Motus Mentis

Engineering firms have a difficult problem to solve: the laws of the actually existing world upon which their products operate are unsentimental and unforgiving. The judges of an engineer’s work are not feelings or opinions, but the simple and ruthlessly objective criteria of success or failure, and the stakes are high. If a bridge is not designed in conformance with the iron laws of physics, it will collapse — and people will die. If the software controlling an airliner’s aerodynamics crashes, so will the plane — and people will die. And so on.

Philip K. Dick summed it up neatly: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And so the problem leaks out of the engineering itself, into the human-resources department of engineering firms: in order to produce reliably engineered products, they need reliable engineers. As far as the company is concerned it doesn’t matter in the least what they look like, or where they come from, but they have to be smart enough, and experienced enough, to know how to do what they will be asked to do, and to know all of the many ways that the real world — which works tirelessly in every age to break everything to pieces — can make their product fail.

This sharply narrows the field of candidates, and another class of stubborn realities — the uneven statistical distribution of the requisite aptitudes, dispositions, and specific cognitive qualities among the sexes and various human populations, as well as the varying habits and preferences of diverse cultures — becomes apparent. Most companies have some wiggle-room here: they can alter their products, and even relax their standards, to accommodate prevailing fashion. Engineering firms can’t do that, though, without inviting catastrophe, because they must satisfy not only their customers, but the immutable laws of physics and logic. So the demographics of tech companies naturally mirror the unequal distribution of these necessary qualities and inclinations in various human groups.

Those who have the talent and inclination to be good engineers share some other characteristics as well: they generally like the work and are willing to put in long hours getting it right. I can tell you from long personal experience that doing good engineering can be deeply rewarding and well worth the effort, and the best engineers take a lot of pride in their work. They don’t generally need to go looking for self-fulfillment elsewhere — and I can assure you that what other engineers respect, and what their employers value, is nothing more or less than the quality of the work. If you can deliver the goods, it usually doesn’t matter if you are male, female, black, white, gay, Asian, or anything else. The lead engineer of the software team I worked on for many years was a black man from Jamaica, and he was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met (and a wonderful boss besides).

So, you see, it’s intrinsic to the job that those who excel at it are going to be a certain type of person: intelligent, hard-working, and good at logical, quantitative, and abstract thinking. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they have to get used to having their ideas and models refuted, as a matter of routine, by contact with the real world.

That last part’s a big deal. Engineering is not for ideologues. If you can’t abandon a cherished belief because it just doesn’t work in the real world, you shouldn’t be an engineer. You can’t impose your wishes on physics, or mathematics, or logic; they exist objectively, and they just are what they are. If you don’t think there even is an objectively existing world — if you think that everything is a “social construct” — then I’m sorry, but you should not be designing bridges. And so it is that the iron laws of nature specify, in turn, that engineers will be — must be — a particular sort of person. There’s no such thing as black engineering, or white engineering, or gay or feminist engineering, relative to some subjective, identity-based “truth”. There’s only one objectively existing world out there: the one that’s going to try to break whatever it is you’re building. And there are only two kinds of engineers: good ones and useless ones.

With all of that in mind, here’s a story from the Daily Mail, in which a black female Google mobile-app developer (who, it should be noted, has produced on the side an app called Sutrology that “shows sex positions and relationship compatibility based on zodiac signs”) registers an ideological gripe about these stubborn realities:

‘They hire someone who’s exactly like them, but black’: Google engineer claims that Silicon Valley hires the ‘whitest black candidates’ in new podcast interview

What’s her beef? I have bolded the relevant passages:

[Google employee Bria] Sullivan said that she believes Silicon Valley companies ‘hire someone that meets exactly their qualifications and I feel like this is a problem‘.

‘And when I was saying there’s like a hiring problem, a lot of what people are asking for is they don’t realize that they’re asking for a white person, they’re not specifically doing that, but only for the most part, mostly white people will qualify for the criteria that they give, and they might find a black person that does, and it might end probably not going to be the type of black person that is actually going to do the thing that we want because it’s what they want.

What, exactly, is “the thing we want” isn’t made clear, but clearly, it isn’t the “thing” the company exists to do, namely to make reliably well-engineered products that people actually want to use. Who, one might ask, is working for whom here?

More here.