiny glass trinkets; stick to your real assets.

The marketing and management people in this industry are fallible. Look at all the Tech Bubble companies that came and went with their hype and their buzzwords. There are plenty of factors that play into a company's success, luck among them; however, it's never a good sign when the promised technology offering has no substance or relevance whatsoever. And I think that if those people had the skills to quickly determine whether the technology was real or bullshit and the ability to scope where certain sectors of the technology market were going to evolve, they definitely would have been better off.

I think characters like Bill Gates are perfect icons for American engineers. Bill is a "freak" in that he codes, runs (or ran for a long time) one of the largest companies in the world and he makes money. In the US, you are almost always either on the engineering side or the business side, but not both. But business is easy, it is about maximizing the money functions, think of it as numbers and don't be too impressed by the hype, the smoke and the mirrors.

One day we will all walk through walls; one day we will rule this joint.

marcf

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