Operating a complex home network… one of the ultimate ways of geekery. I personally have been operating a home network for some time, and I have to say… if the home network is built just for you and yourself, well that’s easy. But the moment you consider using a build-out geek home network that is operating and providing a service to others, well… sometimes that raises more questions than it answers.
First of all, you have to answer to the question of the users’ willingness, or more commonly the case, lack thereof willingness to learn about how the complex network functions. It’s funny, when you think about this. This is so baseline, so fundamental of an idea, yet it’s something that many engineers blissfully overlook. The fact that you can build fancy technologies that do nice things, that people will want to use them, but they will be utmost reluctant to learn about them? How did we fail to anticipate that this would happen?
Specificaly, in the case of computer networking at home, we have a very obvious precedent in the sector: utilities. Internet has often been called “the new utility,” and telecommunications is the name of the larger game. Why do we call them utilities? Because the users have a highly utilitarian attitude toward them! “Does it have a utility?” What benefit does it provide to me? Okay, fine, can I just reap the benefits and forget about the details of it?
It doesn’t matter what their religious devotions are, somehow, regardless of religious viewpoint, most people end up with a highly utilitarian viewpoint toward home utilities. But, as all engineers know, this simply isn’t the way utilities actually work under the hood. Under the hood of utilities is a whole lot of investment. In fact you can argue that a utility is almost nothing but investment. The model of monthly billing to provide a service is largely a distraction from the true essence of how utilities actually operate.
But, point in hand. As much as this seems the least you can do to support a utility, it is the most you can achieve when you have to work with customers who have an extremely utilitarian attitude. The monthly billing provides a source of revenue to build up capital which can then be used for major investment spending like installing new fiber optic cable infrastructure. At the very least, it provides a source of money to pay maintenance personnel for routine maintenance on the physical infrastructure that already exists. It also provides for paid support staff to answer all the amateur’s stupid questions they’re bound to ask. And, finally, the “cream of the crop” expense of Internet Service Providers is tech personnel to work inside the ISP’s central office locations.
So, now that we reviewed the precedent, let’s return to the underlying philosophical questions that I’ve raised. Why is it that so few people are willing to learn about and operate a complex home network? The answer here is obvious too, if you compare the lifestyle of a geek to a more typical person. Fundamentally, you can argue that geeks have a seemingly unlimited stamina to do work. And what is it, when I say this, that “work” actually is?
It simply boils down to the statement of what an engineer is. An engineer solves problems. Problems that that prevent “things from working,” problems that prevent people from working. That, fundamentally, prevent work from occurring. The ability “to make ends meet.” To have financial earnings matching your expenses, to be able to communicate over long distance. An engineer enables the ability to accomplish work.
So, by extension, the fruit of an engineer entices people to work harder.
This is the antithesis of what a non-engineer wants to do in life. A non-engineer does not want to, fundamentally, make ends meet, solve problems, enable object to “work” and function correctly, enable other people to do work, help other people accomplish goals, and so on. At the end of a work day, a non-engineer wants to “shut off” from work. They don’t want to be constantly occupied about the thought of how to make ends meet. At the end of the work day is their money, their time, to be able to consume without discretion of making ends meet. If retirement would mean the ability to have unlimited resources to spend and zero responsibility to think about how to make ends meet, they’d take the opportunity any day. And for many non-engineers, this is how they view retirement: An extended summer vacation where you can have fun and play all day.
So, now that you understand the philosophical standpoint about what’s happening in these non-technical users mind, how are you to go about being a geek running a network that supports a number of these non-engineers? Yeah, you could implement a utilitarian model to support investments for the network. But, no, you have to dig deeper than that. Don’t just answer the face value question, “Can you make things work reasonably well now?” Answer the full question, “What is it that these users truly want?”
When you really think about it, the full question, you’ll realize that at face value, these users don’t want very much. The existence of a large, featureful, and functional network is just a nice-to-have. But, ultimately, you can safely assume that given their unwillingness to… pursue all those engineering things, they wouldn’t too much mind if they lost it all and ends weren’t meeting for them, now would they?
Well, what if they did mind? Here’s the solution you, as a geek, need to understand, the approach you need to take. For non-engineers, the ability to have time and money not directly related to accomplishing work is an ecocnomic unit of its own, and that especially applies in their own home. In this respect, it can obviously be seen that taking on responsibility for operating a home network is a deprivation, rather than a great gift as us geeks see it. But, this goes even further than that. Having a geek operate a home network is not a fair trade in this system of economics because the geek appears, from a non-engineer’s standpoint, to be constantly deprived of something someone ought to have of their time outside work.
There is only one way to remedy this: have the home network operated by professionals. Naturally, this is going to increase the monetary cost of the operation, but it will work in the primary form of economics used by non-engineers. Why? The non-engineer will have more time on their hands to not think about making ends meet, where they can spend more time on entertainment and other non-productive things they’d rather be doing. Then in exchange for the privilege of having this service, they have to pay for all the personal entertainment junk in an equal quantity that can be enjoyed by the home network operators on the other end. That’s how the concept of fair trade for home economics comes in, even when doing so may cause you to spend more money.
