The Nonlinear Library LW - The Perils of Professionalism by Screwtape
Nov 8, 2023
14:18
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Perils of Professionalism, published by Screwtape on November 8, 2023 on LessWrong.
Professionalism is a useful trait to be able to display, but it isn't an unalloyed good. This essay is attempting to outline why deliberately not signaling professionalism may be useful for you.
First, a definition by example for professionalism: Clean button down shirts with solid colour ties, blazers or suit jackets, clean shaven beards, hair tied up in a bun without flyers, beige or gray or at least solid colour cars and desks and walls, even toned voices with just enough of a hint of emotion not to sound at all robotic or unempathetic.
It's not the Professional Managerial Class but they (particularly as Patrick McKenzie sometimes describes them) are often its exemplars.
I.
The word "professional" is defined as a person engaged in a specific activity as one's main paid occupation. It contrasts straightforwardly with "amateur," a person who engages in an activity on an unpaid basis. Notably, "amateur" can also mean someone who is incompetent at a particular activity. As a point of language, we conflate skill and getting paid, and we do this in both directions.
If you want to get paid for doing something, you want to learn to do it professionally. Doing something professionally often includes adjacent but not obviously synonymous skills. Some of these are very closely adjacent; I have been a professional software engineer and I have been involved in hiring professional software engineers, and if you don't know how to use source control as a software engineer then you want to learn to use source control. Yes, I know it's not a cool new algorithm. Yes, I
know the end user will never see it. Trust me, you're going to use it.
Some of the expected skills of a professional are less about the core skill of the job, and more about the frame of the job. "Being on time" and "dressing appropriately" and "conducting yourself properly" are all often given as examples of professional skills which apply in a wide range of fields. Put bluntly, if you're going to interact with a customer especially in a white collar job, it helps to not have facial tattoos and to not swear casually.
We seem to have drifted very quickly into something that seemingly has almost no bearing on your ability to do the actual job at hand! Nevertheless, I expect pretty much every career coach in the western world to back me up on the main points here. I first successfully traded money for software when I was around thirteen years old, and while I have gotten better at writing software over the intervening mumble mumble years I have improved even more in my ability to present myself as a
Professional Software Engineer.
II.
Lets talk about my first professional software engineering project.
(Here I'm using "professional" to mean "I got paid for it." As you're about to find out, it was unprofessional in almost every other sense of the word.)
As best I remember it, the job went something like this. A friend of my mother's heard that I was "good with computers" and asked me if I knew how to build a website. I did as a matter of fact, having recently managed to get my own Apache server running. She said that her organization needed a website where they could announce their events and where people could learn about the organization, and would I be willing to build that for an amount of money that equaled several months' allowance. I
said sure, and asked her a bunch of questions about what needed to be on the website. A week later when I unveiled it, she sounded delighted with it, made a handful of corrections to the text, and I showed her how to add new events.
This next paragraph describing the website will be pure jargon if you aren't at least a little bit of a web developer. If it doesn't make sense, just skip it and underst...
Professionalism is a useful trait to be able to display, but it isn't an unalloyed good. This essay is attempting to outline why deliberately not signaling professionalism may be useful for you.
First, a definition by example for professionalism: Clean button down shirts with solid colour ties, blazers or suit jackets, clean shaven beards, hair tied up in a bun without flyers, beige or gray or at least solid colour cars and desks and walls, even toned voices with just enough of a hint of emotion not to sound at all robotic or unempathetic.
It's not the Professional Managerial Class but they (particularly as Patrick McKenzie sometimes describes them) are often its exemplars.
I.
The word "professional" is defined as a person engaged in a specific activity as one's main paid occupation. It contrasts straightforwardly with "amateur," a person who engages in an activity on an unpaid basis. Notably, "amateur" can also mean someone who is incompetent at a particular activity. As a point of language, we conflate skill and getting paid, and we do this in both directions.
If you want to get paid for doing something, you want to learn to do it professionally. Doing something professionally often includes adjacent but not obviously synonymous skills. Some of these are very closely adjacent; I have been a professional software engineer and I have been involved in hiring professional software engineers, and if you don't know how to use source control as a software engineer then you want to learn to use source control. Yes, I know it's not a cool new algorithm. Yes, I
know the end user will never see it. Trust me, you're going to use it.
Some of the expected skills of a professional are less about the core skill of the job, and more about the frame of the job. "Being on time" and "dressing appropriately" and "conducting yourself properly" are all often given as examples of professional skills which apply in a wide range of fields. Put bluntly, if you're going to interact with a customer especially in a white collar job, it helps to not have facial tattoos and to not swear casually.
We seem to have drifted very quickly into something that seemingly has almost no bearing on your ability to do the actual job at hand! Nevertheless, I expect pretty much every career coach in the western world to back me up on the main points here. I first successfully traded money for software when I was around thirteen years old, and while I have gotten better at writing software over the intervening mumble mumble years I have improved even more in my ability to present myself as a
Professional Software Engineer.
II.
Lets talk about my first professional software engineering project.
(Here I'm using "professional" to mean "I got paid for it." As you're about to find out, it was unprofessional in almost every other sense of the word.)
As best I remember it, the job went something like this. A friend of my mother's heard that I was "good with computers" and asked me if I knew how to build a website. I did as a matter of fact, having recently managed to get my own Apache server running. She said that her organization needed a website where they could announce their events and where people could learn about the organization, and would I be willing to build that for an amount of money that equaled several months' allowance. I
said sure, and asked her a bunch of questions about what needed to be on the website. A week later when I unveiled it, she sounded delighted with it, made a handful of corrections to the text, and I showed her how to add new events.
This next paragraph describing the website will be pure jargon if you aren't at least a little bit of a web developer. If it doesn't make sense, just skip it and underst...