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ILLUSTRATION BY
SCOTT LAUMANN

All titles may not be
immediately available.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS TO KEEP UP WITH
EVERY NEW TECHNO-TREND EVEN WHEN THEY'RE EAGER AND
WILLING. BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY START TO DESPAIR?

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This is the second of two excerpts in Salon 21st from Ellen Ullman's new book, "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents" (City Lights Books, $21.95, 189 pages), an autobiographical exploration of the lives and minds of software engineers.

It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears -- the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism -- there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. Still, I didn't expect it so soon. And not there: not at the AIDS project I'd been developing, where I fancied myself the very deliverer of high technology to the masses.

It happened in the way of all true-life humiliations: when you think you're better than the people around you. I had decided to leave the project; I agreed to help find another consultant, train another team. There I was, finding my own replacement. I called a woman I thought was capable, experienced -- and my junior. I thought I was doing her a favor; I thought she should be grateful.

She arrived with an entourage of eight, a group she had described on the telephone as "Internet heavy-hitters from Palo Alto." They were all in their early 30s. The men had excellent briefcases, wore beautiful suits, and each breast pocket bulged ever so slightly with what was later revealed to be a tiny, exquisite cellular phone. One young man was so blonde, so pale-eyed, so perfectly white, he seemed to have stepped out of a propaganda film for National Socialism. Next to him was a woman with blonde frosted hair, chunky real-gold bracelets, red nails, and a short skirt, whom I took for a marketing type; she turned out to be in charge of "physical network configuration." This group strutted in with all the fresh-faced drive of techno-capitalism, took their seats beneath the AIDS prevention posters ("Warriors wear shields with men and women!" "I take this condom everywhere I bring my penis!"), and began their sales presentation.

They were pushing an intranet. This is a system using all the tools of the Internet -- Web browser, net server -- but on a private network. It is all the rage, it is cool, it is what everyone is talking about. It is the future and, as the woman leading the group made clear, what I have been doing is the past. "An old-style enterprise system" is what she called the application as I had built it, "a classic."

My client was immediately awed by their wealth, stunned silent by their self-assurance. The last interviewee had been a nervous man in an ill-fitting suit, shirt washed but not quite ironed, collar crumpled over shiny polyester tie. Now here came these smooth new visitors, with their "physical network configuration" specialist, their security expert, their application designer, and their "technology paradigm." And they came with an attitude -- the AIDS project would be lucky to have them.

It was not only their youth and high-IQ arrogance that bothered me. It wasn't just their unbelievable condescension ("For your edification, ma'am," said one slouch-suited young man by way of beginning an answer to one of my questions). No, this was common enough. I'd seen it all before, everywhere, and I'd see it again in the next software engineer I'd meet. What bothered me was just that: the ordinariness of it. From the hostile scowl of my own programmer to the hard-driving egos of these "Internet heavy-hitters": normal as pie. There they were on the cutting edge of our profession, and their arrogance was as natural as breathing. And in those slow moments while their vision of the future application was sketched across the white boards -- intranet, Internet, cool, hip, and happening -- I knew I had utterly and completely lost that arrogance in myself.

I missed it. Suddenly and inexplicably, I wanted my arrogance back. I wanted to go back to the time when I thought that, if I tinkered a bit, I could make anything work. That I could learn anything, in no time, and be good at it. The arrogance is a job requirement. It is the confidence-builder that lets you keep walking toward the thin cutting edge. It's what lets you forget that your knowledge will be old in a year, you've never seen this new technology before, you have only a dim understanding of what you're doing, but -- hey, this is fun -- and who cares since you'll figure it all out somehow.

But the voice that came out of me was not having fun.

"These intranet tools aren't proven," I found myself saying. "They're all release 1.0 -- if that. Most are in beta test. And how long have you been doing this? What -- under a year? Exactly how many intranets have you implemented successfully?"

My objections were real. The whole idea wasn't a year old. The tools weren't proven. New versions of everything were being released almost as we spoke. And these heavy-hitters had maybe done one complete intranet job before this -- maybe. But in the past none of this would have bothered me. I would have seen it as part of the usual engineering trade-offs, get something, give up something else. And the lure of the new would have been irresistible: the next cover to take off, the next black box to open.

But now, no. I didn't want to take off any covers. I didn't want to confront any more unknowns. I simply felt exhausted. I didn't want to learn the intranet, I wanted it to be a bad idea, and I wanted it all just to go away. "And what about network traffic?" I asked. "Won't this generate a lot of network traffic? Aren't you optimizing for the wrong resource? I mean, memory and disk on the desktop are cheap, but the network bandwidth is still scarce and expensive."

More good objections, more justifications for exhaustion.

"And intranets are good when the content changes frequently -- catalogs, news, that kind of stuff. This is a stable application. The dataset won't change but once a year."

Oh, Ellen, I was thinking, What a great fake you are. I was thinking this because, even as I was raising such excellent issues, I knew it was all beside the point. What I was really thinking was: I have never written an intranet program in my life, I have never hacked on one, I have never even seen one. What I was really feeling was panic.

I'd seen other old programmers act like this, get obstructionist and hostile in the face of their new-found obsolescence, and there I was, practically growing an old guy's gut on the spot. But the role had a certain momentum, and once I'd stepped on the path of the old programmer, there seemed to be no way back. "And what happens after you leave?" I asked. "There just aren't that many intranet experts out there. And they're expensive. Do you really think this technology is appropriate for this client?"

"Well," answered the woman I'd invited, the one I'd thought of as my junior, the one I was doing a favor, "you know, there are the usual engineering trade-offs."

Engineering trade-offs. Right answer. Just what I would have said once.

"And besides," said the woman surrounded by her Internet heavy-hitters, "like it or not, this is what will be happening in the future."

The future. Right again. The new: irresistible, like it or not.

But I didn't like it. I was parting ways with it. And exactly at that moment, I had a glimpse of the great, elusive cutting edge of technology. I was surprised to see that it looked like a giant cosmic Frisbee. It was yellow, rotating at a great rate, and was slicing off into the universe, away from me.