Smug Yet Unserious

Lately, I’ve been burning out a little bit, and it’s been bringing back a lot of memories of what it’s like to be deep in the STEM trenches. As a result, I wanted to vent a little about some of the more annoying elitist behaviors I’ve seen lately.

Table of Contents

• Recapping the Week
• Elitism Is So Back
• Inherit vs. Implement
• I’ve Never Had Any Issues
• That’s a Waste of Time
• Catharsis

Recapping the Week

It’s Thursday night, and I’m ready to wrap up another extremely busy week. For context, here’s sort of what my day-to-day normally looks like:

1. Get up nice and early to the sound of my toddler yelling “MOM!” and “DAD!,” usually around 7:30 AM.
2. Briefly rub my eyes and crack open my phone to do a variety of pointless tasks like play Wordle and scroll Reddit.
3. Spend the next four hours trying to feed, change, and entertain my toddler while studying Japanese using a mix of Anki, Duolingo, and a plethora of textbooks and recordings.
4. Tag my wife in, so I can head out to work where some days are a mix of labs and office hours while others are lectures and Japanese class.
5. Leave work right around 5PM to fight through rush hour traffic.
6. Get home, eat dinner, and entertain the toddler until around 8PM.
7. Spend what time I have left in the day to respond to emails and finish up work, like this article.
8. Do it all over the next day.

This week, however, it’s been extra busy. For instance, I’m usually home on Mondays, so I spend the afternoons getting work done. This past Monday, I had my biweekly (as in every other week) therapy appointment, which I followed with a couple meetings with colleagues on campus. Then, I came home to the Spectrum technician fixing my internet which had been out since Sunday afternoon.

On Tuesday, my wife, kiddo, and I ran out to a doctor’s appointment. While I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it quite yet on the site, we’re having another kid, so we were able to get a few ultrasound pictures this time around. After that, I had a meeting with my co-resident director to help plan our first meeting with the students we’re taking to Japan. Then, I had my usual workday and usual evening time with the kiddo. The night capped off with a biweekly meeting to on our efforts to pressure city councils to adopt non-cooperation agreements with ICE.

By Wednesday, I was pretty tired, and I had my most busy day yet to come. The morning was normal, but I had to do a bit of cramming for my Japanese class in the afternoon. Then, I had my usual lectures, got roasted a bit in the Japanese class, and finished my workday with an extra hour on campus to meet our students for the Japanese trip. I got home, ate some dinner, and met with one of my Tsukuba University colleagues virtually.

By now (i.e., Thursday), I’m beat. The day was more-or-less fine, but I was definitely on edge. Thankfully, my wife gave me the morning to myself to study and relax. Of course, everything works by the law of equivalent exchange, so I’m writing this just moments after having the kiddo to myself this evening.

Finally, by the time you’re reading this tomorrow (or maybe you’re reading this far off into the future), I’ll probably be just wrapping up a visit to an open house. Did I mention I was also trying to buy a house? Yeah, it’s been a busy spring for me.

Elitism Is So Back

I share all those somewhat intimate details because the rest of this article is probably going to come off as a bit bitchy. The stories I want to share today include moments that I don’t think are really worth the time I’ve already spent dwelling on them, but I find this type of writing somewhat therapeutic.

All of that is to say that I want to revisit a topic that has bothered me for so long in the field of computer science: the arrogance, the smugness, the elitism, etc. Certainly, I’m not the first person to point this out, and computer science is certainly not the only field that has this problem.

Regardless, it’s been a problem that has bothered me since I literally wrote The Artificial Arrogance. Thankfully, most of you won’t be able to access that article behind the paywall. I’d prefer you didn’t read some of the horrendous takes I had at 24 around topics like unions, regulations, and meritocracy.

Anyway, I want to talk about this smugness because it was partially what made me switch to engineering education. Back then, I was so bothered by the culture of tech that I even considered studying it. Here were some of the early research questions I could dig up from my records:

• How do we address toxic tech culture like gatekeeping and elitism?
• Why do we motivate through fear rather than nurture?
• What are we doing in our hiring and admissions processes to select for this type of culture?

