We learn software engineering through esoteric transmission

A few weeks ago, after seeing a particularly rancid take on Bluesky, I wrote to the noted philosopher Liam Kofi Bright and asked for some advice as to reconciling what I felt was an unreconcilable conflict in the discourse around racism and transphobia online. Liam was kind enough to send back (among other good advice) a link to his paper on white psychodrama. It's an excellent paper, and I highly recommend that everyone read it, but the broad sweep of it is that much of the current culture war struggle around racism is a result of psychodrama being played out between white people, with a certain number of PoC intellectuals aiming to cash in on the fight. The contention is that this makes everyone involved in it worse, and that people of colour should aim to be non-aligned, by which it's meant that we (in the sense that I'm dealing with a related but non-identical psychodrama, not in the sense that I'm a person of colour) should cultivate a certain detachment from the culture war and instead aim to make real, material changes to the parts of society that we can in order to address the underlying material imbalance that causes the psychodrama. An excellent analysis on the whole, and I'm working on adapting it to the trans situation (the broad strokes of the argument are that while the White psychodrama is a novel by Dostoevsky, the Cis psychodrama is more akin to Lovecraftian horror).

What I found particularly interesting about this interaction was just how effective it was in changing my perception of the issue and my behaviour downstream of it. I have historically had a bad habit of getting quite upset about political posturing, especially around issues of gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, that I felt were unproductive or contextually wrong: "white trans woman" discourse in the US is a prototypical example of this. However, I never new quite how to respond or process this, and consequently had a terrible habit of getting tangled in a spiral where I massively overthought what was written and tried desperately to rationalise it, upsetting myself quite a lot in the process. Being able to see discourse like that as psychodrama has basically solved this problem. I'll still get a little upset, but being able to say "this is psychodrama¹" and detach what's being said from the material elements of the underlying oppression helps a lot. When you realise that a lot of discourse and unpleasant/uncomfortable behaviour comes from the position of a narrative being acted out more than from material reality, it's much easier to treat these engagements with grace and respect and take what's valuable from them without getting attached or drawn in. You can maintain non-alignment much more easily, and are free to act in ways that might actually bring material liberation for yourself and others. In short, this worked.

This leads to the question: would this have been as effective if I'd simply read the article rather than directly asking Liam for advice and getting a response? I don't believe so. Short as the exchange was, there are a number of elements that would have been lacking had I come across the document on my own. The first point is applicability: the article is written in the context of racial politics in the USA, and it's not clear from the outset that this can be applied to my situation as a whitish trans woman living in Aotearoa. Had I read the document by myself, I might have attempted to apply the position of non-alignment to my own life, possibly even with some success, but creeping doubts as to applicability would always be there. Being told directly that this is applicable to my situation and that I can thus practice non-alignment with confidence makes being able to do it that much more effective. Secondly, I was able to ask Liam questions, even if they were incoherent and came from a slightly strange perspective, and I was able to get confirmation that I was on the right path, or at least a correct path. Finally, direct interaction means that I could get knowledge or information directly applicable to me: without Liam's help, I might not even have found the article in the first place. All of these things, to my mind, made the knowledge imparted much more effective that it would have been had I happened on in by myself.

I've had similar experiences in my profession, which has variously included mathematics, statistics, physics and software engineering (I'm probably the weakest in physics, despite this being what I formally studied). Jesse Alford and Nat Bennett of the Pivotal lineage, Bernardo Stein of the AWS lineage and Ash Lally and Stefan Prandl of the Envato and Hyprfire lineages respectively have had a similar, though much more extensive, effect on my technical practice to the effect that Liam has had on my political thought. Again, similar themes come to being: knowing where to look and what to try, questions of applicability and confirmation that one is on a correct path are all massive advantages of practicing with people whom you admire and look up to. Exposure to, being able to work with and the ability to ask questions of these masters of the art have led to me becoming a much better engineer than I was previously in the course of just over a year.

All this, in short, leads to a singular conclusion: developing true mastery of any discipline requires working with an established master of the discipline in a direct, personal way.

Why do we need a teacher?

