Column: Smarties and the people game

“ I  think it’s stupid.”

I was listening to a former Google intern talk about the company’s corporate policies when he said this. Google’s lawyers, he said, forbade employees from naming other companies in their emails. Even using “Google” as a verb was frowned upon. If push came to shove, name-dropping could be a liability.

Coders should respect politics. In a field where patent lawsuits are as common as head lice is in elementary school, liabilities are important.

I said it sounded interesting. The rise of the internet had birthed a new field of law. In 2006, Amazon was sued for “stealing” the concept of one-click shipping. A few professors in UNC’s computer science department have acted as expert witnesses in such lawsuits.

But shrugging, the former intern just said he thought the entire thing was stupid and continued typing on his laptop.

That irked me. A techie dismissing the details of tech law is like a Peace, War and Defense major shrugging off ISIS. And yet that attitude — “Anything related to politics, hierarchies and bureaucracy is a stupid waste of time, so I’m going to keep coding” — is dominant.

The geek squad in college used to be those students that, in high school, would balk at the preppy student council kids. Making calculator games was much better than debating the dress code with the principal. Nerds snicker at suited-up young politicians and executives — we can’t understand why the senior class treasurer took a made-up position so seriously. When a dispute of Student Congress makes it into the paper, a techie thinks it’s stupid and can’t understand why they don’t just, y’know, get along.

But I admire those sparkle-shoed young debaters. Researchers and programmers can learn from them. The brilliant, independent, sarcastic thinkers of computer science are great, but that mindset is also the reason we’ll never get anyone elected to office.

There is nobility in trying to solve political or bureaucratic problems in any level in society — from high school student council to the United Nations. Even the most ineffective would-be leader has more understanding of the problems at hand than most armchair (internet) commentators that think they do. Problems in bureaucracy and hierarchy — petty, stupid debates — arise in any environment where people need to work together. People tend to disagree, so the ability to tactfully handle these disagreements is important in any field.

But up-and-coming scientists and programmers sometimes imagine they can get by on smarts alone, avoiding the “people game” forever. It’s easy to believe when you need to crank your brain for a living. But then there’s Terence Tao, the 220-IQ UCLA math professor, and his “Polymath 8” project — an effort to bring the world’s scientists together and crowd source a proof to the twin prime conjecture. This is less a feat of the mind and more a feat of leadership in a field. You can’t get things done with brains alone.

So, creators, artists, scientists and programmers — learn the art of politicking.