Age of the Racecar Driver

A January 2005 Drunken Blog Rant in Steve's meanest register: the candidate's breed gets a Turing-themed acronym whose initials you can assemble yourself, and his résumé is compared to that of Ignatius P. Codswallop III, a fake applicant Steve had invented for a screening guide the year before. Under the name-calling sits a genuine quarrel with Joel Spolsky, who had recently written this kind of programmer off as an "Architecture Astronaut." Steve thinks the sneer teaches the wrong lesson. Fields fragment into roles as they mature — his tour runs from gaffers and key grips through game studios to the dentist who once cleaned Steve's teeth himself, with what felt like eighteen thumbs and no hygienist on staff — and a role that looks like a degraded version of yours may just be a different job.

The second half is where the rant earns the read. Steve hands the candidate the floor, and the man turns out to be a keen diagnostician of other people's comfort zones: his story about the assembly-language wizards at a European defense contractor, one of whom took the vendor's buggy compiler home, disassembled it, and brought back a patched binary the next morning while the firm slowly lost its market, gets retold here with obvious admiration. What that story exposes about the candidate himself, and what it does to Steve's vote, is the actual ending; this is one of the few 2005 rants that closes on an open question rather than a verdict. The diagnosis aged well: the industry really did splinter into titles. The acronym aged the way acronyms like that do.