The User and the Engineer
The User and the Engineer
December 1, 2011

Out of all the relationships humans have had with each other over the millennia, the engineer-to-user relationship is one of the newest, both in concept and in scale. These days, a single engineer has the capacity to have this relationship with hundreds of millions of people. This massive scale of person-to-person relationship used to be the sole reserve of people like Jesus. 

What this relationship has in scale, it lacks in dimension. A user, to an engineer, is a dumb, erratic source of input. The engineer is more like a babysitter than anything else - you, the engineer, are responsible for the well-being and delight of all your users, and they, those innocent users, owe you nothing.

It's not very fulfilling. It's why we, as engineers, have started treating users as quite subhuman. They've become points - feathers in our caps - as opposed to human beings. (1) Our relationships to our users are largely ones of victory, and not of love, or understanding, or whatever else human relationships are made of.

We can contrast this with the relationships authors have to their readers, or musicians have to their fans; the ones that chefs have to their patrons, teachers have to their students, or rabbis have to their congregations. I will stop short of saying that these jobs are the best in the world, but the human relationships they cultivate have to be among the most substantial.

Startup folk like to think they have the best jobs in the world. "We're our own bosses," we tout. "We've got passion, and we're builders," we say. And we're largely convinced that this is what makes our jobs the most satisfying of them all, and we pity anyone who does anything else. (2)

It's not entirely misguided. I sleep well at night knowing that I can wake up the next day and build absolutely anything I want. But I can't shake the feeling that building tools will not sustain me for very long. If I woke up tomorrow and I had ten million users, what would it do for me? It would feed my ego for a while, and it could make me very rich. But I'd grow out of both of those eventually.

I want to find the balance. I want it all. I want to disrupt industries and build great things. I want users, lots of users. I want to delight them all, and I'll stay hungry until I find a way for them to delight me in return. (3)

 
1. We all know, by now, that money doesn't buy happiness. But if you replace "money" with "users", you see some pretty dashing parallels - including the fact that both are relentlessly pursued in massive quantities by many driven folks. 2. Keep in mind that the modern youth startup movement is largely a reactionary institution, a rebellion of smart kids against the monoliths and cubicle farms who would have otherwise shackled them if they'd been born a decade earlier. Startups are a better answer, but when all the old companies die of disruption, what will take their place? A bunch of newer, more efficient companies who nonetheless consider the rest of humanity the same way as did their forebears - as common users. 3. To this effect, I've met some success. At Rutgers, you can't register for a class if it's currently filled up. So, I built the Schedule Sniper, which allows users to give input phone number and desired class; then, I scrape the course listing site every couple hours to see if that class is open. If it is, I send the user a text. The user then has the opportunity to respond back with a review, which captures their moment of ecstasy and undying adulation to I, the all-knowing, all-merciful bestower of wisdom. I post these reviews on the site, and it makes me feel fucking awesome.