To Fix Silicon Valley’s Problems, We Need to Have the Language to Describe the Solutions.

Do you know a shorter way to write this sentence?:

“A podiatrist, an obstetrician, and a heart surgeon walk into a bar.”

Well, that’s pretty easy: “Three doctors walk into a bar.”

Done.

Let’s try this one on for size:

“An estate attorney, a public defender, and a Harvard Law professor pick up some sorbet together.”

Well, sure. “Three lawyers get some sorbet.” Asked and answered.

One more: a software engineer, a UX designer, and Sheryl Sandberg go for a bike ride together.

What do you have?

Three computer scientists? Absolutely not. Computer science is a defined academic field, and while it’s helpful for working on websites and apps, it’s 100% not required.

Three techies? This is an informal term that we think of as being the province of hobby. Your niece librarian who’s been playing around with learning to code in her spare time? She is a techie. Sheryl Sandberg is not, at least not in a way that tells us anything meaningful about her public responsibilities.

So what do we have? Is there a collective, plural noun for a software engineer, a UX designer, and Sheryl Sandberg?

There Are No Words. That’s The Problem.

Since 2009, the writer John Koenig has maintained a tumblr blog called The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows, in which he, several times a year, provides the world a new word, complete with definition. One widely shared word defined by Koenig is sonder — his definition is as follows:

Sonder. n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Beautiful. But the reason the word went viral isn’t that it sounds lovely, it’s that the feeling of sonder existed, wordlessly, before Koenig coined it — it simply wouldn’t work as a word were it not for a prior existence as an experience. But once the word exists, it’s something we’re able to talk about more directly and nimbly, as evidenced by just how much the use of the term ‘sonder’ on the internet has exploded.

For over a decade now, Koenig has tasked himself with providing a word for things for which we did not, in our common language, have a word. As it happens, there is, of course, a word for the experience of “not having a word for it”: hypocognition.

Hypocognition is at play in the relief that so many have so clearly felt when they read a word and reflect, “Ah, yes — that’s what I was feeling, or thinking about, before, and had no words for.” Not having the words to describe what you’re feeling or thinking makes it nearly impossible to socially share and collectively deal with our feelings or thoughts. It’s like an itch we can’t scratch because we can’t even locate it. (Not having the words to describe our feelings is likely for many a daily occurrence in 2020.)

Not every missing word recontextualizes everything for us: knowing that the ‘the unspoken but mutual desire when looking into a loved one’s eyes’ is mamihlapinatapei in the Chilean Yagán language is beautiful, but we feel like we can get there without the term. But some missing words are absolutely vital. And there’s one kind of word that nearly everyone in silicon valley, whether they know it or not, is lacking at this very moment: a word for what it is that we all do.

We have specialized work descriptions, to be sure — there’s seemingly no end to the prefixes, suffixes and provisos you can append to your work and job title within silicon valley. But specialization is supposed to always happen within a container: sure, she might be a cardiologist, and he’s an ENT specialist, but they’re both doctors. When the light comes up, and someone rushes to the mic to ask if there’s a doctor in the house, anyone who received training to deal with human patients knows the drill.

We know that silicon valley is capable of this change, because Big Tech forces the adoption of new language all the time.

Microtarget; Deep Fake; Deep Web; and Dark Web. In April 2020 alone, Merriam-Webster Dictionary was forced to add these tech-inflected terms to its roster, part of a monthly process of update that often sees new compound verbs like binge-watch or listicle added to our agreed-upon shared language. Silicon valley is happy to expand the dictionary when it comes to reframing our own lived experience. Why not reframe their lived experience?

We need the word that unites Sheryl, and the ux designer, and the coder; the word that gives tech workers, no matter what their job titles, a descriptor for a common aim, just like doctors, lawyers, and engineers.

Why Lawyers Don’t Casually Give Legal Advice

It’s having the general master category-defining word doctor, or physician, that allows for trust to be built. If we thought someone was an allergist, and we find out they’re actually a pediatrician, we might be confused. But if we thought someone was a doctor, then found out they were never a doctor at all, we’re likely horrified.

The same holds true for the practice of law: there’s no end to the obscure designations and sub-designations of specialized work that can arise among legal practitioners.

Maritime law specialist. Personal injury attorney. Appellate court jurist. They’re all lawyers. (Just as a pediatrician, anesthesiologist, and U.S. Surgeon General are all doctors.) So why don’t we have some container for all those LinkedIn-ready specializations within tech?

Because silicon valley, broadly speaking, has never been obligated to build the overall profession that all of its participants were taking part in. They’ve been permitted, even encouraged, to have the dessert of specialization first, without ever cleaning the veggies off their plate and deciding just what general job all those specialists were specialists of in the first place.

