Humour

The evolution of Homo Geekians

T A Balasubramanian stumbles upon the new species of Homo Geekians.

Marching on cheerfully into the curious world of Bobo Jitter—the restless and ever-doubtful CIO of Bazooka Company—Dr Don Jong takes up another lively session peppered with his usual banter and off-beat stories. Dr Jong, dubbed The Oddfather because of the unusual insights that he doles out, has a special knack for handling technology’s ever-varied conundrums.

“I fundamentally believe that managing brainy programmers with tact and delicacy is the most exasperating job in a company for a CIO, Doc. Going back over what you said about geeks and feelings, however, I am still baffled by one of my favourite techies—we call him El Gizmo just to tease him. And he’s in a different league altogether.”

“And what does he do to baffle you so exasperatingly?”

“For one thing, he completely ignores what other people think about him.”

“Well, my boy, it is just possible that their frequent interactions with machines and codes makes geeks like El Gizmo somewhat domineering over time—they enjoy controlling machines with their precise codes. With machines to control, they have a game they can always win. So that they are—how do you say—quite thick-skinned when it comes to understanding human relatives?”

“Relationships, you mean. Well, Doc, El Gizmo does do not see the point of playing a game if he cannot play to win. But I notice that it is not because he cares too deeply about winning—he cares that the game has a framework of rules, and that the framework should be honoured. It is almost as if he considers any system of rules to be more important than people. Now, although I’m talking primarily about work here, these geek characteristics do extend outside of work, too, you know. Particularly the way he gleefully goes all out to ignore those whom he considers intellectually inferior.”

“Ah, Bobo, that is no surprise. By definition, geeks think that the entire human race, or Homo Sapiens, is in an abject state of degradation when it comes to the intellect—excluding, of course, the sub-species called Homo Geekians, which, if you believe the geeks, has somehow been excluded from the general decline. Now, of course, you have touched upon the most sensitive of all topics—the hubris of geeks—which is, to use a metaphor—barely the tip of the iceberg.”

“What do you mean, Doc?”

“Well, Bobo, may I point out to you that I have discovered—across many years of interaction with the most active members of the species I have just named—that for a geek, all coding is childishly easy, and fun, and intellectually stimulating, of course, in a problem-solving way. A lot of geeks are exceedingly good at it, which is what makes them such efficient geeks in the first place. The hard part of software for Homo Geekians lies in dealing with the human factors that are completely disconnected from actual coding. They do not take ordinary people’s feelings into account when doing things, because those elements refuse to fit neatly into the rational, logical, predictable framework they like. Being nice to other members of Homo Sapiens who do not understand coding—and the associated rituals that go with it—does not come easily, for some reason, to a lot of creatures in this sub-species.”

“Quite so, Doc. What else have you stumbled upon?”

“Ah, the great underlying principle of unification which binds all Homo Geekians together in the evolutionary chain. I have discovered that the three great virtues of the geek fraternity appear to be laziness, impatience, and—what we have just uncovered—hubris, which, as we know, is unwarranted self-pride that usually goes before a full toss.”

“You think laziness and impatience is further evolutionary proof of belonging to the species Homo Geekians, eh?”

“Certainly, my boy. If you notice, geeks have the right kind of laziness—they have a devilish knack for discovering devious methods so that they can always avoid hitting hard problems whenever they can. You might even find that it could evolve one day into a significant movement to identify and label Homo Geekians—maybe it would be respectably called your level of LQ, short for Laziness Quotient.”

“Quite so, Doc. El Gizmo, my in-house geek at Bazooka, is as lazy as an overfed cat. He has found ways to reuse every bit of code that anyone has ever written for any project so that he can avoid the tedium of writing a few lines all over again.”

“Ah, that apparent laziness is but an instance of good housekeeping, if you look at it from the geek’s standpoint. When it is all right for society to urge folks to reuse and recycle consumer goods and packaging and waste, why is the same principle deemed to be laziness when it comes to code? The trap seems to be in our outmoded thinking that in order to do something ambitious, you have to solve hard problems head- on, rather than dodging them with ready-to-use prior solutions.”

“Not that I am complaining, Doc ... it’s certainly virtuous laziness.”

“Then again, Bobo, real geeks are very impatient by nature. They will release early versions of a difficult project often, like trial balloons, hoping that all the punctures likely to happen will be forced to happen quickly. The careful geek will instinctively avoid taking large gambles that will not pay off for years.”

“Right again, Doc. I have had El Gizmo testing his projects almost every other day with a frenzied urgency, even if the deadline happens to be many months away. He loves to do everything possible to get people to crash his prototype. Then he goes right back to his desk and plugs all the loopholes in the next version.”

“They’re like monkeys who enjoy swinging on any new rope that is given to them. They will keep doing it with a determination to put the fibres to the ultimate test, just to see if it will snap. Now that, if you ask me, is the nature of all geeks. They like subjecting everything around them to the ultimate test—and that includes whatever they are creating.”

“Which brings us to hubris, Doc. How is that virtuous?”

“Hubris means that despite using minimal effort, a geek still wants to impress people with something great—the halo of accomplishing a feat you might have thought impossible.”

“We like to sow the seeds of ambition, Doc. Isn’t that what drives a geek to take on projects that stretch them? Except that instead of stretching, El Gizmo finds a short-cut and gets it done without exertion.”

“Well, Bobo, you could say that some of you, from the old quirky school of CIOs, are the culprits. You have been promoting the idea that software is supposed to be hard work—and that train wrecks and disasters are the inevitable price of doing something ambitious. At the same time, you have been insisting that your El Gizmos should be ambitious anyway. That does seem like a contradictory mindset for the geeks on a software project to have, doe it not?”

“You’re right, Doc. We like to see hard work done the hard way. Maybe it’s time to learn from my geeks and get it done the easy way.”

“Voila! You comprehend that there is great virtue in the practice of good avoidance techniques, eh?”