Well, So Much for Another One
Published at 18:58 on 8 September 2015
Had another interview today, and the way it want (not badly, but not great either) makes it pretty certain I’m not going to get an offer. Which is OK, given the next point.
The biggest catch is that the guy who would be my boss, while very smart, has fallen victim to Respected Academics Syndrome. That’s when someone with lots of formal education and recognition to their name lets it all go to their head, to the point where they can’t take any constructive criticism, no matter how valid, from someone with less of either. They have the credentials, I don’t, so therefore there’s absolutely nothing they could ever learn from me. Period.
In this case, it was about SQL. The guy wanted to design a program that sent SQL to back-end databases that was both standards-confirming (so it would be database-independent) and efficient. You can’t do that: the SQL standard is surprisingly small. A lot of the SQL syntax that one takes for granted as basic stuff for writing efficient queries (such as the LIMIT clause) are actually nonstandard extensions. But no, I couldn’t make that point without being interrupted and having my concerns waved off (never with any actual evidence to the contrary, of course).
What’s sad is that it is at an organization with a very noble mission (cancer research). So this project is going to run into all sorts of unnecessary and easily foreseeable difficulties, wasting lots of money and effort, largely because the workplace is a hierarchical and authoritarian place. If the world wasn’t largely on such principles, personality faults like that wouldn’t do nearly so much damage: he’d still be respected for his past accomplishments but the moment he tried to bluster others into doing the impossible he’d get ignored and overruled by group consensus, because there would be no such thing as a “boss”. And because such academics could get easily called on their shit, they wouldn’t let their recognition go to their head in the first place.
And that is the biggest reason I am an anarchist: because life experiences keep on underscoring to me that authoritarian hierarchies just don’t work very well.