Now that I’m back in the thick of computer science culture, I’m starting to see a lot of the same issues resurface, and I want to share a few examples.

Inherit vs. Implement

The first example that comes to mind for me is the most salient—perhaps because it happened to me today. I was working with a student after class who was really, really curious about generic methods in Java. Generic methods are a feature of Java that I’m not really familiar with, but I get the central premise. If you have no clue what I’m talking about, here’s the literal method we were discussing:

/**
 * Returns whether {@code x} is in {@code t}.
 * 
 * @param <T>
 *            type of {@code BinaryTree} labels
 * @param t
 *            the {@code BinaryTree} to be searched
 * @param x
 *            the label to be searched for
 * @return true if t contains x, false otherwise
 * @requires IS_BST(t)
 * @ensures isInTree = (x is in labels(t))
 */
public static <T extends Comparable<T>> boolean isInTree(BinaryTree<T> t, T x) {...}

The student was asking me about the generic bit before the type. I was telling him that it’s necessary because the method is static. In other words, usually instance methods would already have access to the generic type from the class declaration, but static methods don’t because they can be called without an instance of that class.

During that conversation, he asked me a series of interesting questions around the purpose of the generic type, why it was needed, and what extending it would do. In the process of that conversation, I asked him to chat with me out in the hallway. As we continued chatting, I made a few comments like “when you make the generic type extend an interface like Comparable, the method will only accept objects that inherit the Comparable interface.”

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with what I said, but another instructor crept out of his office to correct me in front of the student. He said something along the lines of, “not to be pedantic, but it’s ‘implements’ not ‘inherits.’ Classes can’t inherit interfaces. They implement them.” Sure, man.

I found this so infuriating because it added basically nothing to the conversation, and I’m certain it didn’t clear up any confusion for the student. In fact, I find it almost counterproductive because computer science terminology is famous for being incoherent. I’ve talked at length on this website about the difference between statements and expressions and how almost no contemporary language respects those boundaries. Therefore, how could it possibly be valuable to distinguish between the terms inherit and implement? I find this all the more absurd because even the generic method uses the verb “extends” and not “implements.”

Also, somewhat unrelated, but as someone learning another spoken language right now, I find it silly to be pedantic when language is inherently ambiguous, contextual, and fluid. It just comes off like an English teacher saying “ain’t” isn’t a word. Well, I hate to tell you this brother, but there is no correct way to use language as long as the point gets across. And keep in mind, this is coming from someone who did social science research and loves to debate what words mean. There’s a time and place for that level of pedantry.

I’ve Never Had Any Issues

I think I complained about this elsewhere on the site, but another example that comes to mind happened last semester. We continue to have a variety of painful issues in our labs as operating systems go through the enshittification process. One such issue revolves around OneDrive, which doesn’t exactly play nice with software development.

If I recall correctly, one of the educators was running into an issue where OneDrive would suddenly delete files to save drive space. Often, these files would be key config files or library files needed for software development. The files, of course, would be help up in the cloud, and OneDrive would leave behind impostor files as placeholders. Then, the IDE would think the necessary file was there when it wasn’t, causing tons of fun little bugs.

As a few of my colleagues were discussing how to solve the problem, I shared some sympathy by talking about some of the challenges I’ve personally faced with scrubbing OneDrive off my PC. I assumed being a bit vulnerable would be taken in good faith, but a couple of grad students followed up with some of the most aggravating comments imaginable. I’m sure you can guess what they said:

• “Hmm, I always uninstall OneDrive on a fresh install and never had any issues.”
• “I guess it’s time to tell every student to switch to Linux.”

These are akin to the kinds of comments you’ll get in places like Stack Overflow and Reddit. Generally, just smug comments that don’t address the original question or problem and instead chastise you for not being omniscient.

