Silent Technical Privilege

When I first read On Technical
Entitlement by
Tess Rinearson in mid-2012, it resonated
with me so much that I emailed her. I’ve been meaning to expand that
original email into an article for a while now, so here goes …

This was me at nine years old (with horrible posture):

I started programming when I was five, first with Logo and then BASIC.
By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC
games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast
growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the
original dragon compiler
textbook
from their grad school days. That’s when I started learning C and
writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters
were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school, I had already
created a self-hosting compiler for a non-trivial subset of C (no
preprocessor, though). Throughout most of high school, I spent weekends
coding in x86 assembly, obsessed with hand-tuning code for the
newly-released Pentium II
chips.
When I started my freshman year at MIT as a Computer Science major, I
already had over ten years of programming experience. So I felt right at
home there.

Okay that entire paragraph was a lie. Did you believe me? If so, why?
Was it because I looked like a kid programming whiz?

When that photo was taken, I didn’t even know how to touch-type. My
parents were just like, “Quick, pose in front of our new
computer!” (Look closely. My fingers aren’t even in the right
position.) My parents were both humanities majors, and there wasn’t a
single programming book in my house. In 6th grade, I tried teaching
myself BASIC for a few weeks but quit because it was too hard. The only
real exposure I had to programming prior to college was taking AP
Computer Science in 11th grade, taught by a math teacher who had learned
the material only a month before class
started. Despite its shortcomings, that class
inspired me to major in Computer Science in college. But when I started
freshman year at MIT, I felt a bit anxious because many of my classmates
actually did have over ten years of childhood programming experience;
I had less than one.

Silent Technical Privilege

Even though I didn’t grow up in a tech-savvy household and couldn’t code
my way out of a paper bag, I had one big thing going for me: I looked
like I was good at programming. Here’s me during freshman year of
college:

As an Asian male student at MIT, I fit society’s image of a young
programmer. Thus, throughout college, nobody ever said to me:

• “Well, you only got into MIT because you’re an Asian boy.”
• (while struggling with a problem set) “Well, not everyone is cut
  out for Computer Science; have you considered majoring in bio?”
• (after being assigned to a class project team) “How about you
  just design the graphics while we handle the backend? It’ll be easier
  for everyone that way.”
• “Are you sure you know how to do this?”

Although I started off as a complete novice (like everyone once was), I
never faced any
micro-inequities to impede
my intellectual growth. Throughout college and grad school, I gradually
learned more and more via classes, research, and internships,
incrementally taking on harder and harder projects, and getting better
and better at programming while falling deeper and deeper in love with
it. Instead of doing my ten years of deliberate
practice
from ages 8 to 18, I did mine from ages 18 to 28. And nobody ever got in
the way of my learning – not even inadvertently – because I
looked like the sort of person who would be good at such things.

Instead of facing implicit bias or stereotype
threat, I had the
privilege of implicit endorsement. For instance, whenever I attended
technical meetings, people would assume that I knew what I was doing
(regardless of whether I did or not) and treat me accordingly. If I
stared at someone in silence and nodded as they were talking, they would
usually assume that I understood, not that I was clueless. Nobody ever
talked down to me, and I always got the benefit of the doubt in
technical settings.

As a result, I was able to fake it till I made it, often landing jobs
whose postings required skills I hadn’t yet learned but knew that I
could pick up on the spot. Most of my interviews for research
assistantships and summer internships were quite casual – I looked
and sounded like I knew what I was doing, so people just gave me the
chance to try. And after enough rounds of practice, I actually did start
knowing what I was doing. As I gained experience, I was able to
land more meaningful programming jobs, which led to a virtuous cycle of
further improvement.

This kind of privilege that I – and other people who looked like
me – possessed was silent, manifested not in what people said,
but rather in what they didn’t say. We had the
privilege to spend enormous amounts of time
developing technical expertise without anyone’s interference or implicit
discouragement. Sure, we worked really hard, but our efforts directly
translated into skill improvements without much loss due to
interpersonal friction. Because we looked the part.

The other side

In contrast, ask any Computer Science major who isn’t from a majority
demographic (i.e., white or Asian male), and I guarantee that they’ve
encountered discouraging quotes like “You know, not everyone is
cut out for Computer Science …” They probably still remember the
words and actions that have hurt the most, even though those making the
remarks often
aren’t trying to harm.

