Presented at Eurucamp 2015 in Potsdam, Germany. Video to follow. This PDF includes speaker notes, with just slides at http://www.slideshare.net/lhawthorn/will-the-real-technical-people-please-stand-up-51172732 Talk abstract: How often have you heard – or said – the phrase “$PERSON just isn’t technical”? If you’re our speaker, you’ve heard it plenty of times over the past 15 years, and frequently applied it to yourself and other colleagues who didn’t quite fit into well understood “technologist” categories. But what does technical actually mean? What makes someone technical? What makes them not technical? In this talk, the speaker will explore how “not technical” is a dangerous phrase we use to ensure that we need never question our hidden biases about others and their aptitudes. She will demonstrate how this phrase not only encourages a lack of collaboration, but leads to stagnation in the growth of your orgnization by actively discouraging your peers from learning new skills. She will conclude with concrete steps attendees can take to better understand the capabilities of everyone on their team – coders or not – so their projects, company or teams can be most successful.

1. Will the Real Technical People
Please Stand Up?@lhawthorn - Eurucamp 2015
mikecogh
Good morning, everyone! I’m here to talk to you today about a phrase I find just as problematic as I find my enjoyment of the singer whose music inspired the title for this
talk. I’m here today to ask that all the “real” technical people in our industry please stand up.

2. $PERSON
isn’t
TECHNICAL
How often have you heard this phrase? Do you find yourself using it? I’ve been hearing it for the past 15 years, which coincidentally is just as long as I have worked in the
tech industry. I’ve never really felt like it fit me. I had the immense privilege of having access to a computer almost from birth, and growing up in Silicon Valley meant I had
access to a computer lab filled with Apple IIes, writing my first programs more than 20 years ago. (Sheesh, I’m getting old.)
What’s even more surprising is how often I hear this phrase from women at technical conferences like OSCON. They’ll visit the booth I’m standing in and the first words
out of their mouths will be “I’m not technical, but ….” I don’t really think of non-technical people as attending OSCON.
So, I find this phrase really problematic, because when I hear it, I immediately think of ….

3. My Parents*
* Not Drawn to Scale
thedailyenglishshow
Unix Programmer
Learned to use the
ATM when I was 14
My Mom. My Mom, the Unix programmer, the one who worked at Visa International for more than a decade attempting to bring chip enabled credit cards to the United
States. The ones you folks here in Europe have had for years, but we’re just rolling out now.
And I think of all of her patience with my Dad, who has no relationship whatsoever with computers. Even today. My Dad, who so embodies the definition of non-technical
that his Nokia candy bar mobile is *never* charged and I had to teach him how to use an ATM when I was in secondary school because he’d never gotten money from a
bank without standing in line to make a withdrawal from a human teller.

4. © D. Taranik
used with permission
Or, I think of these lovely women, my dear friends from the US. These are the women who I see not often enough, but definitely each year at Christmastime. The ones who rapidly hand me their smart phones to install a myriad of
software updates, uninstall various spyware programs and to introduce them to such wonders as the Yahoo! mail app.
And yet, when I really think about my friend the vet, I remember she was required to do more years in university than doctors who perform medicine on humans, and she heals patients who cannot speak to her to tell her what is
wrong.
And yet, when I think of my friend the high school teacher in Florida, teaching youth who have recently come to the US as refugees from places like Haiti. A woman who has learned to navigate a desperately underfunded public
school system to ensure her students are able to learn, while balancing their human needs as recent immigrants, living in poverty, and learning English as their second language.
And yet, when I think really think my friend the office manager, I think of all the times I have watched her work around bugs in her office’s software. If you think every expense reporting system you have ever used is terrible, try using
software to manage dental records that has to maintain compliance with patient confidentiality laws while speaking to any number of different backends for various insurance corporations. You’ll run screaming for Oracle Financials
immediately.
It’s very hard for me to say that these women are not technical. I feel like their work is very technical, just not my flavor of technical. I certainly cannot do any of the things they do every day.

5. What does
$PERSON isn’t TECHNICAL
even mean?
see also its ugly relatives: “not very technical” and “not technical enough” and “not as technical as $SOMEONE_JUST_LIKE_ME”
So I have a real problem with this phrase. And I suppose my biggest problem with it is that I actually can’t tell you what it means. As far as I can tell, it’s completely
meaningless, entirely subjective and randomly applied.

