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I spend way too much time on LinkedIn these days though I am not entirely sure why. There are of course business related reasons; for instance my team at OpenAI is hiring and I find and communicate with potential candidates through LinkedIn. But for the rest, LinkedIn is on the fast path to the bottom of the same pit of awfulness where all other social media apps have sunk to. I go to Twitter exactly once a week to post a link to the latest and greatest Wednesday Wisdom article and Facebook and Instagram have become completely useless as they have figured out that I am a middle aged straight white guy and hence they mostly serve me reels of scantily clad young women who are trying to lure me to their OnlyFans pages. LinkedIn isn’t quite there yet, but I guess it is only a matter of time.
True story: When I went to YouTube to find the link to Breeze’s “it’s only a matter of time”, I first had to sit through an ad for erectile dysfunction pills 🤣.
On top of the blatant self promotion, fake humility, and people from Toilet Duck recommending Toilet Duck, one of the things that is on full display on LinkedIn is certainty. The platform is full of posts from people who are certain about the dumbest things, like very specific coding patterns, knowing for sure that some company is going to go out of business because they do not support remote work, and of course there are posts from non-lawyers who are absolutely certain that the GDPR says that all transfer of personal data to the US is illegal in the light of recent political events over here. These posts annoy me greatly…
Certainty is a young person’s game. Or at least, it was for me. When I was younger, I was very certain about lots of stuff, but mostly about the fact that I was usually right. As I got older, I became less certain about many things and by now I will freely admit that I pretty much know almost nothing for certain about anything. Extrapolating that trend, I can confidently say that I will know fewer and fewer things for certain every year from here on out. Taking it even further, I expect to pass away in complete confusion about the state of the world (and that is not taking any dementia into account).
Certainty is a great tool for quickly making sense of a complex and complicated world where few things seem to hold. The infinite amount of choices that the world presents, the pressure to make good decisions, and a seeming shortage of time to think about anything, lead to an increased need for certainty. With certainty, you know what choices to make, what to think, and you are never afraid that these choices or thoughts are the wrong ones. The alternative is endless doubt, which is the world that I live in.
Over time, I became less certain about many things because experience taught me how often I had been wrong or had too narrow a perspective.
Here is a bit of an extreme example: When I was about eighteen years old, there was this girl in my village of about my age who lived with her parents and who had given birth to a baby that was the result of a short and ill advised relationship with a useless boyfriend. One day, we got the news that, in her anguish, she had thrown her baby down the stairs because it was crying so much that she couldn’t handle it anymore. We were all certain and unforgiving in our opinions: Total nutcase, who would do such a thing, the electric chair is too good for her, et cetera. I was certain too: No normal person would ever do that. Years later, when my own darling daughter had been crying for what felt like six months straight and my wife and I were at our wits end, I softened up a bit. Here we were: Two functioning adults, without any real worries, with steady jobs, able to afford everything we needed, and we were having a hard time. Imagine being eighteen, single, poor, and without a support network.
Certainty comes with a closed mind. If you are certain that C++ is the best language out there, why ever look around anymore and learn something new? If you are certain micro services are bad, or maybe great, why think for yourself?
By the way, that “Micro services are bad” article I linked to in the previous paragraph was written by someone who describes themselves as an Internationally Known AI and Cloud Computing Thought Leader and Influencer, Enterprise Technology Innovator, Educator, Best Selling Author, Speaker, and GenAI Architecture Mentor”, which at least makes me more or less certain about something.
Technology gives us great things to be certain about. Many years ago I made a living teaching courses. One of the courses I taught was “Digital Unix System Administration” at the (former) Digital education center. These courses were filled with people who were forced to move from Digital’s proprietary VMS operating system to Digital Unix. It’s been a while and you probably have never used a VMS system, but one thing to know about VMS is that everything in VMS is better. That operating system doesn’t have users, it has devotees; they are certain that VMS is vastly superior.
One day, one of the attendees of the course told me this story: They used to have a cleaning lady, mrs. VMS. Mrs. VMS had been with them for years and after a while they had become a bit annoyed with her. “Can you clean this corner”, they would ask, and then mrs. VMS would tell them: “Sure, I’ll get right to it, once I am done with these six other things I am doing over here.” They didn’t like waiting and eventually they fired mrs. VMS and hired a new cleaning lady: Mrs. Unix. New brooms sweep clean, or so the (Dutch) saying goes, and mrs. Unix was great. Whenever they asked her to do something, mrs. Unix immediately obliged. “Oh, you want me to clean this corner?” Mrs. Unix dropped everything and jumped right on it. Everybody was very happy. But, after a few months, they opened some closet and it was full of dust bunnies and garbage. “What’s up with that?” they asked. “What do you mean?”, mrs. Unix responded, “you never told me to clean that closet!?” You see, mrs. VMS had always just done all of that work without anyone ever wondering or bothering to ask. They realized the errors of their ways, fired mrs. Unix, and begged mrs. VMS to come back. And everyone lived happily ever after…
Being certain means that you don’t have to think about anything anymore, which results in more speed. You might be going in the wrong direction, but at least you are going fast, which is a great boon for all the people who confuse motion with progress. It also makes you look decisive. I often get asked difficult questions and I tend to respond with: “I don’t know, I’ll have to think about that a bit.” This puts me at an immediate disadvantage compared to the people who are certain; they never have to think and they have the answer ready. To some, these people might seem smarter than I am because, hey, they had the “right” answer immediately.
The problem with that ready answer is that it might be wrong, but being certain also leads to confirmation bias; people who are certain rarely find that they were wrong. I once gave a talk to a group of architects and they were complaining that their great architectures were badly understood and people couldn’t implement them and that’s why things were a mess. During my time with them, not once did they consider that maybe their architectures weren’t fit for purpose if the IT department that they were in was not able to implement their lofty ideas.
Mutatis mutandis, Rust might be the best programming language out there, but that doesn’t mean it is the best choice for your project right here, right now. Python might be a terrible programming language, but it might be the best choice for the problem you are facing at this moment. There really are few absolutes in our profession and being certain about something is often the fast path to being wrong.
I am not at all against strong opinions though; it’s totally fine to have strong opinions, but they should be weakly held. A strong opinion can be a useful starting point for your investigation of the solution space because nobody really has the time to start from first principles every time. But, please, don’t turn your strong opinions into a religion or a certainty. As Dutch comedian Herman Finkers so aptly put it: A dogma is a nice thing, but you shouldn’t exaggerate.
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