Excellent post. As a young programmer I often got the impression that "gate-keeping" is a rather bad thing (and it *can* be bad in many circumstances). But experience taught me over the years: If you care about something, be very selective about whom you give influence over it. Once I learned that I also decided that there is not point in trying to "grow" my software company (which I tried at first), but to stay small, efficient and close to the craft.
As a side question: What or how are people generally invited (for attendance) to the conference? Is it possible for somebody to attend without having personal connections to other attendees?
While personal connections sure would help, remember what was said about these people being strangers to each other. To get invited you must create something that earns you it.
"But for someone who is primarily concerned with craft, or the creation of beauty, and would rather financial gain and influence come as second order effects of that, this lust for power is detrimental to their whole purpose. [...] This is why careful selection of people is critical, and this is why it works."
I think this is an excellent summary of what we (as craftsmen) should be striving for.
It always comes back to virtue ethics in the end doesn't it :-)
This made me reflect on the various ways I have pursued "power" in my own life. I realize that I can't execute my own vision for Better Software without some amount of power. I need financial independence to carve out a meaningful block in my schedule and make software my way. I've always argued in favor of more entrepreneurship from people in Handmade Network because, practically speaking, money buys you that freedom.
It sucks to be in a position where you know you need to change your career, but you lack the power to do so and are more or less "stuck" working as a web developer until you hit retirement age. That situation will burn out people who have higher ideals for what software should be.
But perhaps where I differ with some is the means by which one acquires this relatively small amount of power, financial independence. I don't think you get there by growing a community and charging an entrance fee. Like you said, it dilutes the community and wrecks the original stated goal.
Products and businesses are a much better path, but I could also see a creeping interest in expanding the market for a product and potentially wrecking the stated vision that way too.
I think the reason we all have such admiration for Jonathan Blow is the fact that he somehow managed to do what most of us cannot. His team does work they believe in, on their own terms, and they make more than enough money to cover the expenses. It might not be a flashy existence, but you're well fed and don't have any identity friction eating at you.
We want something like that, something like being the studio that made Factorio. You let few people into your core working group, but you're okay with the consumer end product having more of a mass appeal. The product isn't entrance into the club. It's something useful to civilization, something well-built where you control the variables.
I don't think the stated aim of Handmade or BSC should be to change the software industry at large. It should be to create financial independence for the handful of people who really need to make Better Software to live with themselves.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Those redditors complaining about how "samey" everyone allegedly is are precisely the kinds of people you _don't_ want in your organization, team, or company. They inevitably will eat away at the core mission statement and goals of the organization, attempt to lodge themselves in key positions, and ideologically capture it. We've seen this happen at 37Signals and DHH wisely cleaned house, just as one example.
As a native Hawaiian myself I find it infantilizing and disingenuous that these people virtue-signal so much to care about "minorities". If anything, watching the BSC talks really expanded my awareness of what I had assumed or thought to have known and allowed me to update my paradigm (or throw it away and start from first principles!). This is the sort of excellence-seeking that should encourage and inspire others to git gud and grind out the work to literally build better software.
But if you were to just tell people like me that "no babe you're doing fine, you're not invited to their evil creepy white-man club because they subconsciously hate you for who you are, not based on your behavior or quality of work" you're lying for one thing, but also you're stunting their growth and preventing them from excelling at all! "I'm fine, everyone else is the problem".
And no amount of logic will work on these people. If they weren't logic'd into it, they won't be logic'd out of it. They're just avatars of an ideology, which if anything makes them more pitiable than the faux-pity they claim to have on other groups of people.
May you guys keep up the excellent work! I still gotta get through a lot of the talks, and they've all been quite illuminating! Cheers!
I do not disagree with what you wrote, but the publication of the conference was... incomplete to put it kindly. I signed up on the newsletter, but did not receive any email, the bsc x (twitter) account didn't post anything till may 31, and the invite-only thing was quietly patched into the website months later since the original site version.
Thank you for your interesting talks, but the organizers certainly did not help make a good image for the conference.
As time goes on I've noticed myself also adopting a similar principle of exclusivity. I.e. there is some "spirit" of a goal I wish to accomplish, and my priority at that point is surrounding myself with like minded individuals to share that charter with.
If you've got more content along these lines, like learning how to identify individuals most likely to contribute greatly to the craft, or organizing meetups/events in a way that doesn't inhibit individuals participating, etc, that'd be great to hear.
Learning to deal with people properly feels like the final frontier for most engineers like myself.
It's really common for people to complain about gate keeping--except when they're the customer. Taylor swift gate keeps her stages from the kareoke bar singers and her concerts are better off for it. Likewise, the cockpit of the planes I fly on are rigorously gatekept. It's a good thing that the death cult of inclusiveness is finally falling out of fashion. I'm glad to have benefitted from the BSC, and really appreciate it being put out for free!
