Guilty. Trying to do better.

Via Nat Torkington’s Four Short Links column, today I read Contempt Culture.

I’m ashamed to say that too much of it rang true. Less so on the language side - there’s some PHP-bashing in the Liverpool tech community, but personally at least, I’m language-agnostic enough that my general take is to use whichever language best suits your needs. I think people should generally be heading away from PHP for new developments, but beyond that any of Ruby/Python/Node JS work for most applications. Each have their niches to which they’re better suited, but availability of developers and your existing knowledge of the language are equally important factors in that choice.

I think my unthinking contempt comes across in my lament of there not being enough “proper tech firms” in the area. The problem isn’t with the agencies or firms using software/the ‘Net to enable them to build better businesses, it’s just tricky to pin down exactly what I mean and a disdain for agencies, etc. is a lazy shorthand because I can’t express things properly.

I want there to be more people in the community doing interesting work in tech, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, or at least keeping up with where the boundaries are. I want more people in strategy meetings with the council and the LEP to be proposing projects that show they understand the real possibilities of digital.

What I want is to raise the level of ambition in Liverpool’s tech and digital community. That will make it harder for some of the companies to put out a perfectly-passable app and laud it as ground-breaking innovation. It’s not about making their lives harder, it’s about recognising that the really exciting work is harder than that and building a community that rewards technical talent rather than marketing talent. Successful businesses do need marketing and sales, but to compete in a global marketplace that needs to be built on a foundation of solid tech.

We aren’t going to attract the best technologists to the city if we’re showcasing run-of-the-mill companies. We need to find ways to help the existing companies get better, help us good technologists (he says snobbishly assuming he’s one of them) find each other, and educate the support organisations (including the council, LEP, etc.) to recognise good tech over good bullshit (to pick extremes).

And I’m going to try to be less down on agencies and to continue to strive for better ways to explain what I really mean.