That’s a Waste of Time

More recently, I have a lot of students that talk when I’m talking. This happened to me once like three years ago, and I was baffled. Now, it happens often. I’m not saying that I deserve to have the stage, but I also just don’t get it. Why come to class at all?

I bring this up because I have a student this semester that has decided I am their enemy. Our relationship is poorly antagonistic. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

Early in my classes, I give students paper name tags. The idea is pretty straightforward: if I have a variety of ways of associating a student with their name (i.e., by verbally hearing them say it, seeing it written, and seeing where they sit in the class), I can learn their names faster.

During third class, we usually take time to setup everyone’s computer. I was trying something new where I actually walked through the process with the class, so everyone could literally see what needed to be done at each step. Obviously, folks fall behind, so I offered to help them after I was finished with the demo.

Afterward, I approached my antagonist to offer them some help. They seemed annoyed with me already, but I managed to get them setup fairly quickly. When I asked them for their name, instead of telling me, they sort of gestured toward their name tag. I thought that was odd, but I tried reading it out: “nada.”

Later, I realized that I didn’t remember anyone with that name, so I checked my rosters. Sure enough, it was a nickname or possibly even a fake name, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, after that point, I basically never saw them again. They weren’t coming to lecture anymore, and they barely came to lab. Then, they started coming to class again, and they were frankly pretty disruptive. They would basically talk through the entire class period, and they weren’t exactly quiet about it.

In fact, I almost felt like they were talking loud on purpose in an effort to hurt my feelings or something. On one occasion, I remember overhearing someone explain to them my optional project. After the student finished selling it to them, I heard them say at max volume, “well, that sounds like a waste of time.”

And like, sure, I think it’s fine for a student to believe that. I just think it’s odd that you would say it out loud in from me. You might as well be like, “hey, you know that thing that you spent a bunch of time on to give us a better learning experience and a chance to start building out our professional portfolios? Why did you even bother?”

Catharsis

I’ll be honest. I was not expecting to dump over 2,000 words to the page in one sitting tonight, but it sure was cathartic. This weekend, I’m going to try to get some better sleep, so I can go into next week a little more refreshed. Perhaps that’ll help me ignore the annoying pedantry and smugness going forward.

If not, one thing I would really hate is to start seriously burning out. Earlier this week I had a minor crash out over an anonymous student question, which read: “What should we be studying for the midterm? Like what sort of problems, not just like broad categories.” This somewhat broke me because I read it as: “I haven’t been paying attention at all to you repeatedly telling us how to prepare and/or the resources you have painstakingly prepared are not good enough.”

Sometimes I look back at my fourth grade teacher who would regularly crash out and think, “no, yeah, I totally get that.” I distinctly remember him repeatedly asking the same question to the same student over multiple days because the student refused to internalize it. It went something like, “Justin, what’s the land at the foot of a mountain called.” If the student didn’t immediately say “piedmont,” the teacher would throw objects around the room.

In fact, a lot of weird things happened this week. For instance, I went to a destress event to hang out with some students and some of my peers. While I was in line, I had a wonderful conversation with a past student about the science of lifting. When I made it inside, the student introduced me to one of their friends who apparently knew me already. I made a comment about how it’s always weird when I hear that students talk about me with their friends. Before I could even finish that thought, another instructor (who I think is a grad student) interjected with something like, “yeah, I bash you all the time to my students.” I don’t know if this was intended to be a joke because he just immediately walked off after. Like, I was genuinely confused by the interaction.

Anyway, on the bright side, I’m really looking forward to the Japan trip this year. I’m also really looking forward to finally owning my own home, and I’m looking forward to watching my kiddo grow. Though, I do wish that last part would slow down a bit. As much as the day-to-day gauntlet wears me out, she’s been a lot of fun. And, I’m especially excited for her to meet her sibling!

Normally, I would share some links here to some related articles, but I’m just too exhausted. You’ll have to settle for the link to the list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, take care!