The white trash software methodology

The White Trash Software Methodology is to hire the smartest person you can find with the lowest self-esteem who was raised under an oppressive Protestant work ethic. Then bluntly tell this person that you doubt they can build a great piece of software.

My mom's favourite cinematic moment is the scene from An Officer and a Gentlemen when Richard Gere, with newly minted officer’s commission and freshly-pressed white uniform, marches across the factory floor to sweep Debra Winger off her feet. The film ends with the promise of a life of love and romantic adventure for Winger's character as she follows her man through a series of exotic overseas airforce postings. My mother's fondness for this film is likely because it mirrors her own revisionist take on events leading to her marriage to my father. The only problem is that my dad - a budding Sapper in the Canadian Military Engineers - sabotaged his commission when he told his commanding officer to "fuck off" during his officer training in Wainwright, Alberta. As a result, love lifted mom and dad right up where they belonged, which was apparently the same place they had started from: Chilliwack.

So it was that I came to be born in a small but picturesque army town, comprised of three distinct socioeconomic groups: the fundamentally religious, the native Indians, and the white trash. None of these labels particularly fit me like a glove, but through a process of elimination, I gravitated to the latter. My parents listened to Elvis (Aloha from Hawaii on 8-track as we drove around in our AMC Gremlin). My mom made hamburger stew every Saturday night, which we ate on TV trays while watching Hockey Night in Canada. None of my immediate nor extended family ever went to university, including my grandparents, whose opportunities for social mobility were yanked out from under them when their parents decided they wanted to be farmers in Western Canada instead of continue being solicitors in London or enjoy a leisurely retirement in Glasgow. The romantic call of the Canadian frontier (circa 1920) altered my family’s trajectory for at least two generations.

I grew up a latchkey kid in a working class subdivision. The homes were new, but nobody could really afford them without both parents working. As a result, the children of my neighbourhood enjoyed a significant amount of unsupervised play, especially during summer vacation when we often played road hockey as long as there was daylight. Without anyone around to cook for us, we ate a lot of Alphaghetti for lunch. Recently it has become popular to bemoan the lack of unstructured and unmediated time that children get to explore nature and to be themselves. But we all know what happens when you leave a bunch of white kids unsupervised for very long: Piggy gets killed. Lord of the Flies was re-enacted in some bastardized fashion on a daily basis in our suburban utopia. Now that I am an adult, ever day is Animal Farm on some level. As an aside, why is it that reading those two novels as children merely endows one with the ability to use their titles as allegorical shorthand, but does not teach one the lessons needed to avoid having opportunity to require their use?

At this point, dear reader, you are probably wondering how a rambling personal memoir is going to help you learn anything about software engineering. To be honest, so am I, except for this nagging feeling I have that a working class background coupled with low self-esteem is the recipe for the ideal software engineer. So bear with me for at least one more paragraph.

I was raised under the cloud of a Protestant work ethic and just enough physical abuse to ensure that I never wanted to disappoint any authority figure, especially my father. The male role models that surrounded me were from a generation that came of age during a time of unprecedented economic growth and opportunity in North America, which meant they could be and do pretty much whatever they wanted. Unfortunately it seems that many aspired to become a raging, violent, racist homophobe incapable of sensitivity or showing any sign of weakness. But they sure had high standards for us boys, and rarely hesitated to let us know when we were out of line or not measuring up. This was especially true of the vein-bulging hot heads that coached our hockey and baseball teams; the principal that picked children up by the ears; the father who chased his son around the yard slowly insisting that he "come here... come here..." so he could beat him with his belt in front of all of his friends; the uncles that molested our cousins; and so on. Ladies and gentlemen, the Silent Generation. Silent, but deadly.

Ultimately these stoic men made me feel vulnerable and weak. (Either that, or it was the abundance of Kraft Dinner I ate combined with my undiagnosed lactose intolerance.) Subsequently, girls made me feel inadequate (because I saw myself as vulnerable and weak). But man, did I ever refuse to lose, channeling all that anger and misunderstanding and disappointment into a competitive, guilty, fearful, responsible ball of anxiety and intellectual fury. As a result, I was not always a nice kid. And when you're not always a nice kid... well, in my day that meant you would often end up in a fight on the playground.

I was a skinny kid, and so I was beaten up. Usually in retaliation for some intellectual bullying I was engaged in, but sometimes for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Perhaps it is due to this experience that I grew into an adult about whom people have often remarked "he has an edge to him." But I think (hope?) it is a good edge; trust me, you want people on your programming team that got beat up as children, for they will go the extra mile to please those in charge and to prove them wrong. You need someone like me: a white trash software engineer that can turn his hidden injuries of class into an advantage that will ensure your team ships on time and on budget. By making sure your team has at least one white trash software engineer, you greatly increase the odds of success.

Why? Consider the alternative: a team of well-heeled, secure individuals who were raised with unconditional love, whose only punishment they knew growing up was nurture and compassion. These are great citizens, and make for ideal friends and neighbours, but would you want to go to war with them? I think not. Given the often Herculean effort required to tackle the complexity of writing software that works, it can be difficult to get these people to devote the necessary mental energy and commitment simply because they don't really care if things don't work out. "There's a bug in my latest check-in...? Oh well. I've got to leave early as I have a friend from Zurich in town and she wants to join our run group this evening." Awesome.

Writing software is not easy. I have found that it helps if you have low expectations and a fear of failure if you want to persevere long enough to be successful at it.