For example, one of my good friends took the Intro to
Java
course during freshman year and enjoyed it. She wanted to get better at
Java GUI programming, so she got a summer research assistantship at the
MIT Media Lab. However, instead of letting her build the GUI (like the
job ad described), the supervisor instead assigned her the mind-numbing
task of hand-transcribing audio clips all summer long. He assigned a new
male student to build the GUI application. And it wasn’t like that
student was some child programming prodigy – he was also a
freshman with the same amount of (limited) experience as she had! That
other student spent the summer getting better at GUI programming while
she just grinded away mindlessly transcribing audio. As a result, she
grew resentful and shied away from learning more CS.

Thinking about this story always angers me: Here was someone with a
natural interest who took the initiative to learn more and was denied
the opportunity to do so. I have no doubt that she could have gotten
good at programming – and really enjoyed it! – if she had
the same opportunities as I did. That spark was there in her during
freshman year but was snuffed out by one bad initial experience.

(Also, when she first got into MIT, her aunt – whose son had
been rejected – congratulated her by saying, “Well, you only
got into MIT because you’re a girl.”)

Over a decade later, she now does some programming at her research job
but wished that she had learned more back in college. However, she had
such a negative association with everything CS-related that it was hard
to motivate herself to seek further learning opportunities for fear of
being shot down again.

Programmers aren’t superheroes

One trite retort is, “Well your friend should’ve been tougher and
not given up so easily. If she wanted it badly enough, she should’ve
tried again, even knowing that she might face resistance.”

These sorts of remarks also aggravate me. Writing code for a living
isn’t like being in the Navy SEALs hunting down international terrorists
or simultaneously shooting three pirates in the head at sea while they
were pointing a gun at a
civilian.
Programming is seriously not that demanding, so you shouldn’t need to
be a tough-as-nails superhero to enter this profession.

Just look at this photo of me from a software engineering summer
internship:

Even though I was hacking on a hardware simulator in C++, which sounds
mildly hardcore, I was actually pretty squishy, chillin’ in my cubicle
and often taking extended lunch breaks. All of the guys around me (yes,
the programmers were all men, with the exception of one older woman who
didn’t hang out with us) were also fairly squishy. These guys made a
fine living and were good at what they did; but seriously, they weren’t
superheroes. The most hardship that one of the guys faced all summer was
staying up late playing the game Doom
3 when it first came out and then
rolling into the office dead-tired the next morning. Anyone with enough
practice and motivation could have done this job, and most other
programming and CS-related jobs as well. Seriously, companies aren’t
looking to hire the next Steve Wozniak – they just want to ship
code that works.

It frustrates me that people not in the majority demographic often need
to be tough as nails to succeed in this field, constantly bearing the
lasting
effects
of thousands of micro-inequities. One researcher notes that:

In contrast, people who look like me can just kinda do programming for
work if we want, or not do it, or switch into it later, or out of it
again, or work quietly, or nerd-rant on how Ruby sucks or rocks or
whatever, or name-drop monads. And nobody will make remarks about our
appearance, about whether we’re truly dedicated hackers, or how our
behavior might reflect badly on “our kind” of people.
That’s silent technical privilege.

Conclusion

Here’s a thought experiment: For every white or Asian male expert
programmer you know, imagine a parallel universe where they were of
another ethnicity and/or gender but had the exact same initial interest
and aptitude levels. Would they still have been willing to devote the
over ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in the
face of dozens or hundreds of instances of implicit discouragement they
will inevitably encounter over the years? Sure, some super-resilient
outliers would, but many wouldn’t. Many of us would quit, even though we
had the potential and interest to thrive in this field.

I hope to live in a future where people who already have the interest
to pursue CS or programming don’t self-select themselves out of the
field. I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to
have gotten in college and beyond – unimpeded opportunities to
develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and
fulfilling.

The bigger goal on this front is to spur interest in young people from
underrepresented demographics who might never otherwise think to pursue
CS or STEM studies in general. There are great people and organizations
working toward this goal on multiple fronts. Although I think that
increased and broader participation is critical, a more immediate
concern is reducing attrition of those already in the field. For
instance, a 2012 STEM education report to the
President

That’s why I plan to start by taking steps to encourage and retain those
who already want to learn.

On 2014-01-15, this article was lightly edited and republished by
Slate.
That article led to my first interview on NPR.