Stranger in a Strange Land

(This story was written some years ago. Every single thing in it is true. Except the things that are not.)

I spend many of my evenings writing code, and surfing the web and whatnot at Mary’s Club. Mary’s Club is Portland’s oldest strip joint. It’s just one of many – Portland allegedly having the most strip clubs per capita of anywhere in the U.S. – but it’s the one that I find most suits my needs: A conveniently located place to work that is free from unwanted distractions.

It’s “quiet” in as much as I don’t have to hear lots of conversations in the background, just the loud music and the occasional lewd comment or animalistic yelp from the audience. It’s free from unwanted distractions because the performers give the drunken patrons something to focus on other than the guy with the laptop. If I want a distraction, I can usually chit-chat with the bartender, or a performer who’s between sets and not finding a lot of takers for private dances. I can choose if, when, and for how long the distraction lasts.

As places to work past 10PM in Portland go, Mary’s is tops for me. Most people that hear this think I’m full of shit. Obviously I go there to stare at bouncing boobs! Or at the very least to stare at bouncing boobs while I’m waiting for my code to compile. No? But… but… titties! How could you possibly work while there’s titties?! Probably a good question for me to ask a therapist someday, but for now it is what it is.

I have, in fact, watched most of the performers’ routines at least once, but that’s principally to get a measure of the people and the place. What kinds of routines do the performers do? (All kinds!) What’s a “good” routine, and what’s not? (If she takes pride in it, it’s probably good.) What do audiences respond to? (It depends.) Is there skill here? (Yes.) Is there artistry? (Absolutely.) Or is there nothing more than women selling desperate men on unattainable fantasies? (Well…)

I’ve also talked to all of them in varying degrees of depth. When I want a distraction: I either chat with the bartender, or wait for a performer to come to the bar for a between-set drink, and chat with her as she either scans the audience, or pointedly ignore the available distractions.

The personas I encounter – because make no mistake, that is all I as a customer get to see – are varied and fascinating and creative and eminently interesting. When a woman works at a strip club, she gets to craft an identity for the role. She is an actress who gets to create her own character and write her own script. Part of this is a matter of physical safety. Telling a customer your real name could obviously lead to trouble – and giving a customer enough detail about your unique life could create similar opportunities for him to track you down. Part of it is also about emotional safety. Very few people are emotionally prepared to get up on a stage, strip naked, and be leered at by a bunch of drunken assholes – to be harshly judged and have every slight flaw spat back at them by the same drunken idiots. It seems to be easier to deal with it if they’re leering at a character and not at you.

Invariably, there’s some elements of truth interleaved in the fiction, and this varies from performer to performer. I take a certain joy in capturing as many details as I can from as many people as I can, cross-checking things and seeing if the story stays consistent over time. It’s not that I really want to know the truth, per se – more that I’m curious about where the lie ends and the truth begins for each performer.

I have fallen into a world that is intensely strange, by the standards of my usual peer group. Strange by the standards of most of society. Strange even by the standards of Portland whose unofficial motto is “Keep Portland Weird”, and whose residents go to painstaking effort to live up to. Yes, even here in this city where going to a strip club is almost as normal as going to a bar to hang out and many strip clubs routinely feature a female clientele almost as numerous as the male clientele (generally due to couples coming in en masse). The world of the strip club is strange.

To me, it has become almost… normal. I’m still every bit the outsider, to be sure, but my general lack of sexual interest in the performers has given me a chance to get the tiniest glimpse of what the reality is like for the people that actually live in this world.

This has given me a whole new perspective. The world I live in now seems so much less inevitable and so much more bizarre.

Shut Up and Look Pretty

I am a software engineer, but more precisely I am specialized to the role of “Technical Co-Founder”. This is a position with rather different demands than the usual software engineering role.

I can get away with being a bit less of a team player. More of a prima dona. Not particularly great with one particular technology or another. The upside is that I get to work on any and every aspect of a problem. Architecture. Security. Front-end. Back-end. Tooling. Networking. Everything. I will have the single biggest impact of any engineer on the success of the company, bar none. Every engineer who comes after me is building upon the kernel of success I’ll have created and is taking far less risk – both business and personal.

The only catch is I must be good enough at all of these things to tide the company over until it can afford to hire specialists for each area. I also have to be able to operate with less guidance, less information, and less validation than most engineers are comfortable with. I can’t wait for a proper project plan to be dropped in my lap, and haggle over requirements. I have to pick a direction, start running, and be able to course correct if I’m wrong. I’ve met a lot of brilliant engineers who can’t bring themselves to just fucking code something, anything, now. I have deigned, built, and shipped, whole products in less time than I’ve seen teams take to figure out what they will build. Frequently with no experience in that problem domain.

On the flip-side, when faced with a well-defined set of requirements and a detailed project plan, I’m pretty damned useless. My estimates are basically random numbers, some things that other engineers could just push through are insurmountable to me – and the constraints that arise from detailed requirements tend to leave me feeling like I have no clear path forward.

The usual software engineering role is one I am poorly suited to. The role I am in is one I am uncommonly well suited to. I am very much where I belong.

As a “Technical Co-Founder” there is however one other role that I fill. If the CEO is the driver, and the company is the car, then I am the engine (at least, early on). The CEO needs to impress investors with the promise that this is the car that will win the race, and having a top-notch engine is a key checklist item.

