“I Don't Like Your Examples” (2000)

Admittedly, that would be the kind of title that would make me want to pick up the book waaaay more.

re: this comment from the author:

> I believe that just about every technical book comes with a body of politics, an ideology that governs and usually restricts its example set. We don't notice the political slant because it reflects the dominant viewpoint in our society and is thus invisible.

It's not just mainstream technical books that are immersed in a dominant political ideology. In his book "Disciplined Minds", Jeff Schmidt makes a strong argument that political and ideological training and qualification play a major part in the process of creating new professional workers:

> Unlike employees whose actions can be prescribed in unlimited detail, these workers have to understand their employer's interests, because there are moments when that understanding is all they have to go on. Employers designate these special nonmanagement workers "professionals".

> Preparing to become a professional is fundamentally different from preparing to become a nonprofessional, because the blank sheet professionals face holds an infinity of possibilities, and there is no way to teach or even list them all. Professional training therefore centers around ideology, because ideology guides the subtle decisions and creative choices that the professional makes as she fills the blank sheet. (The professional's work, in turn, propagates the ideology that guides it.) Even those whose range of discretion is humiliatingly insignificant require the special preparation: The system apparently considers ideology to be of paramount importance. Thus, if the work of a particular occupation is in part creative -- that is, if the decisions are not _purely_ routine or rote -- preparing and qualifying for that occupation will include a _major_ ideological component involving years of postsecondary schooling, even if the creative work is a _minor_ part of the job.

> This accounts for the seeming disparity between amount of preparation and authority on the job. ("After all the schooling I went through, they hardly let me make a difference around here.") And it accounts for the seemingly irrelevant part of the schooling required to get the paper credentials that allow one to work as a professional. Despite years of student opposition, these qualifying assignments are still imposed, precisely because they are _not_ irrelevant. They get the individual used to the kind of political framework within which the skills and techniques of the profession are applied.

> When employers designate certain jobs "professional" and insist that employees have professional training -- not just the technical skills that seem sufficient to do the work -- they must have more in mind that efficiency. Hierarchical organizations need professionals, because through professionals those at the top control the political content of what is produced, and because professionals contribute to the bosses' control of the workforce itself. It is crucial for the functioning and survival of the institution -- and the hierarchical system of production as a whole -- that the employees who make decisions do so in the interests of the employer. As we will see, the employer's control of the professional's creative work is assured by the ideological discipline developed during professional training. And the employer's control of the workforce is maintained in part through the professional's elitism and support for hierarchy in the workplace. The preparation process develops, and the qualification process measures, the student's willingness and ability to accept ideological direction from future employers. The one who has met the requirements -- the "qualified professional" -- can be trusted to do what is "politically correct" when making decisions and creative choices at work.

Schmidt's book is is fantastic, and I thoroughly recommend it. See e.g. http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

They probably would use Excel or something; and they'd be horridly wrong.

One of the major features of a database is to allow multiple users to simultaneously work on the set of data as a whole without unexpected data loss or conflict*. (Obviously if two workers need to update the same resources and are working with external programs those need to request the correct locks and/or have transaction mechanisms that make sense.)

I agree with cwyers that the example are bad. Databases (relational ones, anyway) are good at describing relationships between clearly defined entities. The reason that people use Employees and Managers or Sales and Month in books is because they are clearly defined relationships and entities at the most basic level.

Those kinds of super-dumbed-down examples serve a purpose: to provide a prototypical way of thinking about the technology and how it's best used.

I mostly agree with the author about his politics, as far as I can tell from what he wrote. But I think his agenda got ahead of him. I had really hard time going to a small religious school when I was a kid because a daily dose of "Jesus says . . ." seemed to me to be completely irrelevant to a math class. It was, for lack of a better term, an unnecessary context switch. WTF am I supposed to be thinking about right now? What I think or what I believe?

But examples of a war criminal database just don't fit when you're trying to teach someone to (hopefully) do more than just copy and paste some code. The point of these examples is to provide a mental template for how to think about relationships between entities and what entities are.

If, on the other hand, the book were supposed to be more advanced and dealt with topics like, "How to navigate hot-button topics in the workplace" or if the example really wanted to model how one might design a database that served the purpose of categorizing war criminals, I would be okay with it. As it is, I just think it's a garbage example.

I do, however, think the author has a point about how much we gloss over sublimated political and social speech. It's true. We do that. And we often accidentally espouse the status quo by trying to be neutral. That is a legitimate problem not only in technology but also in journalism and in every endeavor that involves written language.

From that point of view, I applaud the author for trying something different. And I can certainly understand the need to try something different when you've been doing basically the same thing for 10 years.

That's my general response to this. My specific response to it is that teachers--in whatever format: book, in-person, classroom--have an obligation to only teach. Never to preach. People can go to churches for that if they want. But if I'm teaching you, my mandate is to lead you. To point you in a direction that will enable you to increase your knowledge. I struggle with this quite a lot as a violin teacher of young children.

Classical music and its history and theory are full of politically and morally charged ideas. It's not all about how to get the fingers of your left hand to fall into a certain configuration in a certain time constraint. Or about how to put your bow in exactly the right place with regard to a vibrating string.

You have to manage your relationship with your audience. You have to understand why this music came to be, and yes, how things like religion were a factor. It's not simple.

But my job as a teacher isn't to tell my students that Mozart was a womanizing asshole, or to pass judgement on Tchaikovsky for being a closet homosexual who was very kind to his wife in spite of being very frustrated.

My job is to lead the student. To show them where facts can be discovered and ultimately to enable them to process those facts and draw their own conclusions. To give the student a framework for how to process facts, analyze them, and draw their own conclusions.

What I think about this author's approach is tied to my personal opinion of what we should be doing when we are in leadership positions. Saying that Kissinger is a war criminal doesn't inspire the kind of learning I think is appropriate. It's stated as a fact. It's the copy-paste mindset that is so detrimental to practically everyone. Memorize a fact. Repeat it. You need to learn how to do a thing on the web. Use jQuery. Repeat it.

I find this didactic method deeply and morally repellent, even though I agree with the politics espoused.

When we take up the mantle of a teacher or mentor or leader, we have an obligation to lead people down a path of growth. Not browbeat them with ideology. This approach smacks to me of someone who doesn't understand what teaching really means.

Finally, I would bet money that the author has a different attitude about things today, and that we shouldn't sit around crucifying someone for an experiment they did 17 years ago. It was mostly harmless. We all make mistakes when we are writing and teaching. I make mistakes as a teacher almost every day. Sometimes more than once.

It's a good topic for thought, and even though I think it was the wrong move, it makes me question and think about my methods and the ways I relate to people. So maybe it wasn't so far off the path of leading-not-preaching as I thought.

The examples are not simply about storing two key value pairs. His new books do not include the facts from the examples given in this article. It seems to be easy to miss the technical point by being upset about we think is polemics.