did, most of the people with really good credentials and experience were occupied.
There was so much money chasing a relatively limited talent pool. The
folks who were in their 30s were simply not available. They were tied up working
at their own startups. So we thought, “OK, how are we going to hire and
grow people?”
For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers
at MIT—that I didn’t like the way that programmer careers turned
out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is really
much less happy in his/her job than the average airplane mechanic, which
is pretty sad when you consider that becoming an airplane mechanic is an
18-month trade school education. For $30,000 and a year and a half, you can
become an airplane mechanic (even less if you want to work as an apprentice
for 3 years and get your FAA certification). You work in a small group, you meet
the customer directly. You don’t have the alienation from the customer that
Karl Marx talked about as being a bad thing about factory work versus
craftsmanship—that you never find out if your work really connects with
people because you’re in a factory and the customer is at the other end of a railroad
line.
Airplane mechanics have a direct interaction with the customer. A lot of the
jobs require two to three people, so it’s kind of social, and I noticed that they’re
just really happy. Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don’t
think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer,
because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an
organization or a society has and says, “OK, here’s this problem that we have—
how can we solve it?” The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution
to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the
problem. That’s engineering. If you look at civil engineers, architects, they’re all
dealing directly with the customer and going through the whole process.
Livingston: Programmers were off in the corner programming?
Greenspun: The programmers were in the corner doing what they were told.
That’s one reason they were so easy to outsource. If a programmer really never
talks to the customer, never thinks, just solves little puzzles, well, that’s a perfect
candidate for something to offshore. So I said, “I don’t want my students to end
up like this. I want them to be able to sit at the table with decision-makers and
be real engineers—to be able to sit with the publisher of an online community