Man Bites Blog

As part of an ongoing series about women in combat, Kingsley Browne argues that one reason it may be a poor idea to have women in combat is that women’s social motivations are different from those of men. 

Specifically, men are very motivated to not appear cowardly.  They would prefer to run from a fight , but are socialized not to, because cowardly behavior from men would lead them to be considered failures as men.

The same is not true for women.  Women are not called cowardly if they run from battle, and their identity as women is not tied to bravery in battle, so they may be more likely to refuse orders.

Worse, the presence of women may give men cover to have a unit behave cowardly, since they can justify it as protecting the women in the unit.

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It seems to me this logic could be equally applied to men and parenting.  If something goes wrong in parenting, say, from something as serious as the child dying from choking to something more trivial as the child going in public in ill-matching clothes, women are socialized to believe they have failed as women.    Men are not subject to the same pressures.

Indeed, this assymmetry in the pressures men and women face in upkeep of homes and rigor in child care as men are expected to take on a greater domestic role gives rise to much tension and frustration in modern society.

Would this be reason to chase men out of domestic responsibilities?  After all, it seems parenting and child care are more vital activities than warmaking.  If asymmetric societal pressures is a reason to keep women out of combat, then why should it not be a reason to keep men out of parenting?

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As we learn more about what group differences are innate and which ones are contructed, an important task will be how do we respond to them?

If women are less responsive to the ways in which soldiers have traditionally been motivated, then there are other responses than keeping women out of combat.  Maybe officers need to find new motivational methods.  Maybe soldiers should not be asked to take on semi-suicidal actions.  This makes running an army more difficult, but is it a bad thing that motivating people to go in and kill and risk being killed is difficult?

Steve Atwood had a couple of posts last week about different kinds of programmers.

In the first post, Atwood riffed off Ben Collins-Sussman’s observation that there are two kinds of programmers — the 80% and the 20% (following the variant of the 80-20 rule that 20% of the people do 80% of the work) to suggest that those of us in the 20% (the assumption being that reading programming blogs is sufficient to identify oneself among the 20%) should devote more of our energy to bringing the 80% up to our level, and less time arguing and showing off to the other 20%.

This touched off a bit of a firestorm, as some readers resented the implication that they are among the 80%, which was both an incorrect implication to draw and not that insulting if you think about it.

My problem with the post is that I don’t think “reaching out” to the unwashed masses is the best use of a 20% software developer’s time. The 80% are there with their tried and true methods, doing their jobs, not bothering anybody. When we come up with something grand, they will come around and figure out that they need to learn it to keep up. Teaching and mentoring are noble callings (I teach myself), but if we think that by doing that we’re going to turn an 80% programmer into an 20% programmer, we’re dreaming.

In fact, it’s my suspicion that the more time a 20%er spends with an 80%er, the more likely it is she will turn into an 80%er herself. If someones working 80 hour weeks, writing compilers in his spare time, etc., and starts seeing that lots of people are able to make a decent living in software development and have time to have personal lives, then that’s going to start looking more and more appealing. The 80-20 rule doesn’t apply to salaries.

A developer who leaves at 4:00 PM every day to pick his kids up at school isn’t going to re-arrange his family’s schedule because you just showed him how cool the latest Linux distribution is. But a developer who sees that folks who leave hours before her get paid a single digit number of percentage points less than her will start to wonder why she’s doing it.

So, my inclination is to let the 80% be the 80%, and concentrate on making your work so good and irresistible they will have little choice to earn it.

Atwood followed that up with a post expanding the universe expanding the universe of proframming personas to three, based on Nikhil Kothari’s characters of Mort, Elvis and Einstein.

He quotes Phil Haack, who writes:

We have to realize that Mort is responsible for a lot of important systems. Systems that affect the general population. When I hear of recent cases of identity thefts such as Choicepoint among others, especially those caused by lax security such as using default passwords for the database, I think of Mort. When I read that $250 million worth of taxpayer money has gone into an overhaul of the FBI Case File system, and the system has to be scrapped. I think of Mort.

Given this much responsibility, we should expect more from Mort. So Mort, I hate to say this but software development is not like working the register at McDonalds where putting in your nine to five is enough. I am all for work-life balance, but you have to understand that Software development is an incredibly challenging field, requiring intense concentration and strong mental faculty. It’s time for you to attend a conference or two to improve your skills. It’s time for you to subscribe to a few blogs and read a few more books. But read deeper books than How to program the VCR in 21 days. For example, read a book on Design Patterns or Refactoring. Mort, I am afraid it’s time for you to quit coasting. It’s time for you to step it up a notch.

Yes, but whom do you think of when you read about a 50% divorce rate, or undersupervised kids? The above things are more examples of gross negligence that people just getting by with what works. And I’m not sure it’s a slam-dunk that preventing these things is worth having loads of developers spend 10 hours less with their families a week. For the “craft of software engineering,” sure, but maybe not for society as a whole.

It’s kind of trite, but on his deathbed, will Mort wish he had read a few more books about Design Patterns, or coached his daughter’s softball team?

Let’s face it — this isn’t the NBA, where in order to make it you either need to be supremely talented or supremely dedicated, and likely both. There is a greater demand for software development than there are 20%ers to go around, so as things stand right now, one can make a decent living working 40 hour weeks using the same tried and true methods. Neither “reaching out” nor “demanding more” is going to change that (though globalization might).

Plus, many employers are quite happy to have 80%ers watching their systems, keeping them running, not taking crazy chances, and not asking for big raises and promotions.

Our task is to push the trail forward such that it will be irresistible to others. That is how we will leave our mark on the world; that is how we will leave things better than we found them.

Let Mort be Mort. Let the 80% be the 80%. We’ve got work to do.

Penelope Trunk, writer of the Brazen Careerist blog, is having trouble in her marriage. How do I know this? Because she has blogged about it.

But that’s not the most interesting part. The intersting part is the comments. They seem to consist of:

• People telling her it might not be in the best interests of the marriage she calims she wants to save to do things like blog the contents of her mediation sessions.

  Trunk responded that this is perfectly OK because her husband had no problem with her writing about their sex life for her Master’s thesis 15 years ago, without saying that he has specifically approved these revelations.

• Accusations that she is only writing about this to drive up her hit counts.
• A lot of “Wow, thank you so much for your bravery and honesty in opening yourself up like that…”

It’s this last one that I find a bit hard to swallow.

Imagine a man running a blog called something like “Brazen Careerist,” whose SAHM wife wants to divorce him. He blogs about it, including:

• Divulging details about mediation sessions without making it clear that he had his wife’s permission to do so.
• Having no idea that his wife wanted a divorce.
• Not knowing the reasons why his wife wanted said divorce.
• Dropping another mention of how great his career is going, and that he mentioned this to the mediator.
• Refer to how her career “sort of stalled.”
• Mention how much better she is at details than he is, and that she’s good at making lunch boxes, whereas the kid rejects his.
  
  OK — I’ll tell you how this one would play out — the husband would be accused of passive aggressively screwing up the lunches on purpose so that it would be his wife’s responsibility, like everyhing else…
  
• Refers to himself as the “career expert in the household” and how he thinks this makes him “ten steps ahead” of his wife.
• Mentions that he “delegated” finding a therapist to her because he is too busy blogging

I can think of a few words women would use to describe such a man, and “brave” and “honest” aren’t among them.

The interesting thing is that it looks like Ms. Strunk is having to learn the same lessons an entire generation of men have had to learn — if your spouse is devoting their life to household work, they need you to honor and respect the work that they are doing.