Hard vs Soft Mastery

Some years ago, as part of a discussion of computer programming styles, a colleague introduced me to the concept of "hard master" versus "soft master." Be warned: I am emphatically not making any value judgments here: I do not believe that hard masters are smarter, purer, better or more detail-oriented. I do not believe that soft masters are failing at being hard masters; I do not believe that a good hard master can do anything a soft master can do, or vice-versa.

Enough about what I don't mean: what do I mean? A little Google magic got me here, the horse's mouth: Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman. Read the selected section for details, but the summary is this: the hard master feels he has to know all the details when using technology while the soft master knows how to get what she wants.

The use of gender-specific pronouns is not accidental: frequently hard masters are male and soft masters are female. Note that while there is a significant pro-male, anti-female bias in computer programming, this is not a bias from which I happen to suffer. I have worked with women for my entire technical career, and have found female technology interaction different but not inferior. In fact, I have found that this discipline has room for, and needs both, kinds of interaction. As a general rule, I want my bit-bashing systems software from an anti-social grumpy guy and I want my application software from an empathetic, flexible and cheerful gal.

I understand that these generalizations are not universal truths, that there are grumpy women who are antisocial and mathematical while there are cheerful men who are sensitive to how technology feels to use, and all possible permutations in between.

But I do not believe that all permutations are equally probable. I find distinct trends: men tend to define technological success and men tend to be hard masters. Women have their own technological approaches and these approaches tend to be deemed inferior by men, mostly men who cannot perform these "soft" tasks themselves.

Given this observation, I was not surprised at a recent recommendation of related reading from another colleague: an article from the Harvard Business Review that considers the assertion that women make your technical team smarter. I am sure that is true, at least for my team.

In the interests of full disclosure, I will admit to being a middle-aged man who thinks of himself as a designer, as something of a non-combatant in this fight. My attitude is that I can code anything I have to, but I am not a coder. Opinions of my coding by coders varies, but mostly I think that both hard and soft masters have reason to despair at my code. So I claim to be of neither camp: I need them both to get my designs realized, unless I end up having to code one or other kind of task myself. Which happens all too often in these recessionary times.

I find the hard versus soft dichotomy in server software versus client software. For example, configuring a web server is a heavily technical task which requires a deep understanding of networking, process management and security. By contract, creating a web page is also web-related, but has utterly different requirements, including a flair for graphic art and an understanding of usability.

I also see this division in the back end (data storage & retrieval) area as opposed to the front end (data acquisition through user interaction) area. Figuring out how to store data effectively is a job for a hard master who wants to think about file systems, database formats and the interaction of caching and performance. Figuring out how to get users to enter data quickly and accurately is about understanding how human beings use software.


From my perspective, there is trouble brewing for the hard masters. It is my observation that as abstraction rises mastery softens. When there was only simple hardware, Unix and ANSI C, someone could be a hardware expert, a firmware expert, a Unix system software expert and complete master of their own code base. Now, with server clusters and interpreted languages and database interfaces and web servers and programming environments embedded in web servers, I just don't see that as a viable or desirable goal. How do hard masters get anything done these days? They must have to restrict themselves to rather small areas of expertise.

Not only is abstraction on the rise, but I see a very real trade off between productivity and mastery which abstraction provides. Women who are happy to cruise along at the GUI-to-create-GUI level, such as Visual BASIC, kick my ass in terms of how fast and how custom they can make apps. Who cares how deeply they understand what underpins that abstraction? (Until that abstraction bites them in the butt; more of that anon.)

There has been a shift in the balance of power between apps creators (soft masters) and systems engineers (hard masters) as time has gone by. So far as I can tell, app programmers now rule: users understand what they do (create apps), economic buyers are willing to pay for what they do. Also for systems engineers, I find that users have no idea what they do, economic buyers don't relate to them or their work and organizations feel that they get the behind-the-scenes stuff for free, as part of buying apps, or smart network hardware, or whatever.

When I started out in the early 1980s, app programmers were the bottom of the ladder, while systems programmers did the real work, got paid the real money, and wrote apps whenever they felt like it. As a designer, I find that I no longer have to start by getting hard masters to buy into my design: in fact, I find that most of my gigs come from soft masters coming to me so that I can create a framework in which they can create the apps that people want. No one is interested in the lowest levels: is this MS-Access to a local database, or MS-Access as a client for a database server? Who cares?

Of course, users should care: bad infrastructure makes for a bad user experience. But users don't care about boring old infrastructure and systems engineering because most of the time they can afford not to.


All this does not bode well for the hard master. These days, I see hard mastery in demand only in those relatively rare instances when the abstraction fails or is incomplete. When you need a DLL to extend the Microsoft desktop, or a shared object to extend the Perl interpreter, you really need that. But how often does that come up? When I started out, we had five or six programmers, all male, two of whom were apps specialists. Over time, we have tended to add apps programmers, who tend to be women, and we have moved to consuming our hard mastery as a pay-as-you-go consulting commodity: we don't need full-time hard masters anymore.

This makes me a bit nervous: will the hard master be there in the future when I need him? But for now, I am busy being part of the problem: I need more soft masters and fewer hard masters I don't see that trend reversing anytime soon.