Maintenance Culture And Honor Culture

I very interesting article came my way through mastodon the other day: The problem is culture by Iris Meredith. This post is itself a reply to a reply to [another post](My week with opencode) she did. But it basically stands on its own. A couple of excerpts I wanted to highlight:

This distinction is most in evidence in the heroes that our two distinct cultures choose: the people that we believe worthy of emulation and praise and the behaviours and achievements that they exhibit. The technological culture tends to praise risk-takers, iconoclasts and people who exhibit cunning and cleverness to build new things, disrupt old things and usually become rich in the process. Example figures might be people like Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen and, unfortunately, Elon Musk[...]. The key virtues being expressed tend to be novelty, independence, ambition, a bias towards action and building something rather than nothing. The key is to throw time, energy and resources into creating something new and brilliant that changes the world, no matter how many lives or anything else are thrown away in the process. This is, in short, an honour culture, where engineers compete for glory on the field of open-source software, aiming to be elevated in the eyes of their peers and the industry.

And

Our heroes, by and large, are maintainers, people who quietly did the work of keeping alive the things our predecessors built that were valuable and improving on them when needed. They're also whistleblowers and dissidents, people who held the line on the fact that what someone else did was wrong and dangerous and would not be silent about it, often at the cost of their careers or even lives. In contrast to the honour culture of tech, our culture is heavily influenced by the mediaeval church and at times can be almost monastic in nature: our task is to contribute to the long work of salvation, which no one person will ever complete. Individual heroism is thus less important than piety and the willingness to suffer for our principles, and while tech culture encourages you to make a name for yourself, engineering culture encourages you to work, quietly and diligently, for your salvation and for the salvation of the world.

I think this distinction is pretty great. It is an oversimplification and a little fanciful at times, but it is a map (not the territory) in the most positive sense of the concept: It lets us express something about the current discourse that would otherwise be hard to tease out without making this kind of broad distinction.^[1] The article is concerned to explain why LLMs don't make sense to engineering culture people. And why tech culture is predominantly male. Lot's of meat on that bone, for sure and therefore worth a read.

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