[jblow]

I have no objection to the actual existence of the article. I just think it's important for people to understand this fact, that seems to be increasingly misunderstood these days, that "technology" is about expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. Just because someone types program-like things into a computer doesn't mean what he is typing is technology.

If the defining property of your activity is that you are trying to negotiate messes that other people have made in order to make things happen, where the things you are making happen are not novel in themselves, that is pretty much what working in a bureaucracy is like. So you can think of it as "working in a vast decentralized computer bureaucracy" rather than "working in tech".

[dariusk]

Last I checked, science -- not technology -- is about expanding the frontiers of human knowledge. Technology is the reification and application of that knowledge: necessarily a messy thing.

[Kiro]

That's your definition of technology. I don't share it.

[dariusk]

I actually really appreciate your comment about bureaucracy The main difference on my end is that I believe "working in a vast decentralized computer bureaucracy" is completely analogous to "working in tech" whether you like it or not. Bruno Latour's book Aramis is a case study in this idea. Brief review of that book here:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~tmisa/reviews/Latour_Aramis.pdf

Any technologist who believes they're not working in a vast bureaucracy (both of the political kind and the technology itself) is not paying enough attention.

[SvenBergstrom]

I think I will simply take his comment as a generalisation. The semantics from the dictionary simply state the application of science is technology. i.e Computer science applied, is technology.

I agree whole heartedly, learning the science is key.

[slurgfest]

How do you propose to make web games? Flash? Read Knuth and then use Flash? Abandon web games because it's too messy for you? Please be more specific about what you propose instead.

[jblow]

If you want to make web games, make web games. That's fine. Just don't be deluded that this is "working in tech". It is not.

[meric]

I agree. It's engineering. There's a difference between launching a spacecraft and use it to do something no one has done before and building a 50km long bridge. Both are incredibly hard and expensive, but one of them is "only" engineering, the other has science as well.

There's no such thing as working in "tech". You are always working in "tech", whether it is using Excel or WebGL. When newspapers call the latter "tech", what they really mean is "new tech".

Programming a 3D multiplayer game in a browser is a re-combination of existing technologies, and therefore not "new tech". (Though of course, new, compared to Excel, but only by a few years.)

[nightski]

It sure as hell is. You have just chosen a definition of technology that differs from the rest of the world.