23.10.2025 IfI Colloquium: Cocaine and Conway's Law: what young software engineers need to learn and how we should teach it
Speaker:
Dr. Greg Wilson, Software Engineering Manager, Plotly Inc., Canada
Date: Thursday, 23 October 2025, 17:15
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
Abstract
Most young programmers have only ever been exposed to one worldview: the toxic strain of neoliberal capitalism favored by venture capitalists and their gushing fans in the tech media. As a result, they don't have the intellectual tools to understand how tech contributes to climate change, widening inequality, the resurgence of racist nationalism, and a host of other problems.
Lots of books offer cogent answers to these questions, but very few programmers are going to read nine thousand pages on a whim. However, they might sit through a one-semester course that introduces a few fundamental ideas, including why "flat" organizations make power imbalances worse rather than better, why discrimination persists despite its economic inefficiency, how regulatory capture works, and what can we learn about big tech by studying drug cartels.
Bio
Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including "Beautiful Code", "The Architecture of Open Source Applications", and most recently "Software Design by Example". Greg is a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT's Influential Educator of the Year award, and currently works as a software engineering manager at Plotly.