I’m not a lawyer, or a doctor. I can loosely give legal or medical advice to a friend. But if I were a lawyer, or a doctor, I would have good reason to be more cautious. (See the widespread use of I Am Not Your Lawyer, This Is Not Legal Advice online.) That’s because law, and medicine, are professions — and you take an oath to become a lawyer, or a doctor, not to be a particular kind of lawyer or doctor. There’s no such container for silicon valley.

The designation of a field as a ‘profession’ let us know whose advice to take seriously in domains so grave we’ve determined they’re no-amateur terrain, like how to heal the sick, or stay within the permit of the law. One of the tell-tale signs of a profession is that we consider its practitioners to have a duty of care — that is to say, a duty to take care to avoid harm through their work. Can anyone deny that social technology, the focus of silicon valley, has become such a terrain? It shapes our elections, our economy, our culture, our safety — in the age of covid-19, when we can expect rolling waves of shutdown and slowdown for possibly years to come, silicon valley is essentially building so many of our workplaces and doctor’s offices virtually.

A trade or vocation only fully becomes a profession once it has universal enforceable standards and norms. You know a profession is bound by standards and norms because someone can be ejected from its ranks — a practitioner can be forced out of being a doctor, or a lawyer, based on the rules set not just by governments, but by the profession itself–the institutions and certifications that evolve to ensure the industry’s quality and reputation.

There have been attempts to go down this road before, which are waiting for us to rediscover and reuse. I think of Margaret Hamilton, the woman most responsible for the software that powered the Apollo 11 moon landing, who coined the term ‘software engineer’ to convince her bosses to take the crafting of software more important as a discipline and science. The intention to call herself a “software engineer” was a good one: she wanted to signal, this is serious work. This is work of consequence. It should be taken seriously, because there could be real weight to not taking its destructive power seriously.

Unfortunately, the rest of the field did not follow Hamilton’s lead — and the term software engineer, rather than spur further professionalization of the overall field, became just another piece of specialization-lingo — something that creates the false impression that those who build software are somehow credentialed (like other engineers). The programmer Kathleen Vignos, before she (ironically enough) became Director of Software Engineering at Twitter, got very close to nailing this dynamic in an essay called ‘Programmers, Let’s Earn the Right to Be Called Engineers’:

My husband is a structural engineer (yes, we met at work, my first job out of grad school). When we talk about work at dinner, I see striking similarities in our days…But if he makes a mistake, people may lose their lives. If I make a mistake, my employer may lose money.That’s not to say I take my job any less seriously than my husband does. But the accountability just isn’t the same, nor are the professional standards.

Vignos is right here about everything except the single most important thing: the consequence of her work. There, Vignos gets it exactly backwards: the problem is precisely that if a programmer at, say, Twitter makes a mistake, then people might well lose their lives. We now have multiple protracted examples of social media-fueled genocides in recent years. The problem with comparing Vignos and her husband’s work is not that the husband’s work is more serious. It’s that Vignos’ work is arguably even more serious, but the price she might pay for getting things wrong is dramatically lower.

As it stands, software engineers are not, currently, engineers. So what are they? Currently, programmers/developers/coders who are not bound by a social contract with society. People navigating a wild west.

What’s Our Word?

You become a lawyer when you take an oath, after years of training — then you practice some particular corner of law. You become a doctor after you take an oath, after years of training — then you practice some particular corner of medicine. They take oaths because they’re signing a social contract with nothing less than humanity itself: to above all, do no harm.

If we were to provide a general professional title for a software engineer, a UX designer, and Sheryl Sandberg, one they could all share, what would it be?

I propose Technologist.

There are many types of doctors, lawyers and engineers — there are categories of workers within these professions; there are specializations. The field is medicine or the law. Here the field is technology.Technologist is broad enough to encompass those who are directly involved in the development, creation, deployment and management of tech. This includes programmers, designers, developers, sales folks and product managers among others.

You’re a technologist first. You’re a programmer, or coder, or designer, second.

A technologist cares about the craft and the outcome.

A technologist considers their creations in context.

A technologist feels responsible to society.

A technologist worries about unintended consequences.

A technologist sees a direct connection between the work they do and the world they live in.

A technologist sees technology as a way to drive humanity forward, a way to improve other fields — not as an end in and of itself.

Just coining a word is, of course, not enough. Someone doesn’t become a doctor because they call themselves one. They become a doctor because doctors are certified, and surrounded by an infrastructure that guarantees they’ve stayed someone who reliably earns the title.

We need so much more before we can trust the people crafting the conditions of our increasingly online-only world. It would’ve been nice to have that before covid-19, but here we are. It will take certifications, ethical training, protections for tech workers contending with management.

But it will have to start with a word — because we simply don’t have one yet for what we need.

Because just like we’re not improving anything we don’t measure, we’re not fixing anything we can’t name.