Well the video crew somehow damaged the file of my speech, but I gave the keynote at Technical.ly’s annual Builders Conference back on May 8.
I published the themes on Technical.ly here, here and here. I wanted to share the full video here, but no luck. I do have my full notes below.
Here are my remarks.
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In July 1969, 650 million people — about 1 in 5 of humans alive on the planet — watched a live broadcast of a hunk of metal going into a controlled fall onto the moon’s surface. I’m going to tell you something you may not know about the moon landing, why most of our careers were made possible by it and how it’s all changing now.
Software engineering can claim many dates of origin. I prefer Sunday, July 20, 1969 at 4:14pm Eastern. That’s about when Margaret Hamilton’s phrase “software engineer” earned its permanence — even if it took another 50 years for her to get her due.
The term “engineer” has been used for hundreds of years. It shares roots with “invent” and “ingenious.” It’s always had prestigious connotation. In contrast, the modern usage of the word “software” dates just back to the 1950s.
It’s not a mistake so many women are linked to early coding — from its spiritual founding with Ada Lovelace to the pioneering supercomputing work by the ENIAC women like Kay McNulty to the modern processes set by Grace Hopper. Men had a funny way of focusing only on the machines. But machines got a lot more complicated after World War II. All that military-funded research and post-war peace fueled one of the most inventive periods in human history.
This gave us systems engineering, or stitching together many individual machines into a coherent, complex tool. Early coding in the 1950s and 1960s was an early part of this, writing rules and instructions for all these machines. But software was a kind of sub-field. Rather than software controlling hardware, all this code was seen as purely administrative. More like bookkeeping than world creating. Men thought all the power was in the machine, not the code.
Around the MIT-NASA offices, Margaret began bandying about the term software engineering — combining this emerging field with one of the most vaulted titles of the day. Those building the spacecraft and even many of her code-writing coworkers thought “software engineer” was something like an executive assistant calling himself a “Calendar Engineer.” All hat, no cowboy.
Today, software is the centerpiece of most of our careers. Margaret was among the first to see it. But it took three boys in a tin can running short of fuel streaming live to the world for software to set down the path that brings us here today. Funny, then, that so much is about to change.
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Hello there, I’m Christopher Wink. I’m the CEO and cofounder of Technically, the news organization with a community of technologists and entrepreneurs that organizes today’s conference. We’ll return to how software saved the moon landing in a moment.
First, though, welcome, to the Technically Builders Conference, which is dedicated to building better innovation ecosystems. You are entrepreneurs, team builders and economic & workforce development leaders. You make local economies more dynamic and inclusive across more than 20 US states and three countries. Today’s conference gathers you so you can do that better.
Today also supports the local journalism we produce at Technically, which is celebrating 15 years of publishing in 2024. We do that today with learning and tonight with a party: All proudly part of the 14th annual Philly Tech Week Presented by Comcast, which as you heard is this year produced with our partner 1Philadelphia, whom you’ll hear again from in a moment.
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But first, I want to introduce three themes for the day, which Margaret’s story helps illustrate.
- First, When you get comfortable with technology, it ceases to be technology.
- Second, Entrepreneurs need housing more than tax policy.
- Third, How you work will determine who will work.
First, Whenever you get comfortable with technology, it ceases to be technology.
Technology is an old word for describing what is new. The steam engine was called a technology. The telephone was called a technology. The washing machine was called a technology. Physical things.
Then Margaret spotted software, and the internet accelerated the language change. For a generation of us, the word “technology” is synonymous with software. When we said “tech companies”, we imagined cloud computing, ecommerce and social media; When we said “tech startups” we meant SaaS and mobile apps. When we said “tech workers,” we mostly meant software developers. That’s changing.
Besides the size of the federal spending over the last few years, what stands out is what we’re spending on: Building stuff.
The $50B CHIPS Act is subsidizing semiconductor plants in Arizona and Ohio. More than $62 million in Build Back Better funds are building out the robotics and autonomy cluster in western PA around Pittsburgh. Coalitions from Baltimore and Philadelphia are both finalists for $70M in EDA Tech Hubs funding for bids in biomanufacturing and precision medicine.
The outputs are intended to be semiconductor chips and robots and gene therapies. Physical things, not digital things.
That’s not to say software won’t be involved, of course it will be. It’s just that 55 years after Margaret Hamilton predicted it would take center stage, software is just kind of baked in now — a bit like washing machines and the telephone.
So, how big is the AI moment now? Despite what anyone on stage at TED might tell you, there are still roadblocks that could slow the progress of this generation of AI. There are limitations of data sources, copyright, regulation. But I still agree something has already changed.
In recent weeks, Technically hosted three dinners of our most recent RealLIST Startup founders: one in DC, one in Philadelphia and one in Pittsburgh. Between 30 entrepreneurs whose companies were three years or younger, most told us AI tools are part of why they plan to raise less outside financing and hire less than they would otherwise.
That view from the trenches matters because it’s harder to see at the enterprise level. I spoke last month to a lead AI engineer at a Fortune 50 retail company who was just given permission to use a software copilot. Legal is very concerned about who owns code suggested by a bot.
Technical.ly was given a preview of the internal results of what to date is likely one of the largest deployments of a software copilot within a single company. Across a sample of hundreds of developers, the large enterprise saw “a significant increase in coding speed” and “a significant increase in code quality.”
Does this mean we won’t need software developers any more?
