I Cannot Be Technical

This point is so obvious and self-evident that I'm really amazed that anybody is acting as if that's not the central thesis of the essay. One of the first links is to a PDF with a title by Mar Hicks called "Sexism is a feature, not a bug." Every single time someone argues sincerely or otherwise that sexism is no longer a problem in software development communities, please think back to the time that all these self described hackers couldn't read an essay spelling out in detail that the "technical" designation is socially constructed by everyone else without your permission and often is along gendered lines - they all read that, missing the point, and said "sure you can!" How many of these same commenters have described and will go on to describe a colleague with more mathematical, statistical, and scientific rigor than they and be like "oh, she's not that technical"? Will it be all of them?

The author wants to move the boundaries of technical to include her skill set. But her skill set could be compared to the business class (who also consume numerical research), and those people are not considered technical either, regardless of gender or race or anything else.

Business class skills are generally considered a tier above... all of society.

The article isn't about gender specifically, the author explicitly calls that out.

[flagged]

One side has an excuse, the other doesn't.

I wish I had an excuse not to be technical. But I will not complain about not having it. Neither I will fake being what I am not so I can get that sweet free out of jail card.

I am a dumb tech boy who is fragile and broken. And I am not upset about it. I will kindly help you without putting you in a pedestal.

Your move to be human.

But why does it matter? How is this worth spending life energy on?

It’s reading a long essay by a girl who wasn’t invited to a classmate’s birthday party.

Just make your own community, and call it whatever you want.

As an example that nearly everyone here will now, Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, Vite and etc, has a degree in art and art history. By any metric imaginable, he's also deeply technical with a very strong track record.

They were saying that they know of counterexamples to this statement.

if you write explicitly to not be understood you're not proving anything except that you're not a nice person

The writing per se flows well, where most writing does not. I did find several places farther in where the author's comma-phobia cost me a few milliseconds, and a couple passages that would probably need to be heavily re-arranged for basic clarity to be achieved.

I had to get all the way to the end, though, to figure out that this is about a particular kind of "big tech" culture among a very few people in a very few places, which is why I spent most of the article failing to understand WTF it was about. It does not communicate well at all, and in fact, even knowing that now, it assumes familiarity with that kind of culture to such a degree that I'm still in the dark about most of the piece.

The various personal anecdotes are so lacking in detail that I read some of them three times and still wasn't sure exactly what had happened. They accomplish the opposite of grounding and illustrating the more abstract points: they make it more confusing.

I wouldn't really call this academic style, at least none of the research I read uses this sort of tone, let alone personal language (completely fine in an essay of course).

My main issue is how circuitous and rant-y it comes off as. Honestly the rhetoric style of argumentation and no qualifiers or even attempts to define terms makes it a really hard read.

Maybe in her own mind she doesn't want to take it even though it is earned. That is a common problem, and as a psychologist she should well be aware of that. (I believe that the problem is more common amount women - but I'm not the psychologist she is, and so it would be wrong for me to tell her truths in her field)

I don't recognise her requirements for "being Technical". I think she feels like an outsider because she doesn’t meet her own arbitrary standard for what "being Technical" means.

I had the same issue. I think that their point boils down to what we consider "technical" as a label on people. Basically that "technical" is more of an identity rather than someone having a specific skillset. Something the author feels excluded from, even though they do work that's relevant and impactful.

I think so anyway. As I said, I had the same issue as you having difficulty getting through it. The article takes a long time to actually get to a point, circling around things rather than concretely building towards something.

If I had to guess it is more of a flow of thoughts and not really a classical argument.

It also makes it hard to draw any conclusions about it. Because I think I sort of get where they are coming from, but at the same time I am not sure if I entirely agree. In my line of work technical just means "being skilled with IT related technical skills" without a judgement about other skill sets. It is just there to distinguish between people who can dive into systems hands-on and those who have other skills and bring value in other ways.

It seems to be about the way "technical" and "non-technical" are thrown around with implicit assumptions in conversations in places like this as hard categories. You're either technical, or what are you doing here? Are you lost? The door is over there.

A key paragraph:

>> "This is because Technical is a structural designation that operates outside of any actual problem-solving you and I are doing together. Being Technical is about being legitimate. Or to put it more simply: it’s because you are Technical that I can’t be. We have created the identities this way. A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate."

I'm still reading but it does seem to be about gatekeeping while avoiding any language that would set off a Technical person.

> Would someone be kind enough to post TL;DR of some sorts

I found o3 to have done a decent job of it:

  - Technical as structural identity: Being "Technical" is a power‑laden designation that shapes reality and enforces belonging, not a neutral skill measure.
  
  - Dehumanization paradox: The system prizes flat emotions yet sustains itself by choosing emotions over efficacy, repeatedly devaluing human needs.
  
  - Excluded expertise: Human‑centered work — psychology, caregiving, storytelling — is repeatedly labeled illegitimate despite its practical and moral value.
  
  - Boundary policing: The "Technical" boundary is preserved by rejecting both outsiders and insiders who push its limits.
  
  - Caring as resistance: Genuine care, narrative, and solidarity with those left outside offer a path to rehumanize tech beyond mere "Technicality."
  
  - Collective rebuild: A hopeful call to action—tech builders possess the capacity to dismantle and reassemble systems to include humanity at their core.

summarized via LLM

In her essay "Why I Cannot Be Technical," Cat Hicks, a psychologist specializing in software environments, explores the structural and social dynamics that define the label "Technical" in the tech industry. She argues that despite her expertise in human-centered aspects of software development—such as behavior, culture, and organizational change—she is often excluded from being considered "Technical" because the term is narrowly defined to prioritize engineering and coding skills.

Hicks emphasizes that this exclusion is not due to a lack of capability but stems from systemic biases related to gender, class, race, and professional roles. She notes that the designation of "Technical" often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism, determining who is deemed legitimate within tech spaces. This legitimacy is frequently withheld from those whose work focuses on human factors, regardless of its complexity or impact.

It’s mostly a pleasant read, but even as someone who prefers the humanities and studied a lot more of that than most folks in computer jobs, I’ve made it about 40% in and couldn’t tell you what the author means by capital-T “Technical”.

Is this something that would be clear to me if I’d worked in FAANG or similar? Is it a cultural thing there? Something to do with a corner of social media I don’t engage with?

The closest I can come up with connected to my experience is the opposite: “tech” related labels used to exclude people and dismiss their ideas, in decision-making or business-social contexts, and design processes. I’ve not seen it used in this power(? I think? I really can’t figure this out)-conferring way.

[EDIT] The anecdotes are so confusing.

> An example of this is every time evidence of efficacy is not able to exert any power versus the votes of engineering disengagement. You could put your diligent little psychologist heart into it and make a good program or policy change and muster up extremely critical evidence for something no one else bothered to measure but you could not demand that all of the engineering managers do it, for instance. The engineering managers always had the power and always would.

This is a manager thing. Specifically, modern management culture. Management wants to appear "evidence based" and "scientific" but the appearing is the only part they consistently care about. The "technical" run into this same wall, when they mistakenly believe surface claims that management's serious about working with evidence and "metrics" and such, and try to sincerely help as if that's the actual goal—it isn't.

[EDIT 2]

> This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough.

OK, I think this is confirmation that the piece is about a slice of the tech industry I've not really engaged with, which may explain why I am nearly at the end of the piece and am still not sure what it's about.

[EDIT 3]

> Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities.

OK, yes, this is about a tiny percentage of "tech". Under this article's usage, I'm not "Technical", and few or none of the programmers I personally know are. That helps, wish that'd been stated up front.