Humour

Pass the halo, please!

T A Balasubramanian on how a hot job market and public adulation brings out the egos

“Maestro, eh? A glowing halo over my head—you can see that?” says Brooke Bond, your incorrigible head of software projects at Baffle Corporation, with undisguised delight in his voice. With his usual unfettered bravado, Bond has, thus far been taking pains to paint a picture of himself as an uncompromising artist programmer who, perhaps, has mistakenly drifted into the present from a Renaissance studio.

He is responding to Danny DeVito, presently your CTO at Baffle, and also the first humanoid in this exalted position. You, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle, and Bond, your eccentric staffer, are in the process of updating DeVito’s ever-growing database to ensure that he gets a complete understanding of the inner workings of the IT universe. Or at least the way it works at Baffle.

“Absolutely, Brooke,” DeVito reaffirms with a sincere nod. “Shining like a neon display all the time. You’re a genius.”

“Oh, come on, Danny. You’re not bad yourself,” says Bond, looking bashful.

It does not seem to bother him that he is addressing a humanoid. As he cleverly plays up to Bond’s vanity with the suaveness of a crafty human diplomat, it is difficult to imagine that DeVito, the short, bouncy, wise-cracking replica of the Hollywood comic actor, is anything but human. You wonder at how quickly a machine can become adept at manoeuvring humans and their easy-to-manipulate eggshell egos.

Looking back, you recall the words of Ironica Asimova, DeVito’s maker. Pointing to DeVito’s startling ability to be a ‘sociable robot,’ she had said, “He is programmed to learn the evolutionary way you learn—by starting with a core of basic drives and adding to them as your physical and social experiences get piled up in memories. So people will respond to his cleverly assembled social cues almost without thinking, and as a result Danny gives the impression of being somehow, improbably, alive.”

You catch DeVito’s eye and he promptly winks back before turning to Bond to say, “I’m a technology novice here, Brooke. I live and learn from the master himself.”

As you watch him making a gesture of humble supplication, your mind floats back to Ironica’s instructions: “What Danny may lack in looks or finesse, he can make up for in originality—he is programmed to learn the way humans learn—through their bodies, their senses and the feedback generated by their own behaviour. It is a more organic style of learning—though organic is, of course, a curious word to reach for to describe creatures that are so clearly made to order. He comes equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another—eye contact, gaze direction, turn-taking, shared attention, conversational pauses, occasional sounds of approval or disagreement, finger motions or body wiggles.”

“That’s good, Danny,” says Bond, beaming approval.

It is time, you think, to bring a measure of deflation Bond’s growing bubble of self-approval for his own grandness, even though it is clear to you that DeVito is not exactly being overwhelmed, though he is making a great show of being blown away.

Maybe Bond has become persuaded to preen like a peacock because of the ease with which it is possible, these days, to develop a following and a level of fame, however small, thanks to both online and physical world domains, such as blogs, open-source software sites, content-sharing sites and conferences designed for avid programmers, such as invitation-only camps, and annual hacker events. Or maybe the employment avenues for techies have become wider, which gives some geeks the sense that they’re now and forever in charge of their own destinies. You recall reading about one frequent winner of programming competitions who actually enjoys celebrity-like status in the media, has been featured on a billboard in his native town, and has even had a song written about him by geek rapper. There’s nothing like a hot job market and public adulation to bring out the egos.

“Well, Brooke, it is nice to be a Maestro, you know. You have the talent, passion, creativity, confidence and fearlessness about exposing your code and ideas to the rest of the developer community. You tend to be flashy, no doubt, but then we cannot all be humble like Danny here.”

“Hey, Papyrus, who’s humble?” says DeVito, bristling. “I like to persuade people with my peppy personality—and they love it.”

“Of course they do, Danny. But you do not go out of the way to dazzle them with your brilliance, do you? Now, a lot of artist programmers like Brooke here are more interested in the exciting work of creating code than the routine stuff—like debugging, maintaining and understanding business requirements,” you say, warming to your theme. “This is fine, except that they tend to become junkies for code creation. But when you are trying to do the hard stuff—incrementally improve or stabilize a system, for example, they are out of the room and away.”

“You cannot expect a man of my calibre to get excited over maintaining code, Papyrus,” says Bond, looking disgusted. “Maestros delegate this pedestrian work to their minions. I have blogs to write. Lectures to deliver. Audiences to inspire. I have followers who practically worship at the virtual altar of my website, hanging on to every word I put down.”

“That’s the point, Brooke. You are an artist—someone who pushes past good, or better than average, and does some incredible things—someone who approaches development as an art form, not just a means to an end, and wants to create something memorable—not just make something work. On the other hand, you are a refined snob who looks down on some kinds of work as being beneath your stature—which gives me and everyone around a headache. It’s not just about the raw power of your intellect—it is also about how you can tone it down and let everyone move in your charmed circle. What would you rather like to have working for you—someone with decent skills who can get along with everyone or an eccentric genius who has to have everything his way?”

“Ah, a riddle worthy of a Maestro, at last,” says DeVito, smirking.

“Well, Brooke will tell you that he loves coding. Code creation is where all the excitement lies for the artist. But we are no longer in the time where every program is crafted as a work of art. At the heart of the programs that are masterpieces, you will find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really knew what they were creating. On the other hand, they were involved in the finishing of the code, too, the final touches.”

“The polishing, eh?”

“Right. Polishing, or debugging—the removal of bugs—is about twice as hard as writing a program, Danny. So if you are a snooty artist you may write the program as cleverly as you can, but by definition, you will not be clever enough—or patient enough—to debug it. But you do not look down upon it. The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work were too snooty to be involved in the program in the future. The IT world is littered with the shells of these abandoned creations.”

“Ah, well,” sighs Bond. “It did sound good to be called a Maestro, Papyrus, even if it happened to be the invention of a clever CTO.”

“Don’t forget the neon-lit halo,” grins DeVito. “You can pass it back to me, Brooke. I need all the light I can get around here.”