But You Did Not Persuade Me

For the most part, I don't disagree with Jeff Atwood's most recent post. On a factual level, he's correct. When coding, it's more important to market than to code. In fact, for anything you want to do, from plumbing to politics, it's more important to convince people that you do a good job than to do a good job.

But that's not a good thing. Everyone shouldn't have to be a marketer. Specialization is a powerful thing, and it'd be nice if that could be applied to marketing too.

I don't know how or even if such a change is possible. And I'll admit I'm biased by my sub-par social skills. But it still seems like something to strive for.

Also, I disagree with his interpretation of that scene. The unavoidable truth it exposes is that Idi Aman is crazy and incapable of recognizing good advice.

Cultural Invisibility

Have you ever noticed that your own culture is invisible to you?

I think the most obvious example of this is accent. When you hear someone with a different accent speak, you notice their accent. It sounds weird and different to you and you recognize it as an accent. But when you speak, or you hear someone with the same accent as you, you don't notice it. It just sounds like they're talking normally and it doesn't even register that that's an accent too. But it's not hard to realize that you do have an accent, you just don't notice it.

Pretty much every cultural trait is the same. Consider for example social signalling. When someone from a different social group than you signals something, it looks like a waste of money. When you do it, you don't even realize that's what you're doing.

Your culture is the baseline against which all others are judged. Anything that differs from your culture is weird and unusual. Anything that's the same is just the way things are supposed to be.