In practice, this means that I am the entrepreneuerial equivalent of a trophy wife. When we meet with key business partners or investors, I am trotted out to say just enough smart-sounding things that they come away thinking we have and can continue to build up a brilliant engineering staff – but not enough to embarass the company with strangely half-informed opinions, or undermine our bargaining posture with a bit of ill-timed forthrightness. In short, I must do the geek equivalent of “shut up and look pretty”.

See Also: A Profile of J. Random Hacker

Software engineers have a unique and strange little culture. The conventional wisdom is that we are disproportionately afflicted by Asperger’s syndrome – or just poorly socialized, overly analytical, myopic and reductive.

The conventional wisdom is… not wrong. Since we spend much of our waking lives amongst ourselves, and largely isolated from other business units, we have formed a self-reinforcing culture that normalizes, justifies, and encourages all of this.

Strippers have a dress code, of sorts. They want to be noticed. They want you to gawk at them. They want your attention focused on their strongest assets. Panties that glow under UV light. G-strings that curve over the top of their butts in just the right way to accentuate things. And, interestingly, they want to tell you a story before they’ve ever said a word: Badass biker chick. Femme fatale. Quirky pixie. Her chosen persona, made manifest.

Software engineers are no different, and it shows in how we dress.

Above all other things, we profess to be concerned with intelligence, skill, and accomplishment. We eschew anything that acts to confer or imply status while being disconnected from the reality of a person’s ability.

In short, we under-dress as a point of pride. This is so ingrained that we have even come to actively revile attempts by our peers at leveraging the dynamic wherein people measure one by one’s appearance. (See the part about where I said the culture is self-reinforcing.)

Until I saw a totally different world than this one I have been inured in for some 16 years, it just seemed entirely normal to me that I would sit across the table from men in expensive suits, while wearing t-shirt and jeans, and that I would be treated as an equal. I was intellectually aware of the pecking order, and posturing and whatnot, but in my mind, nothing trumped ability, and everything else was just noise at best – or, at worst, compensating for a lack thereof.

I was the king of the meeting, because I was more able than the others at the table, so it’s only natural that I would be respected. Software engineers are not generally known for being humble.

People Are People

I’ve learned something crucial at Mary’s – by watching the performers, and the audience, and the dynamic between them. People are people. These dynamics – these social constructs – aren’t as arbitrary as they may seem to be. They serve a purpose. This is obvious to any normal human being, but I’m a software engineer.

The plumage of the person at the meeting table is a proxy metric. It substitutes for information which is not immediately apparent, and is difficult or time-consuming to obtain. It is financial success as a bottom-line measure that rolls up all the other variables into one easy and obvious score that can be evaluated quickly and reliably.

If you are good at what you do (and thus, worth listening to), you are successful. If you are successful, you can afford to dress well. If you aren’t successful, you cannot. QED.

Yet, despite finally realizing this, I still dress down. You see, I am who I am. I am a part of my culture. It is an intrinsically blue-collar culture, strangely enough. It is us-versus-them. The hard-working wage-slave software engineers. We are the ones who “do” while those who cannot are relegated to management. See the part where I note that we’re viewed as reductive and myopic.

All the dynamics you expect from blue-collar workers tend to apply to software engineers, with the exception that we tend to be almost fanatically obsessive about our work. We are always working in one way or another. Even when we dabble in personal projects, this is merely ongoing education. Practice, for our real work.

As such, we get compartmentalized. Appeased. Managed.

When I am at the table in my t-shirt and jeans, it’s not that I am respected for my skill, despite my appearance – it’s that I am viewed as being “merely” an engineer. Good at what I do, and a necessary component of a successful venture, but not really a “whole” person. I am tolerated.

Absurdity, Distilled

So here I am, on a flight from dreary Portland to sunny Silicon Valley. I am headed to Sand Hill Road. If you’re unfamiliar with the tech world, Sand Hill Road is where the real “power” is. This is where the VCs hang out. If you’re an entrepreneur these are the mysterious, capricious, odd creatures by whom your company may live or die.

Can’t get funding? Your business will probably die. You might hit without funding, but the odds are very much against you. The better your idea is, the more pressure from competition will become a problem for you without resources to fight back.

Got funding? Your business may die. Or it may get screwed over by VCs who think they know how to run a business. It’s a wonder how these folks ever make money investing in startups, given how utterly clueless they are!

The reality of course is pretty different. VCs don’t tend to meddle when things are going well. When they do meddle, it’s because the company is pretty screwed to begin with, and their objective is not to improve the odds of success, it’s to mitigate their loss. Competing incentives appear as cluelessness to us outsiders.

Back to my flight. When I get off this plane, I will check into a hotel, and relax in preparation for a dog-and-pony show. I will be sitting across the table from a group of men who collectively have hundreds of millions of dollars in assets at their command. Their job is to decide who this money should go to. Whose ideas are the right thing at the right time with the right team and the right product and the right whatever other variable they think is important. Their job is to be good at weeding out the duds, all of whom have done their level-best to appear to be winners.

I will sit across the table from them, wearing a t-shirt and jeans with my fluorescent orange hair. I will be called upon by the CEO to say smart-sounding things on command, then return to silence. I will sit there and look pretty and in so doing, do my part to help convince them that we are a sound investment of some 10 million dollars.

There’s even a chance that my fluorescent orange hair will help our cause! It makes me look that much more like the “eccentric genius”. If I am that bold about flouting this key proxy metric, then I must be really smart. That is something that has value to my company, and thus may make the company more attractive.

I will sit across the table from men in $10,000 bespoke suits, and the more I flout this social norm, the better off we may be.

I never really considered just how truly absurd that is until now.