Doing tech (framework, questions)
I think often of the practice of doing tech. What are the norms? What is allowed? What is venerated? What is looked down upon? What are we conscious to? What are we working towards? What are we calling design this week?
There is the practice, the actual thing, and then there is all of the stuff around the thing. Vibes, power, resources, spaceholding. I care way more about that stuff than I do the actual practice by this point. The practice is evergreen. I have learned it. There’s not much more to learn by this point. Doing tech, on the other hand, is mutable. It has changed so much over the years. And I believe that understanding its contours is essential to the core of consultative work & value generation.
Put more bluntly, I believe I will have a job in the future based on my ongoing understanding of what it means to do tech.
First, it’s important to outline what doing tech is not.
Doing tech is not the ability to follow micro-trends or pursue any specific micro-trend, such as crypto or machine learning. You may become well-known for that trend, and then in two years… what, exactly?
Doing tech is not the ability to consult or charge more. Everybody wants to do this, but charging more is the result of doing tech appropriately, not the cause.
Doing tech is not the ability to do your specific job. It is more general, rooted in the broader system.
Doing tech is not the ability to hold a good meeting, although meetings are perhaps the most misunderstood & high-leverage part of knowledge work, and they are worthy of deep independent study.
Then what is doing tech?
Doing tech is the ability to read the room, writ small & large. You need to know how to hold the energy of a meeting and you need to understand the specific structural ways in which your work is valued.
Doing tech is a clear-eyed assessment of the long-term value of a technology. Tech loves to chase hyperbole, embracing a religious fervor for the next great thing, believing that their solution is superior to whatever it is you’re doing. Doing tech involves understanding what new developments are worth incorporating into your practice, and it is necessary to default to “no” when doing so. The iPhone was truly revolutionary, representing a generational shift in what is possible. Contemporary trends are usually not.
Doing tech requires understanding the consequences of technological decisions. Your decisions have an impact on the world. Nothing you build, ever, lacks consequence. People perceive it, use it, incorporate it into their lives. Doing tech involves asking the question “what do we think will happen?”
Relatedly, doing tech involves the humility to understand what to do when we don’t have an answer to this question. The answer, of course, is to follow a process for deeper understanding. We must answer this question with as much confidence as we can muster, and we must have the grace to accept when the pace we desire is not in alignment with the answer we seek. This is a slowness, a way of moving with intention.
Doing tech involves an acceptance of pace. Things break; strategies falter; setbacks always occur. The pressure that exists on “growth” is arbitrary & irrelevant, usually the result of outside interests that pollute the practice.
These are some of the things that I’ve come to realize in 20 years of doing tech. I imagine it’s an incomplete list, and you may be able to fill in some gaps for me. What does doing tech mean to you?