In summary, there are a few key points ane takeaways for geeks to remember from this discussion.
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Not everyone values work equally, especially when it comes to higher-level concepts like enabling the ability to do work through technology.
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“Making ends meet” can appear as a “vice” to some people, even though geeks may see this as a virtue.
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Developing an investment-oriented mindset can be a hurdle for non-engineers to deal with.
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The time, money, and ability to not be concerned with making ends meet, with not having to do work, is seen as an economic unit in its own right for non-engineers. Capitalize on this observation to optimize how goods and services can be best provided to non-engineers in a way that constitutes a “fair trade.”
At the outset, the ability to track these measures may seem like extra work. But of course, there’s a solution. Simply track all “work-related” activities, then what is left over is all the “non-work” activities.
Something needs to be said about engineers being constantly willing to reach out and make it easier for the uninitiated to learn about technology. What is the logic in this? As engineers would like to tout (and as Linus Torvalds was once quoted in an interview), sure although 99% of the target audience will be more focused on play, there will be 1% who will see the value in learning how to enable work and make it more efficient. The biggest point here is a point of economics. If you can decrease the cost of that educational outreach effort to nil, the 1% who do use the resources to learn are pure profit. Every single such new worker has immediate and obvious contributions to the underlying premise of engineering: to enable work and to make it more efficient. And that will have obvious implications to making the world simply run better, to making ends meet.
So, the crux of the matter here, I’ve pointed the fact that the cost of education outreach efforts is critical. If there were a substantial financial cost associated with these efforts, the economic losses would be tremendous. Likewise, the assumption of all gains made is the pure definition of engineering, which does not necessarily imply the return of money as profits. It simply means, the true passion of engineering can be further pursued, regardless of the financials.
And, this is exactly the problem that most businesses face when it comes to engineering. “How can you prove these engineering efforts will improve the bottom line financials of the business?” When it comes to business, it’s already enough of a struggle to set short-term engineering goals on the table. First you have to pay for an engineering research and development team in a way that is rather isolated from the company’s bottom-line financials, because that’s not how engineering fundamentally works. Their short-term goal is to make existing work the business does faster and more efficient. The hypothesis, from the business manager’s standpoint, is that by doing so, that increases the bottom-line for the business. And, therefore, it can be viewed as an area of investment. But the busisness’s bottom line financials are actually not of primary concern for the engineering team.
The problem for the business manager is that short-term, you’re just increasing the business’s costs to pay for more employee salaries. But, the crux for engineering is that if the craft is too closely tied to the financials, they won’t have the “breathing room” to do the clear thinking that results in a good job.
But, we haven’t yet even covered the long-term goals of engineers in relation to the business world: to make the entire world more efficient and productive, to enable new work to become possible, and to empower a greater number of new engineers who can further multiply the benefits of engineering. The business manager is only interested in engineering so far as it improves the financials of their business. They are not too fond about engineering efforts improving the financials of their competitor’s businesses. So, the business manager wants to make the product of their engineering team proprietary, a secret advantage of their business over the others. And they want that secret advantage to last forever. But the engineer is looking two steps ahead and sees that is no winning strategy in this chess game: the competitor will quickly develop a similar but incompatible secret advantage and that’s actually going to result in greater costs for our own business later in time: the engineering work that could have been saved by improving one really solid implmentation is going to be wasted developing several poor implementations. And besides, if the secret advantage lasted forever, the business manager could promptly layoff the engineering team since they no longer are needed for the short-term financial gains.
Finally, the fact of the matter of proprietary engineering is that it is also counterproductive for minting new engineers. How can new engineers build off of the work of past engineering to further improve efficiencies when the product of that work is not available to them? How are they ever going to get hired to work at the company if they don’t have existing experience in that area of engineering? You simply can’t hold onto the same engineers forever, that’s not how human livelihood works. But still, even that business angle on an obvious fact falls far short of engineers true long-term goal.
And finally, there is still the elusive last point that we have not covered: to make new work become possible. Why is this important to a business? If a business fails to innovate, then the world around them will change but the business will not, and the world will buy new products in preference to old ones. So then there will be less and less customers until pretty soon, the company goes out of business. But still, that’s a meager way to explain the true intent behind engineering to business managers.
Fundamentally, we can explain the crux of the matter this way. Engineers will always have longer term goals than is within the scope and purview of business managers. To explain the importance of engineering, you have to translate the language of how these long term phenomenon apply to the short-term operation of a business. Finally, though, business managers have the last say in these matters. Not all businesses are equally willing to fund the future. Overall, you can simply summarize these observations by saying that in general, engineering doesn’t pay, unless you find some people who are actually willing to pay. If you can’t, you need to take the matter personally by accruing the necessary funding by some other means and then using the monetary spend as an investment area of your own.