I got into software development from a fairly stereotypical background of video games and messing around with PCs. I distinctly remember playing through Final Fantasy VII on the original PlayStation, and having my dad tell me that if I were to spend my days glued in front of screens anyway1, I might as well learn how to code them so I can make a career out of my hobby. I enrolled in the computer science elective in high school and capped it off with a college degree, but shied away from the gaming industry after hearing about the long hours and shoddy pay; I still think that was the right move.
But that background, along with my continued interest in consumer electronics and technology, has inflated a bubble of tech geekery around my engineering career that has proven helpful many times.
Sometimes it’s just IT-lite; I configure routers, set up devices, and perform general troubleshooting for relatives and colleagues needing technical support. It’s easier to just Google and figure it out, rather than explain that the skills needed to build software are wholly different than how to make their outdated laptop talk to the printer. Fortunately, the tech support I’ve needed has steadily decreased in the past 2 decades, as manufacturers have made their products easier to use for non-technical users.
Sometimes it’s more about keeping up with the latest technological developments. Particularly for something as fast-moving and attention-grabbing as Generative AI, it’s exciting to see the frontiers of possibility pushed outwards, and to then use those developments to inform team and company strategy. A decade ago, I followed a similar path in keeping close to mobile operating systems as they were gaining traction—while I stopped short of writing Objective C or Java apps myself2, I gained enough context to manage the team responsible for the Affirm app.
But most often, I use my tech geekery to just make myself more efficient and productive. Everything from keyboard shortcuts, to finding apps that apply the right mental models of organization across devices, to setting up smart home triggers to start the day, makes work a bit more convenient and easier to manage. These little tweaks don’t make or break the job, but they do add up to saving significant effort over months and years—as any productivity nerd would attest3.
If you’re reading my writing, there’s a good chance that none of this is news or particularly exciting; the Venn diagram between geeks and computing fluency has massive overlap. But to my surprise and sometimes chagrin, most managers and executives don’t fall into this camp4. That is, the people most experienced in our industry—to get to their positions of managing teams and companies—are, more often than not, casual users of technology.
To be fair, it’s not like the CEO who can barely type out emails is deciding what the keyboard shortcut scheme is for the mail client; the folks on the ground designing interfaces and building apps and devices are usually power users and can relate to the advanced functionality they’re developing. The faulty assumption is that technical fluency is required up through the ranks of leadership and management, or the stronger version: that being good with computers even helps in career advancement in some small way. Anecdotally, there’s little correlation.
In a way, this is comforting: unlike how cinema portrays leaders, it’s not just whoever is the strongest soldier in the army, or the best fashion designer, who gets promoted to run the whole thing and spontaneously develops the talent to lead organizations. It’s a real-world refutation of the Peter Principle, in that what makes for a good manager or executive is different than functional expertise. In my line of work, I’ve heard stories of engineering executives who were let go because they weren’t technical enough and strayed too far from the actual engineering of the product, but occasionally I’ll also hear about executives who were too comfortable acting as super-ICs, spending all their time writing onboarding scripts and debugging WiFi networks instead of running the team they were placed in charge of.
Y’know, stuff that I do for fun in my spare time.
This was back when the only real screen in the house was the family TV, and a secondary one may be the communal PC in the living room.↩
This was before Swift and Kotlin became the standard languages for iOS & Android respectively.↩
As usual, an xkcd comic breaks down the ROI on automation effort to time saved.↩
Even those who proclaim themselves engineers.↩
