I read something today which I had such a knee jerk reaction to that I felt the only thing to do out of deference to the author was to not post a comment on it, but to share it, write about it and read the thoughts of others I respect. That thing is Andrea Di Maio’s Keep Developers Out of Politics, Please. There are so many places I disagree with it that I didn’t know where to start, there are also places where he may have some points. 

What I did instead of placing a knee jerk comment about it was to actually retweet it as I knew that many of my eloquent friends, also developers, through what they said in 140 characters or less be able to totally pull apart at the very least this first stereotyping statement:

Developers would be better communicators? This is quite laughable. Good programmers are often shy, self centered, geeky. I can’t see how they could be particularly skilled to communicate complex political platforms.

I’d like to know if he really believes this statement after reading something like Kevin Mark’s wonderful piece about the Digital Economy Bill and The 1710 Statute of Anne, or indeed any of the pieces on Kevin’s blog. He may counter that it’s one thing to be able to write well, another to speak well. To counter this I can think of many times of being in exceptional conversations with people like Kevin and many other friends who are software developers. We’re not sitting in nerdy huddles and we’re often not talking about technology. Often the conversations are about the societal impact of technology or society as a whole. These conversations often happen in public too at conferences such as the Activate Summit. I won’t labour the point, I’ll just move on to the next bit that frustrated me.

Well, I would have thought that developers might be needed to advise Congressmen, but not necessarily sit in the Congress to do so. I can hardly imagine a Congressional debate on whether to use .Net or Java to implement a mandate.

This seems to me that he feels that developers are so wrapped into the very code-ness of code that they never lift their heads above their monitors to think about bigger picture things such as business and societal problems. It’s quite a simple one to rebuff with a quick pertinent and personal example. About nine months ago I was lucky enough to be giving a keynote at a Gartner Summit on Portals, Content and Collaboration. The talk is almost identical to the one I gave at FOWA a couple of weeks later, a copy of which is on Slideshare. It contains a remarkable lack of discussion of programming languages. In fact it contains so little technical detail that I was worried about giving it at FOWA, however I felt that the rationale of why we were working on the Open Platform and the impact that it was having on the news industry and on the long term future of the news industry was significantly more important than anything relating to implementation.

I’ll not comment much on some of the statements such as:

I can’s wait to see a congressman furiously typing on his laptop to hack the workflow management system or hacking into the text of a bill to change it at will.

apart from to say that looking around at conferences and seeing developers typing only ever makes me think that they’re having further conversations about the issues they’re hearing about using social platforms such as Twitter. This activity isn’t a million miles away from the behaviour of many of our elected political classes (and I personally enjoy every tweet of our good friend Tom Watson MP from the house). 

The final point which I find so unrecognisable from all of my friends and fellow developers is this one:

I am not totally sure that a web developer is necessarily a great communicator. On the contrary, developers tend to (indeed) develop rather than use somebody else’s technology. Isn’t the not-invented-here-syndrome something that developers are usually affected from?

I don’t recognise this pattern at all. Open source, the use of open data, commercial APIs, cloud platforms and the sharing of ideas and code among the people I am lucky enough to work with, and see the work of, is the very antithesis of this statement. I remember a presentation from Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr at d.Construct in 2008 which contained a slide which said “Not invented here. Yay!”. That slide for me sums up all that is current in the world of smart, sustainable, rapid build software development. Look at some of the prototype projects coming out of Rewired State at one end of the spectrum and at large scale endeavours at places such as Twitter and Facebook and you’ll see the rolling innovation of building upon each other’s experience and code and then releasing the ideas and code back into the community. 

There’s a point in this paragraph I’d like to mirror and a point I actually agree with…

I do really hope that Clay’s post was meant to be humorous.  If not, we should start paying attention to a new breed of technocrats that has coalesced around the Obama administration, ill-advising about the unlimited power of web 2.0, fantasizing that government would be something else than an organization that develops and implements policies and provides services.

I really hope Andrea’s post was meant to be humorous. It seemed so full of caricature that it felt like it had to be. I’ve read his writing before and often felt aligned with many things he said. For instance I do agree with him on paying attention to the new breed of technocrats, especially if they are ill advising, but that is true of being wary of any special interest group who seek to influence public policy. 

I hope by spending the time writing this I’ve proven that I’m not a shy self centered person, geeky or not, and moreover neither are my friends and colleagues. I just don’t recognise any of us in that article.