The Universe of Discourse

In which, to my surprise, I find myself belonging to a group

My employer ZipRecruiter had a giant crisis at last month, of a scale that I have never seen at this company, and indeed, have never seen at any well-run company before. A great many of us, all the way up to the CTO, made a heroic effort for a month and got it sorted out.

It reminded me a bit of when Toph was three days old and I got a call from the hospital to bring her into the emergency room immediately. She had jaundice, which is not unusual in newborn babies. It is easy to treat, but if untreated it can cause permanent brain damage. So Toph and I went to the hospital, where she underwent the treatment, which was to have very bright lights shined directly on her skin for thirty-six hours. (Strange but true!)

The nurses in the hospital told me they had everything under control, and they would take care of Toph while I went home, but I did not go. I wanted to be sure that Toph was fed immediately and that her diapers were changed timely. The nurses have other people to take care of, and there was no reason to make her wait to eat and sleep when I could be there tending to her. It was not as if I had something else to do that I felt was more important. So I stayed in the room with Toph until it was time for us to go home, feeding her and taking care of her and just being with her.

It could have been a very stressful time, but I don't remember it that way. I remember it as a calm and happy time. Toph was in no real danger. The path forward was clear. I had my job, to help Toph get better, and I was able to do it undistracted. The hospital (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia) was wonderful, and gave me all the support I needed to do my job. When I got there they showed me the closet where the bedding was and the other closet where the snacks were and told me to help myself. They gave me the number to call at mealtimes to order meals to be sent up to my room. They had wi-fi so I could work quietly when Toph was asleep. Everything went smoothly, Toph got better, and we went home.

This was something like that. It wasn't calm; it was alarming and disquieting. But not in an entirely bad way; it was also exciting and engaging. It was hard work, but it was work I enjoyed and that I felt was worth doing. I love working and programming and thinking about things, and doing that extra-intensely for a few weeks was fun. Stressful, but fun.

And I was not alone. So many of the people I work with are so good at their jobs. I had all the support I needed. I could focus on my part of the work and feel confident that the other parts I was ignoring were being handled by competent and reasonable people who were at least as dedicated as I was. The higher-up management was coordinating things from the top, connecting technical and business concerns, and I felt secure that the overall design of the new system would make sense even if I couldn't always understand why. I didn't want to think about business concerns, I wanted someone else to do it for me and tell me what to do, and they did. Other teams working on different components that my components would interface with would deliver what they promised and it would work.

And the other programmers in my group were outstanding. We were scattered all over the globe, but handed off tasks to one another without any mishaps. I would come into work in the morning and the guys in Europe would be getting ready to go to bed and would tell me what they were up to and the other east-coasters and I could help pick up where they left off. The earth turned and the west-coasters appeared and as the end of the day came I would tell them what I had done and they could continue with it.

I am almost pathologically averse to belonging to groups. It makes me uncomfortable and even in groups that I have been associated with for years I feel out of place and like my membership is only provisional and temporary. I always want to go my own way and if everyone around me is going the same way I am suspicious and contrarian. When other people feel group loyalty I wonder what is wrong with them.

The up-side of this is that I am more willing than most people to cross group boundaries. People in a close-knit community often read all the same books and know all the same techniques for solving problems. This means that when a problem comes along that one of them can't solve, none of the rest can solve it either. I am sometimes the person who can find the solution because I have spent time in a different tribe and I know different things. This is a role I enjoy.

Higher-Order Perl exemplifies this. To write Higher-Order Perl I visited functional programming communities and tried to learn techniques that those communities understood that people outside those communities could use. Then I came back to the Perl community with the loot I had gathered.

But it's not all good. I have sometimes been able to make my non-belonging work out well. But it is not a choice; it's the way I am made, and I can't control it. When I am asked to be part of a team, I immediately become wary and wonder what the scam is. I can be loyal to people personally, but I have hardly any group loyalty. Sometimes this can lead to ugly situations.

But in fixing this crisis I felt proud to be part of the team. It is a really good team and I think it says something good about me that I can work well with the rest of them. And I felt proud to be part of this company, which is so functional, so well-run, so full of kind and talented people. Have I ever had this feeling before? If I have it was a long, long time ago.

G.H. Hardy once wrote that when he found himself forced to listen to pompous people, he would console himself by thinking:

Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.

Well, I was at ZipRecruiter during the great crisis of June 2018 and I was able to do my part and to collaborate with those people on equal terms, and that is something to be proud of.

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