

Silent Technical Privilege

When I first read On Technical Entitlement by Tess Rinearson in mid-2012, it resonated with me so much that I emailed her. I've been meaning to expand that original email into an article for a while now, so here goes ...

This was me at nine years old (with horrible posture):

I started programming when I was five, first with Logo and then BASIC. By the time this photo was taken, I had already written several BASIC games that I distributed as shareware on our local BBS. I was fast growing bored, so my parents (both software engineers) gave me the original dragon compiler textbook from their grad school days. That's when I started learning C and writing my own simple interpreters and compilers. My early interpreters were for BASIC, but by the time I entered high school, I had already created a self-hosting compiler for a non-trivial subset of C (no preprocessor, though). Throughout most of high school, I spent weekends coding in x86 assembly, obsessed with hand-tuning code for the newly-released Pentium II chips. When I started my freshman year at MIT as a Computer Science major, I already had over ten years of programming experience. So I felt right at home there.

Okay that entire paragraph was a lie. Did you believe me? If so, why? Was it because I looked like a kid programming whiz?

When that photo was taken, I didn't even know how to touch-type. My parents were just like, “Quick, pose in front of our new computer!” (Look closely. My fingers aren't even in the right position.) My parents were both humanities majors, and there wasn't a single programming book in my house. In 6th grade, I tried teaching myself BASIC for a few weeks but quit because it was too hard. The only real exposure I had to programming prior to college was taking AP Computer Science in 11th grade, taught by a math teacher who had learned the material only a month before class started. Despite its shortcomings, that class inspired me to major in Computer Science in college. But when I started freshman year at MIT, I felt a bit anxious because many of my classmates actually did have over ten years of childhood programming experience; I had less than one.

Silent Technical Privilege



  • (while struggling with a problem set) “Well, not everyone is cut out for Computer Science; have you considered majoring in bio?”

Although I started off as a complete novice (like everyone once was), I never faced any micro-inequities to impede my intellectual growth. Throughout college and grad school, I gradually learned more and more via classes, research, and internships, incrementally taking on harder and harder projects, and getting better and better at programming while falling deeper and deeper in love with it. Instead of doing my ten years of deliberate practice from ages 8 to 18, I did mine from ages 18 to 28. And nobody ever got in the way of my learning – not even inadvertently – because I looked like the sort of person who would be good at such things.


As a result, I was able to fake it till I made it, often landing jobs whose postings required skills I hadn't yet learned but knew that I could pick up on the spot. Most of my interviews for research assistantships and summer internships were quite casual – I looked and sounded like I knew what I was doing, so people just gave me the chance to try. And after enough rounds of practice, I actually did start knowing what I was doing. As I gained experience, I was able to land more meaningful programming jobs, which led to a virtuous cycle of further improvement.

This kind of privilege that I – and other people who looked like me – possessed was silent, manifested not in what people said, but rather in what they didn't say. We had the privilege to spend enormous amounts of time developing technical expertise without anyone's interference or implicit discouragement. Sure, we worked really hard, but our efforts directly translated into skill improvements without much loss due to interpersonal friction. Because we looked the part.

The other side

In contrast, ask any Computer Science major who isn't from a majority demographic (i.e., white or Asian male), and I guarantee that they've encountered discouraging quotes like “You know, not everyone is cut out for Computer Science ...” They probably still remember the words and actions that have hurt the most, even though those making the remarks often aren't trying to harm.

For example, one of my good friends took the Intro to Java course during freshman year and enjoyed it. She wanted to get better at Java GUI programming, so she got a summer research assistantship at the MIT Media Lab. However, instead of letting her build the GUI (like the job ad described), the supervisor instead assigned her the mind-numbing task of hand-transcribing audio clips all summer long. He assigned a new male student to build the GUI application. And it wasn't like that student was some child programming prodigy – he was also a freshman with the same amount of (limited) experience as she had! That other student spent the summer getting better at GUI programming while she just grinded away mindlessly transcribing audio. As a result, she grew resentful and shied away from learning more CS.

Thinking about this story always angers me: Here was someone with a natural interest who took the initiative to learn more and was denied the opportunity to do so. I have no doubt that she could have gotten good at programming – and really enjoyed it! – if she had the same opportunities as I did. That spark was there in her during freshman year but was snuffed out by one bad initial experience.

(Also, when she first got into MIT, her aunt – whose son had been rejected – congratulated her by saying, “Well, you only got into MIT because you're a girl.”)

Over a decade later, she now does some programming at her research job but wished that she had learned more back in college. However, she had such a negative association with everything CS-related that it was hard to motivate herself to seek further learning opportunities for fear of being shot down again.

Programmers aren't superheroes

One trite retort is, “Well your friend should've been tougher and not given up so easily. If she wanted it badly enough, she should've tried again, even knowing that she might face resistance.”

These sorts of remarks also aggravate me. Writing code for a living isn't like being in the Navy SEALs hunting down international terrorists or simultaneously shooting three pirates in the head at sea while they were pointing a gun at a civilian. Programming is seriously not that demanding, so you shouldn't need to be a tough-as-nails superhero to enter this profession.


Even though I was hacking on a hardware simulator in C++, which sounds mildly hardcore, I was actually pretty squishy, chillin' in my cubicle and often taking extended lunch breaks. All of the guys around me (yes, the programmers were all men, with the exception of one older woman who didn't hang out with us) were also fairly squishy. These guys made a fine living and were good at what they did; but seriously, they weren't superheroes. The most hardship that one of the guys faced all summer was staying up late playing the game Doom 3 when it first came out and then rolling into the office dead-tired the next morning. Anyone with enough practice and motivation could have done this job, and most other programming and CS-related jobs as well. Seriously, companies aren't looking to hire the next Steve Wozniak – they just want to ship code that works.





Here's a thought experiment: For every white or Asian male expert programmer you know, imagine a parallel universe where they were of another ethnicity and/or gender but had the exact same initial interest and aptitude levels. Would they still have been willing to devote the over ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in the face of dozens or hundreds of instances of implicit discouragement they will inevitably encounter over the years? Sure, some super-resilient outliers would, but many wouldn't. Many of us would quit, even though we had the potential and interest to thrive in this field.

I hope to live in a future where people who already have the interest to pursue CS or programming don't self-select themselves out of the field. I want those people to experience what I was privileged enough to have gotten in college and beyond – unimpeded opportunities to develop expertise in something that they find beautiful, practical, and fulfilling.

The bigger goal on this front is to spur interest in young people from underrepresented demographics who might never otherwise think to pursue CS or STEM studies in general. There are great people and organizations working toward this goal on multiple fronts. Although I think that increased and broader participation is critical, a more immediate concern is reducing attrition of those already in the field. For instance, a 2012 STEM education report to the President



On 2014-01-15, this article was lightly edited and republished by Slate. That article led to my first interview on NPR.

Created: 2014-01-05
Last modified: 2014-01-05