Common Sense
Frightens us. Which is why we made lawyers. That requires some unpacking. As I understand it the idea of the Law is to remove uncertainty, to rely not so much on logic as the past, precedent, rules. The rules may not make any sense, but at least they’re rules; lawyers understand that. That philosophy extends to language, which is why it takes so much paper to say anything in lawyer. I’m not just buying a car from you; I’m buying this exact car from a very specific you and I need to be an exact and specific me to do so. It you think that’s bad remember the last time you tried to buy ‘real’ property; how many lawyers were in the room at the closing?
But with out the law all we have is common sense and a handshake. What gives rise to this meditation is that our group is in the midst of a couple of job searches and we’re being reminded that we can’t ask about things that “…don’t directly relate to the ‘professional duties’.” Professional duties being a lot more definitive that ‘the job’. The thing is that there’s more to the job than just writing code; they have to write code that people will use. The implication of that being that they might need to know something about what, how, and why people do things, and to find that out they might actually need to talk to people, relate. That being the case it might help me to evaluate their ‘professional competencies’ if I knew what books they read, or if they read, and how they handle embarrassing questions. None of which is permitted. If you think through the logic of avoiding lawsuits the search committee members should be blindfolded, the candidates voices machine processed to a bland neutrality, and a standard set of questions imposed. That way we would be more or less guaranteed the best selection; best meaning normal, average, which I assume would culturally mean a heterosexual white male between the ages of 26 and 45. Personally I’d rather work with a gay girl who keeps iguanas, I’m pretty sure it would be more interesting and probably productive, but it’s been pointed out that I occasionally lack a certain professionalism.