Not necessarily. The Jevons Paradox shows that as energy gets more efficient we often use more of it — thereby increasing demand on the resource. For example, improved fuel efficiency standards for cars results in more driving. Does far more efficient coding mean we’ll need fewer software developers over time? Or will lower software costs increase demand for coding so much that new jobs will emerge? I’ll see you at the bar.
One thing we’re sure of is that for now: the machines need to be made by someone. That’s why we’re building stuff again.
Two, Entrepreneurs need housing more than offices or tax policy.
Entrepreneurs don’t choose places to start companies. Entrepreneurs choose places to live, and then start companies where they live.
The trouble is the competition for attracting new residents is getting fiercer.
For econ dev leaders, the obsession over Millennials in the 2010s was entirely rational. Regions and colleges and corporations fought over Millennials because there were boatloads of us. Our jeans may be too tight and we may overuse the tears-of-joy emoji, but we breathed life back into American cities. You’re welcome.
But, the Millennial dividend is over. We are mostly settled where we’re gonna settle. GenZ is more diverse but a far smaller generation than Millennials. Retaining college grads is still important but the gains will be smaller in the 2030s than in the 2020s and smaller in the 2020s than in the 2010s. We’re getting less juice from the squeeze.
So where will our entrepreneurs and tech workers come from?
Well, regions can poach from each other. That’s something. Two other tools we have.
The first is immigration. This won’t last forever, the global population is expected to decline by the year 2100. But for now the United States is still the most desired destination for would-be immigrants. Where are your region’s immigrants and why aren’t they a focus of your innovation strategy?
The second tool we have is your existing population. Develop more of your neighbors becoming the entrepreneurs and tech workers you desire. This includes older residents, poorer residents and even the ones in the deathly boring jobs. The apprenticeship is still underused in tech because it takes a daunting upfront investment.
As more of your residents opt for independent contractor work, your entrepreneurship and tech workforce strategies must merge.
What are the best tools to attract entrepreneurs and tech workers? Affordable living, better schools, great culture. Put simpler still: Making your city a great place to live.
Third, How you work will determine who will work.
Can the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund give $20k grants to business owners if only Black women are eligible?
Does that break the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits racial discrimination in private contracts? Or are those grants more similar to scholarships given to students of certain descent — Italian, say — and therefore protected by the First Amendment?
We’re going to find out soon: By summer we should know if cofounder and CEO Arian Simone has to halt her grant program while a trial plays out in federal court.
Technically has spoken off-record to organizers and funders that stopped entirely or shifted the language of programming that previously focused on Black people. Though they quietly continue their work the consensus has been to wait for the court case to play out.
But if we care about economic mobility, removing race as a socioeconomic predictor or simply having teams that reflect the communities we serve, there are steps that can continue.
Income-based programs and special preference for certain zip codes are legal — and because of twisted socioeconomic reasons — can disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic neighbors.
Alternately, run programs open to anyone but invest staff time and marketing resources to encourage and support participants from different backgrounds. Yes, that means race. But it ought to also mean older residents. Immigrants, and people from low wealth communities.
I regret to inform you that here I have to mention RTO, Return to Office.
So many women, especially Black women, started working for themselves in the pandemic so they could manage their time more independently than their employers allowed. So your work-from-home policy, pay transparency, frequency of late meetings and travel requirements all dictate what your employees will look like.
One last kind of representation we need to touch on: political. We’re in a presidential election year. You need a plan for whether or how you want workplace conversations on the matter.
One key bit of advice. Don’t ask someone “why” they believe something, which puts us on the defensive. Ask them “how” they came to believe something — make it about their personal story. Speaking of which..
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It is July 20 1969. Margaret Hamilton is 32-years-old. She is a working mother, with an advanced degree and a 9-year-old daughter. She is watching along with a good chunk of the entire world as a machine hovers.
Neil Armstrong is looking for a better place to make history. But fuel is running low, and the astronauts would like to keep enough around to get back home.
This is everything — it’s the most prominent display of applied science in human history. It’s a defining moment of the Cold War.
Three minutes to landing, hovering above the moon’s surface the astronauts turn on a series of systems to land. But something goes wrong. A switch was left on, and a radar was using more processing power than the spacecraft had available. An alarm goes off inside the cabin.
Imagine being 250,000 miles away from home. You’re just hundreds of feet from landing on the surface of the moon. And your machine is telling you that you can’t land, and that your fuel is low enough that if you don’t land you must leave now, or never make it home. For a moment, mission control is going to abort the whole mission.
But all those machines onboard the ship were not operating independently. They were part of a system. What helped link them was software, a still emerging practice that was such a new concept it wasn’t an independent field yet. A bit of code that Margaret Hamiton had recommended and wrote instructed the machines in a situation like this to prioritize only critical functions. Mission Control overrode the alarm and Neil, Buzz and Michael landed.
Margaret Hamilton’s case for “software engineering” as an independent field gets all its credibility in that moment.
The field of technology she helped name transformed the world over the next half-century, and now AI looms. She was only able to do the work because she could afford to live near MIT, and balance life with home. She was a tech worker turned entrepreneur. She started companies where she lived. In 2016, President Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
We can’t lose out on more Margaret Hamiltons. So I leave you my three themes:
- When you get comfortable with technology, it ceases to be technology.
- Entrepreneurs need housing more than tax policy.
- How you work will determine who will work.
A story is a simplified narrative that helps interpret the messy and complicated real world. Thanks for listening to mine. Welcome to the Technically Builders Conference.