This is a problem that extends far beyond “esoteric language of choice”. It’s the challenge of being a nerd in a boring business world.
What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business. Choosing an exotic language will greatly tilt the ratios towards this later group.
Most people in this later group can discipline themselves to focus on delivery, while remaining a great resource when truely challenging puzzles pop up. Most, but not all. Choosing a very esoteric language is pushing the curve far towards this tail, and the result will be many “brilliant, but useless to our business, people”.
Every small business needs a strong technical leader. I’m convinced of this. You need someone in charge that can stop the arguments, make people put down their toys, and remove people that cannot contribute for whatever reason. So this is my conclusion, it’s boring like so much of business. You need the right manager.
It’s a spectrum, it’s multidimensional and it changes over time though.
I love myself computers and probably more so earlier in my career than now, but I also like influencing people (often through code, with a focus less on algorithmic elegance but instead more on setting patterns, tooling, and APIs that influence how others build around them); and I also enjoy the challenge of aligning the pleasure of a juicy piece of elegant code against the pleasure of positive business outcomes. I think that makes me neither a “boring business person” nor a diehard code nerd, but somewhere at the intersection with attributes in other directions not captured by either stereotype.
That said, if you really are 100% motivated by abstract technical challenges, then maybe academia is more for you than industry is. Or working at the small slice of companies that truly make their bread and butter on cutting edge technical excellence and not, say, applying tried and true tools to some underserved niche.
I do find the “algorithm nerd” charisma also tends to intersect with having warped views of how the world operates and weak self-awareness, so maybe easier said than personally realized.
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That said, if you really are 100% motivated by abstract technical challenges, then maybe academia is more for you than industry is.
Of course. Such people very typically attempt to get a foothold in academia. The central reason why they nevertheless leave academia is because of the precarious job situation.
Hello! I'm just starting my career as a dev now and I am definitely more drawn to academia and research than to the business world. Could you point me to some resources where I can learn more about companies or projects that work researching CS/programming topics?
If you are drawn to research, look at the affiliations of the authors of papers that you like. There are pockets like INRIA, Galois, Tarides, but it really depends on what research you are interested in.
> What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
> The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business.
I think the problem rather is that many "business people" have a deep hate against people who love to think about whether there is a deeper hidden mathematical structure behind the business problems. Just to be clear: there also exist some few business people who appreciate this, but the latter are typically "nerds" who mostly switched to business because it pays much better.
It's not my experience that the latter group of programmers ignores the business problems, they just rather have their own much less anti-intellectual way of approaching them.
Yep, the ‘nerd’ analysis of something that is very trivial is funny really. It’s money: most business peeps don’t give a crap about you or your skills: they pay the minimum they can to up the gains and that’s it. No more complex explanations are needed.
> who love to think about whether there is a deeper hidden mathematical structure behind the business problems.
Yup and lots of whom started with programming as a hobby, and could chase after any shiny thing they saw, or run off whenever on any side quest that interested them.
Nobody wants to pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to navel gaze, or run off down whatever path you feel is mathematically satisfying. Do that on your own time. You're being paid hundreds of thousands dollars to deliver business value - so do that. Build mathematical towers on your own time.
It's like paying someone by the day to paint your house and they paint the Mona Lisa in white paint on white and take 3x as long because it's more artistically beautiful even if the end result is just an all white painted house.
"Don't you see the deeper hidden artistic structure!?"
> You're being paid hundreds of thousands dollars to deliver business value - so do that. Build mathematical towers on your own time.
A better understanding of the deep underlying structure behind the business problems is a step towards proving business value. This is exactly what I mean with a " much less anti-intellectual way of approaching [business problems]".
A better understanding of the deep underlying structure behind the business problems can be a step towards proving business value. Or it can be interesting to a small number of people, but completely useless.
Of course, the people to whom it is interesting think that the case they're interested in is almost certainly in the "providing business value" category. In their enthusiasm, they probably over-estimate the odds...
I can't plus this enough. I hired a unicorn business minded, brilliant, can solve any software engineering or UI/UX problem engineer who happened to have a predilection for functional programming.
What attracts people to being a programmer? For some people it’s “looks like a reasonable job with good pay and conditions”. For others, it’s more “I love computers, programming, and abstract puzzles to solve”. This latter group (of which I am one), is more likely to provide both benefits and problems.
The benefit is they will generally be capable of greater innovation than the former group, but the downside is that they may just focus on interesting puzzles and ignore the needs of the (boring) business. Choosing an exotic language will greatly tilt the ratios towards this later group.
Most people in this later group can discipline themselves to focus on delivery, while remaining a great resource when truely challenging puzzles pop up. Most, but not all. Choosing a very esoteric language is pushing the curve far towards this tail, and the result will be many “brilliant, but useless to our business, people”.
Every small business needs a strong technical leader. I’m convinced of this. You need someone in charge that can stop the arguments, make people put down their toys, and remove people that cannot contribute for whatever reason. So this is my conclusion, it’s boring like so much of business. You need the right manager.