Curated conferences with homogeneous perspectives can be powerful and certainly comfortable, but it also leaves you vulnerable to blindspots. And I think the strength of Handmade Network is that it challenged the dominating consensus. So be careful to not just create a new consensus, because the best cure to blindspots is diversity and inclusion of perspectives, the very thing you credit as an issue.
The "people are not fungible" point is something I finally put into words in 2016. The company I was working for was purchased by a venture cap and was getting parted out. They were closing my site and moving all operations to the primary site, with the intent of hiring new grads to staff any positions needed.
Holy dooly. What an awesome post. "People are not fungible" - I'm going to start using that one.
"This phenomenon is driven by an organization’s age, and it seems to necessarily flow in one direction—towards the preference of growth, at the cost of exclusivity and cultural preservation. It’s unsurprising that companies, specifically, exhibit this effect—and ultimately regress towards the mean—because it reduces risk, and doesn’t immediately compromise profit. The longer a company is alive, the more incentive there will be to stop betting on the initial “magic” which made the company function to begin with (since it’ll inevitably die out regardless)."
Wow, I know of a major old organisation going through this right now.
There's also The Ninth King (Willem Ouweneel; https://www.cantaroinstitute.store/products/the-ninth-king) which explains the power of empires from a biblical viewpoint, and gets even deeper to the root cause (put the Root back in Root Cause Analysis!)
Thanks for the wonderful post Ryan. We should treasure and protect the spirit and the culture of craftsmanship and we can’t ignore the fact that it requires conscious effort and selectivity. Without it, the quality just degrades and I have witnessed it many times in various places.
Great post. Surprised that there was so much backlash against the exclusivity of it given that the results were high quality talks. You can be sad you didn’t get to go while also enjoying and appreciating the content.
It’s sad to see that the immediate response to exclusivity was bashing it for not being open. E.g. when I saw it was going to be invite only, I was struck with FOMO, because it sounds cool to attend. But I asked myself the fairly obvious “well what would you present on or contribute outside of a talk?” - the answer is “probably nothing…”. The fairly obvious action to take is work on something high-quality / innovative and share it!
This is a great post, enough to make me subscribe.
It reminds me of a quote from the book "Darkness at Noon" where the writer describes how organisations have chosen self-preservation at the expense of their ideals and what they believe in.
"Gletkin justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved. But what did it look like inside? No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete. The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world."
Excellent post. As a young programmer I often got the impression that "gate-keeping" is a rather bad thing (and it *can* be bad in many circumstances). But experience taught me over the years: If you care about something, be very selective about whom you give influence over it. Once I learned that I also decided that there is not point in trying to "grow" my software company (which I tried at first), but to stay small, efficient and close to the craft.
As a side question: What or how are people generally invited (for attendance) to the conference? Is it possible for somebody to attend without having personal connections to other attendees?
While personal connections sure would help, remember what was said about these people being strangers to each other. To get invited you must create something that earns you it.
"But for someone who is primarily concerned with craft, or the creation of beauty, and would rather financial gain and influence come as second order effects of that, this lust for power is detrimental to their whole purpose. [...] This is why careful selection of people is critical, and this is why it works."
I think this is an excellent summary of what we (as craftsmen) should be striving for.
It always comes back to virtue ethics in the end doesn't it :-)
This made me reflect on the various ways I have pursued "power" in my own life. I realize that I can't execute my own vision for Better Software without some amount of power. I need financial independence to carve out a meaningful block in my schedule and make software my way. I've always argued in favor of more entrepreneurship from people in Handmade Network because, practically speaking, money buys you that freedom.
It sucks to be in a position where you know you need to change your career, but you lack the power to do so and are more or less "stuck" working as a web developer until you hit retirement age. That situation will burn out people who have higher ideals for what software should be.
But perhaps where I differ with some is the means by which one acquires this relatively small amount of power, financial independence. I don't think you get there by growing a community and charging an entrance fee. Like you said, it dilutes the community and wrecks the original stated goal.
Products and businesses are a much better path, but I could also see a creeping interest in expanding the market for a product and potentially wrecking the stated vision that way too.
I think the reason we all have such admiration for Jonathan Blow is the fact that he somehow managed to do what most of us cannot. His team does work they believe in, on their own terms, and they make more than enough money to cover the expenses. It might not be a flashy existence, but you're well fed and don't have any identity friction eating at you.
We want something like that, something like being the studio that made Factorio. You let few people into your core working group, but you're okay with the consumer end product having more of a mass appeal. The product isn't entrance into the club. It's something useful to civilization, something well-built where you control the variables.
I don't think the stated aim of Handmade or BSC should be to change the software industry at large. It should be to create financial independence for the handful of people who really need to make Better Software to live with themselves.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Those redditors complaining about how "samey" everyone allegedly is are precisely the kinds of people you _don't_ want in your organization, team, or company. They inevitably will eat away at the core mission statement and goals of the organization, attempt to lodge themselves in key positions, and ideologically capture it. We've seen this happen at 37Signals and DHH wisely cleaned house, just as one example.
