Ellen Ullman > Quotes

“We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“I fear for the world the Internet is creating. Before the advent of the web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. Physical reality—the discomfort and difficulty of abandoning one’s normal life—put a natural break on the formation of cults, separatist colonies, underground groups, apocalyptic churches, and extreme political parties.

But now, without leaving home, from the comfort of your easy chair, you can divorce yourself from the consensus on what constitutes “truth.” Each person can live in a private thought bubble, reading only those websites that reinforce his or her desired beliefs, joining only those online groups that give sustenance when the believer’s courage flags.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“The machine seemed to understand time and space, but it didn’t, not as we do. We are analog, fluid, swimming in a flowing sea of events, where one moment contains the next, is the next, since the notion of “moment” itself is the illusion. The machine—it—is digital, and digital is the decision to forget the idea of the infinitely moving wave, and just take snapshots, convincing yourself that if you take enough pictures, it won’t matter that you’ve left out the flowing, continuous aspect of things. You take the mimic for the thing mimicked and say, Good enough. But now I knew that between one pixel and the next—no matter how densely together you packed them—the world still existed, down to the finest grain of the stuff of the universe. And no matter how frequently that mouse located itself, sample after sample, snapshot after snapshot—here, now here, now here—something was always happening between the here’s. The mouse was still moving—was somewhere, but where? It couldn’t say. Time, invisible, was slipping through its digital now’s.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“But you can't stop knowing something, can you?”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Yet, when we allow complexity to be hidden and handled for us, we should at least notice what we are giving up. We risk becoming users of components, handlers of black boxes that do not open or don’t seem worth opening. We risk becoming people who cannot really fix things, who can only swap components, work with mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. But when something breaks or goes wrong or needs fundamental change, what will we do except stand helpless in the face of our own creations”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“In this privatized world, what sort of "cultural" conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except "Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I’m an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they sweated and tumbled while I sat with a cramped hand writing code. The couple went from gentle caresses to ever-widening passions, and I despaired as I tried desperately to find a way to express the act of love in the C computer language.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything?

Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“I’ve managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility. This humility is as mandatory as arrogance… There is only one way to deal with this humiliation: bow you head, let go of the idea that you know anything, and ask politely of this new machine “How do you wish to be operated?” If you accept your ignorance, once you really admit to yourself that everything you know is now useles, the new machine will be good to you and tell you: here is how to operate me.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“I had this idea we would have ordered some good champagne, launched toast after toast to our humanity, which after all had created everything: the opportunities for the bug, the bug itself, and its solution. I think now it might have changed us, softened our failures, made us feel we belonged to—had a true stake in—those lives full of code we had separately stumbled into. I like to think it would have reassured him, saved him: To know that at the heart of the problem was the ancient mystery of time. To discover that between the blinks of the machine’s shuttered eye—going on without pause or cease; simulated, imagined, but still not caught—was life.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“Do I have to recite any further risks you have taken? How much you have not conformed? How much internal bravery this implies?”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“I've managed to stay in a perpetual state of learning only by maintaining what I think of as a posture of ignorant humility.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents

“I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company. In exchange for large quantities of stock that might be worth something someday, I was supposed to give up my life.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“The therapist could not budge the patient from her syllogism. She replayed it throughout the hour, 'stuck in a single organization of events.' Seeing it from the other side (from behind the wall, as an observer), I understood the obsessive quality of such an attachment, something comforting in holding on to a smug, all-seeing knowledge, even a sad or hurtful one; something that let the patient control the precise amount of pain she administered to herself.”
― Ellen Ullman, By Blood

“I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“There, in that presumed paradise, the engineers were stranded in the company of an infantile mentality. They created artificial smartness, made a simulacrum of intelligence. But what they talked to all day was little more than a mechanism that read bits off a disk drive. If a comma in the code was out of place, it complained like a kid who won’t tolerate a pea touching the mashed potatoes. And, exhausted though the programmer may be, the machine was like an uncanny child that never got tired. There was Karl and the rest of the team, fitting the general definition of the modern software engineer: a man left alone all day with a cranky, illiterate thing, which he must somehow make grow up. It was an odd and satisfying gender revenge.

Is it any surprise that these isolated men need relief, seek company, hook up

This is not to say that women are not capable of engineering’s male-like isolation. Until I became a programmer, I didn’t thoroughly understand the usefulness of such isolation: the silence, the reduction of life to thought and form; for example, going off to a dark room to work on a program when relations with people get difficult. I’m perfectly capable of this isolation. I first noticed it during the visit of a particularly tiresome guest. All I could think was: There’s that bug waiting for me, I really should go find that bug.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“Meanwhile, the original programmers will have left, and their replacements -- believing they understand the code -- will make some truly spectacular errors, mistakes that will suddenly make everything completely stop working for a while. So that what had seemed to be a descending curve of bugs, a fall toward the ever-receding zero, will reveal itself as the shape of another equation altogether: a line of relentlessly rising, bug-counts climbing in an endless battle against infinity.”
― Ellen Ullman, The Bug

“Uber’s drivers are the R&D for Uber’s driverless future. They are spending their labor and capital investments (cars) on their own future unemployment.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

“There is a purpose of life in the nerd world, which is treating reality as code, and optimizing it. Life becomes a problem-solving activity, and the problem is some sort of lack of optimization.”
― Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents