I was excited and also humbled to be given the chance to deliver the closing keynote talk at PyOhio this year. You can see the video of that talk here. But a conversation afterward offered me a chance to reconsider and – hopefully – improve both myself and that talk for the future.
I set up a particular joke early in the talk: After establishing that “there really aren’t any poor technical choices”, I go on to qualify that statement with examples of demonstrably bad technical choices – things like not having backups, testing in production, etc. In that list I include the punchline:
Using Oracle for literally anything, ever.
Near the end of the talk I offer another list, this time technical decisions that sometimes leave us paralyzed with indecision. Near the end I ironically include the same line – “using Oracle for literally anything, ever”.
Both lines never fail to get a laugh from the audience. First, because any sufficiently large, complex, storied, and difficult to manage technology would fit the bill. I could have chosen from a range of programming languages, platforms, or solutions and gotten almost the same type of laugh. But second, because Oracle – the company, and certainly it’s CEO – have made itself an easy target.
And look, it’s a good joke, ok?
What I failed to consider is that plenty of thoughtful, dedicated, committed IT folks work with Oracle every day. Some might have had taken jobs that covered a wide range of solutions, Oracle included. And some might have seen where the money was – that internally the big projects and big funding was going to an Oracle-based project – and decided to go in that direction because of the potential for promotion, bonuses, and stability.
And in that moment, anyone in the audience who’d made that choice found themselves in an unintentional spotlight. Because, without my meaning to, I’d made them and their work the butt of a joke. At best, they now had to deal with folks winking at them and saying “using Oracle for literally anything, amirite?!?”. At worst, they had to explain why they had made a “poor technical choice”.
Moreover, unlike any of the other technologies I mention in that talk, I hadn’t offered an “out”. Every other poor technical choice is presented in a “That’s bad! No that’s good!” type of framing.
I wasn’t aware of any of this, although I’d given the talk several times, until someone at PyOhio stepped forward. Through the Code of Conduct grievance process (and massive props to the PyOhio team for having this process, and taking it seriously), they registered their discomfort, both in the moment and afterward. They related that, having built a career around their expertise with Oracle, they found themselves uncomfortable and conflicted about how to react during my talk. And after the talk was over they were uncertain about how (or whether) to mention their work to other attendees.
They asked the organizers to ask me to consider my talk in from their perspective, and reconsider how willing I was to put other people in the same situation, all for the sake of a momentary laugh.
It’s easy – too easy – to write off this one person as being overly sensitive, unable to take a joke, too self-absorbed or self-important to laugh at themselves. Upon even a moment’s reflection, it should be obvious that this would be both defensive and condescending. Who are we to normalize cruelty just or judge someone else’s response? “Nobody can take a joke any more.” Is (and, let’s be honest, always has been) the response of those who don’t want to bear responsibility for their words.
The truth is the person who filed the complaint is the epitome of bravery. It takes strength of character and conviction to stand up and tell someone that what they’re doing is wrong. I applaud anyone who takes that kind of risk. I’m deeply grateful to the person who did so in this case, even though I’ll never know their name.
SO… where does that leave me and my punchline? To be honest, I’m still not 100% sure. On the one hand, I could just modify the line to say “Oracle corporation”, separating the solution from the Law-firm-with-a-small-software-division that is the Oracle business. I could go searching from a different target that’s so old nobody would be offended – like Perl or XML. Or something that’s likely to be universally reviled – like Windows 8. Or I could cut the punchline out entirely. A conference talk doesn’t need to be a thinly veiled standup routine.
So I’m not sure of HOW it will change, but I’m absolutely certain that it WILL change. I was given feedback that was specific, personal, and urgent. To ignore it would be more than just a poor technical choice. It would be a poor choice as a human being.
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