As a native Hawaiian myself I find it infantilizing and disingenuous that these people virtue-signal so much to care about "minorities". If anything, watching the BSC talks really expanded my awareness of what I had assumed or thought to have known and allowed me to update my paradigm (or throw it away and start from first principles!). This is the sort of excellence-seeking that should encourage and inspire others to git gud and grind out the work to literally build better software.
But if you were to just tell people like me that "no babe you're doing fine, you're not invited to their evil creepy white-man club because they subconsciously hate you for who you are, not based on your behavior or quality of work" you're lying for one thing, but also you're stunting their growth and preventing them from excelling at all! "I'm fine, everyone else is the problem".
And no amount of logic will work on these people. If they weren't logic'd into it, they won't be logic'd out of it. They're just avatars of an ideology, which if anything makes them more pitiable than the faux-pity they claim to have on other groups of people.
May you guys keep up the excellent work! I still gotta get through a lot of the talks, and they've all been quite illuminating! Cheers!
I do not disagree with what you wrote, but the publication of the conference was... incomplete to put it kindly. I signed up on the newsletter, but did not receive any email, the bsc x (twitter) account didn't post anything till may 31, and the invite-only thing was quietly patched into the website months later since the original site version.
Thank you for your interesting talks, but the organizers certainly did not help make a good image for the conference.
As time goes on I've noticed myself also adopting a similar principle of exclusivity. I.e. there is some "spirit" of a goal I wish to accomplish, and my priority at that point is surrounding myself with like minded individuals to share that charter with.
If you've got more content along these lines, like learning how to identify individuals most likely to contribute greatly to the craft, or organizing meetups/events in a way that doesn't inhibit individuals participating, etc, that'd be great to hear.
Learning to deal with people properly feels like the final frontier for most engineers like myself.
It's really common for people to complain about gate keeping--except when they're the customer. Taylor swift gate keeps her stages from the kareoke bar singers and her concerts are better off for it. Likewise, the cockpit of the planes I fly on are rigorously gatekept. It's a good thing that the death cult of inclusiveness is finally falling out of fashion. I'm glad to have benefitted from the BSC, and really appreciate it being put out for free!
How does one get invited? I'm assuming one needs to prove themselves in a software they wrote?
Curated conferences with homogeneous perspectives can be powerful and certainly comfortable, but it also leaves you vulnerable to blindspots. And I think the strength of Handmade Network is that it challenged the dominating consensus. So be careful to not just create a new consensus, because the best cure to blindspots is diversity and inclusion of perspectives, the very thing you credit as an issue.
The "people are not fungible" point is something I finally put into words in 2016. The company I was working for was purchased by a venture cap and was getting parted out. They were closing my site and moving all operations to the primary site, with the intent of hiring new grads to staff any positions needed.
Holy dooly. What an awesome post. "People are not fungible" - I'm going to start using that one.
"This phenomenon is driven by an organization’s age, and it seems to necessarily flow in one direction—towards the preference of growth, at the cost of exclusivity and cultural preservation. It’s unsurprising that companies, specifically, exhibit this effect—and ultimately regress towards the mean—because it reduces risk, and doesn’t immediately compromise profit. The longer a company is alive, the more incentive there will be to stop betting on the initial “magic” which made the company function to begin with (since it’ll inevitably die out regardless)."
Wow, I know of a major old organisation going through this right now.
You may have heard of it.
The UK.
On power, I would recommend this book to understand it more from a neurological point of view: The Master and His Emissary (Iain McGilchrist; https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/).
There's also The Ninth King (Willem Ouweneel; https://www.cantaroinstitute.store/products/the-ninth-king) which explains the power of empires from a biblical viewpoint, and gets even deeper to the root cause (put the Root back in Root Cause Analysis!)
Thanks for the wonderful post Ryan. We should treasure and protect the spirit and the culture of craftsmanship and we can’t ignore the fact that it requires conscious effort and selectivity. Without it, the quality just degrades and I have witnessed it many times in various places.
Loved this Ryan, great post!
Great post. Surprised that there was so much backlash against the exclusivity of it given that the results were high quality talks. You can be sad you didn’t get to go while also enjoying and appreciating the content.
It’s sad to see that the immediate response to exclusivity was bashing it for not being open. E.g. when I saw it was going to be invite only, I was struck with FOMO, because it sounds cool to attend. But I asked myself the fairly obvious “well what would you present on or contribute outside of a talk?” - the answer is “probably nothing…”. The fairly obvious action to take is work on something high-quality / innovative and share it!
This is a great post, enough to make me subscribe.
It reminds me of a quote from the book "Darkness at Noon" where the writer describes how organisations have chosen self-preservation at the expense of their ideals and what they believe in.
"Gletkin justified everything that happened with the principle that the bastion must be preserved. But what did it look like inside? No, one cannot build Paradise with concrete. The bastion would be preserved, but it no longer had a message, nor an example to give the world."