6. Does It Mean ….
• Doesn’t have a university degree in Computer
Science or Engineering of some sort?
• Doesn’t write code? (Or doesn’t do it for their
career?)
• Can’t solder and has no idea what thermal
compound is?
* What about all the self taught people in our industry who are successful programmers? All of our idols who never attended university or dropped out of school?
* What about civil engineers and civic planners? They don’t necessarily write software. And I don’t know about you, but it would really frighten me if the people designing
roads and building bridges for me weren’t technical.
* Doesn’t administer their own mail server? How many of us now only use Gmail or another web email service?
* Does anyone else remember when the only people Google would employ were able to build their own computer from scratch, and everyone else wasn’t technical
enough?
* There are people who will tell you that anyone who thinks Emacs is a viable text editor aren’t really technical, either, nor are people who run OS X or Windows instead
of Linux, etc., etc.
* Is everyone in these categories really “not technical”?

7. $PERSON isn’t TECHNICAL
implies some kind of
immutable binary
Which is completely false. Not a single one of us was born knowing how to program. Every single one of us is capable of becoming a developer, as the fine folks in
mentoring programs like Rails Girls SoC and Rails Girls Berlin have demonstrated to us again and again. Why would we ever use language that suggests otherwise?

8. hape_gera
This phrase is toxic.
So, I submit you, fine folks of Eurucamp and beyond, that this phrase is toxic. It should be stricken from our vocabulary. Just like we’ve learned not to say “this code is
lame,” we should find better words to choose than “$PERSON isn’t technical.”

9. This phrase is code for…
• “I don’t have to challenge my own biases”
• “The work $PERSON performs is much less
valueable than my own work”
• “$PERSON is a woman / person of color / not
enough like me to ‘fit in’”
* “I don’t actually have to think about what $PERSON is or is not capable of doing”
* “I don’t have to expend any effort to teach or better inform $PERSON and there is no value in doing so”
* It is amazing how often this phrase is applied to underrepresented groups in the technology industry, even along the lines of devaluing professions that are seen as
more accessible to women: documentation, user experience design, program management and business operations.
* Have you ever heard a member of an underrepresented group tell you that their not technical? I can guarantee you that this isn’t a phrase that they came to
themselves. They’ve heard it over and over, and in hearing it repeated they’ve internalized it and come to believe it to be true.

10. This phrase prevents us from …
• Having better educated and more empowered
colleagues
• Fully respecting the value of our team mates
• Having more effective collaboration throughout
our organizations and projects
* Achieving pay equity
* Achieving our greatest level of success due to causing demotivation, burnout and impostor syndrome
* This language fails to serve us. It’s time to edit it out of our vocabulary and take the time to think about what we really mean when we say “$PERSON is not technical.”
Perhaps what we really mean is “$PERSON doesn’t know how to program - yet!”

11. Why would I stay in an industry
that defines me by what I can’t do
instead of all the things I can do?
Read awesome things by Kara: http://bit.ly/AlcoholAndInclusivity Kara’s Twitter bio pic used with permission
In closing, I’d like to share some wisdom from my friend Kara Sowles, a community human at Puppet Labs. When she heard I’d be giving this talk, we shared some thoughts on the topic at the recent OSCON conference, and yet
again Kara’s wise words really stayed with me long after we spoke.
In an industry where we hear constant complaints about a lack of pipeline to create diverse teams and, more accurately, a leaky pipeline when it comes to retaining underrepresented groups, why would we ever devalue the
contributions of people who will frequently learn to program or choose to become professional developers after beginning their career with so-called non-technical job functions?
I’d like to ask everyone in the audience to edit the phrase not technical out of their vocabulary, challenge others - gently, with mutual respect and kindness - to do the same, and to explicitly, vocally value all the contributions of their
co-workers and collaborators. We will all be the better for it, and so will our projects, companies and industry.

12. 86979666@N00
Thank You!

13. Further Reading & Legal Bits
• Fantastic related article:
The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee (http://
bit.ly/MythNon-TechEmployee
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respective owners and are used with their written
permission, including via Creative Commons licensing.
• This presentation is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Please
reuse, remix and share widely!