men, men, men

One thing that’s always inter­ested me about soft­ware design is the inescapable bias of the designer. Whether we like it or not, design­ers’ per­spec­tives always color what they think makes sense, what they think is use­ful, and what they think is good.

Never has this been more appar­ent to me than at the 2010 Mozilla Sum­mit. I couldn’t help but notice that every ses­sion I vis­ited, every recep­tion I attended, and every con­ver­sa­tion I had was dom­i­nated by male hacker stereo­types. The game room was full of obscure board games, first per­son shoot­ers, caf­feine and candy. Group con­ver­sa­tions inevitably drifted towards the finer details of an API or a tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion of the mer­its of one plat­form or another. I had many short-lived and terse con­ver­sa­tions with shy and intro­verted but incred­i­bly proud geeks like myself.

It’s not that there’s any­thing wrong with the typ­i­cal Mozillian—it’s that Mozil­lians are such a sur­pris­ingly typ­i­cal group. It didn’t mat­ter what coun­try I came from, whether I was speak­ing to a man or a woman, or whether the con­trib­u­tor was a devel­oper, tester, local­izer or other form of con­trib­u­tor, there was a some­what shock­ing homo­gene­ity to the per­son­al­i­ties and value sys­tems of the peo­ple I met.

And it’s not even that these per­son­al­i­ties or value sys­tems are wrong: in fact, I share many traits and val­ues with the peo­ple I met. I’m shy; I’m intro­verted; I believe in stan­dards, open com­mu­ni­ca­tion, trans­parency. As an aca­d­e­mic, I may have learned to over­come these traits for the ben­e­fit of my career and to fos­ter other val­ues, but at my core, I iden­tify strongly with Mozil­lians in both per­son­al­ity and beliefs.

No, the trou­bling thing was the lack of oppos­ing traits and beliefs. Where are the tech­ni­cally dis­in­ter­ested Mozil­lians? The gre­gar­i­ous? The empathiz­ing? Where are the Mozil­lians who are inter­ested in peo­ple, soci­ety, his­tory, diversity?

The answer, of course, is prob­a­bly quite obvi­ous: they’re Mozil­lians because they’re inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy. The ones inter­ested in peo­ple have self-selected out of this group and are con­tribut­ing to soci­ety in other ways and other places.

What this means, how­ever, is that a com­pa­ra­bly small group of peo­ple with sim­i­lar goals, sim­i­lar inter­ests, sim­i­lar view­points, and sim­i­lar skills have a dis­pro­por­tion­ate influ­ence on how the rest of the world expe­ri­ences the web. And unsur­pris­ingly, the expe­ri­ences that Mozil­lians cre­ate are the ones that prop­a­gate and rein­force Mozil­lians’ own viewpoints.

None of this is very con­tro­ver­sial either. In fact, I spoke with many Mozilla employ­ees who believe that Fire­fox and Mozilla’s other mature prod­ucts are really prod­ucts for power users, despite the orga­ni­za­tions unique user-facing stance rel­a­tive to other open source com­mu­ni­ties. They believed that while it may be pos­si­ble for the rest of the world to use Fire­fox as an alter­na­tive to other browsers, the Mozilla com­mu­nity ulti­mately builds for itself and its own per­spec­tives because it knows no other way.

What is this way, then, that Mozil­lians view the world? Through­out my many dis­cus­sions, I noticed a num­ber of recur­ring beliefs (many of which are gen­eral to engi­neers and devel­op­ers, and not just open source communities):

• There’s always a right answer. Unlike most pro­fes­sional design­ers, I noticed that devel­op­ers like to use the word “right” a lot when design­ing solu­tions. Under­stand­ings of trade­offs seem to be limited.
• My answer is right. Most of the Mozil­lians I met like to believe they have the right answer. There appears to be a joy on defend­ing this posi­tion as well.
• If a ratio­nale argu­ment can’t be made for a solu­tion, the solu­tion is invalid. Ratio­nal thought is the only valid means of obtain­ing knowl­edge or solv­ing a problem.
• Proof by exis­tence, not by evi­dence. Pro­to­type it and then I’ll believe you.
• Ambi­gu­ity is unac­cept­able. Messy or noisy prob­lems need not be solved. Solve the solv­able problems.

Another recur­ring stance I noticed was that devel­op­ers are spe­cial, priv­i­leged class. Obvi­ously this isn’t the first time I’ve see this, but it did make me won­der where it comes from. So I probed. What I found was that every story of how some­one learned to pro­gram and become part of the com­mu­nity was one of com­pet­i­tive selec­tion. It’s hard to learn to pro­gram, it’s hard to get into CS, it’s hard to get a devel­op­ment job, and it’s hard to become a Mozilla devel­oper. In fact, many told me that with all of these tri­als by fire, they learned quickly to act con­fi­dent, to act cer­tain, and to act as if one is right. One devel­oper described this as a form of elit­ism, which brings with it a dis­dain for other view points and other more eas­ily acquired skill sets (hence the appar­ent lesser sta­tus of local­iz­ers, testers, and support).

What no one said, but what I gleaned, is that this cul­ture of elit­ism is as much an iden­tity thing as it is a social thing. Per­haps the com­pet­i­tive processes by which devel­op­ers attain sta­tus cre­ates an iden­tity that must be fed by being right. And what do we know about iden­ti­ties? Peo­ple rein­force them, they defend them and they seek expe­ri­ences that keep them intact.

What is the impact of all of these on the design of soft­ware, or at least Mozilla soft­ware? For one, design cul­ture itself appears in direct con­flict with how devel­op­ers view the world. There is often an ambi­gu­ity, or mys­ti­cism to how design­ers learn to cope with ambi­gu­ity, and at least with respect to devel­op­ers, I can see how this ambi­gu­ity is dis­con­cert­ing and uncon­vinc­ing. More­over, it dis­em­pow­ers con­cep­tual design­ers by requir­ing func­tion­ing pro­to­types as a ticket to entry.

The par­tic­u­lar mis­sion of Mozilla, to sup­port the open web, also has inter­est­ing inter­ac­tions with this devel­oper cul­ture. For exam­ple, many devel­op­ers I spoke to believe that the pub­lic ought to care about their abil­ity to con­trol their online expe­ri­ence and own their data. I asked them, as devil’s advo­cate, why Mozillian’s had the right to impose these val­ues through soft­ware, and many made a free mar­ket argu­ment: peo­ple group together to espouse their val­ues and those groups that per­suade best, win. I saw lit­tle room in most stances for the pos­si­bil­ity that users might not value the free­dom espoused by Mozilla, and that the very espous­ing of open­ness might in fact oppose other val­ues, such as sim­plic­ity, human­ity, and beauty.

Are these trends in devel­oper cul­ture inescapable, or just an ephemeral aspect of a rel­a­tively young trade? Is it pos­si­ble that as more peo­ple with more diverse per­spec­tives learn to code, this imbal­ance in per­spec­tive will cor­rect itself? Or are there only cer­tain types of peo­ple drawn to code? Per­haps the mar­ket will ulti­mately force devel­op­ers to empathize with other view­points, because soci­ety will cease to tol­er­ate the engi­neered design of today and demand designs that respect their own val­ues. I do not know—but I’ll be inter­ested to find out!