A few notes before I begin: firstly, this is not necessarily applicable to the early stages of mastering a discipline. In general, while a teacher is a useful aid to learning, the early stages of learning focus on developing the basis for mastery rather than mastery in itself. You can do well to develop the basics of software engineering practice or certain types of Buddhist practice on your own, for example: it'll go faster with a teacher, and you'll make fewer messy mistakes than you might when learning on your own, but you can go without. This is aimed at people who've built a basic level of competence and wish to build true mastery. Secondly, the figure of the teacher can be dangerous: this involves identifying with the teacher and their way of seeing the world more than a simple student-teacher relationship involves, and if the teacher is morally corrupt in some way, you put yourself at risk of significant damage. There is, after all, a reason why the evil monk is a stereotype in Wuxia, and why so many supposed gurus get caught out doing some pretty awful shit. So, if you are to choose a teacher, choose them very, very carefully, and do not let go of your common sense. Also, don't fuck them. Jesus.

I will note, however, that a large part of the way that teacher-student relationships like this become damaging in the first place is by the position our societies generally hold that they shouldn't exist at all, and that all learning should be broadly institutional. This means that any question of right conduct or good or bad teachers is endlessly deferred or not spoken of, because, after all, these kinds of relationships shouldn't exist at all. There are few good outcomes from this: the best case situation, really, is that people who would benefit from a relationship with a teacher don't seek one out, and consequently learn much more slowly than they otherwise might, or don't learn at all. The worst case is that people seek out a relationship with a teacher anyway, that relationship turns out to be abusive (we see this everywhere from cults to martial arts gyms to PhD supervisors), and then can't get support because society blames them for being stupid enough to get caught up in this (I've narrowly avoided this trap myself).

That said, there are four major points where the presence of a teacher is indispensable to the development of mastery yourself. While I'd not wish to say that it's impossible to develop mastery or resolve these points without the presence of a teacher, the teacher makes these much, much easier. This is for the simple reason that we tend to be stuck in our own heads a lot of the time. An external view from someone who's gotten to where you want to go is thus very useful for unblocking issues that you might have. You might aim to learn how to see yourself from a third-person perspective and unblock yourself that way, but that is in itself a serious discipline requiring the development of important skills and probably the intervention of a teacher, leading us back to our original state.

The first point is direction-setting. The early stages of development in a discipline are usually fairly linear and narrow: with software engineering, for example, you can step through the concepts of variables, conditionals and loops in some kind of order, and get to a point of being able to build a program in some reasonable way. This is all well and good, but as you gain in knowledge and grow towards the journeywoman phase of your mastery, the space of possibilities explodes, and it's simply impossible for a person with normal human capacity. The teacher, having achieved mastery himself and having at least a surface knowledge of what other teachers are capable of, knows the possibilities of directions for growth and knowledge, and importantly, has eliminated many of the false or unproductive paths that exist (such as Microsoft Copilot). A teachers can thus direct you towards productive paths for your development and help you grow in ways that are useful to you, rather than you trying to make your way through the morass on your own.

The second point is permission (what I discuss in terms of applicability above). Even when you find the correct resources, it's not uncommon to find yourself mentally blocked from understanding or apprehending them properly. This is for a number of reasons: in the common social soup that we inhabit, disciplines are often deliberately mystified or made to seem more complex than they actually are. Part of this is the usual mystique that builds up around any serious discipline: mathematics, physics philosophy and Buddhism all take serious effort to master, and they're deeply useful both to the people who practice them and to the world, so laypeople who don't understand how the thing is done will naturally build a folk mythology around it. This is only made worse by the consistent presence of false masters, gurus and other frauds who make use of this mythology in order to defraud people. Secondly, our society is amazing at teaching incapacity: it starts with our parents and our schools, and keeps going from there. Incapacity is seen as the base, ordinary state, and capacity, in a hundred little ways is seen as you getting above yourself. When faced with a real skill or discipline, therefore, there can be a fear that you can't do this or that you're not allowed to take it up. The teacher, in this context, gives you permission to take up the skill or the discipline, confirming that you can do it, that you're capable of it and that you're ready for it. For my part, this had a large part to play in my finally learning Terraform (or, well, OpenTofu): the Pivots gave me the confidence that I could learn it and that I was capable of doing so. The relative freedom from self-doubt or ego that the presence of a Master provides is really useful for this, as it allows you to do things that might otherwise stop you.

Confirmation is the third point, and it's one of vital importance, particularly when you've developed a meaningful level of skill and capacity in a given discipline. For someone with a fair degree of capacity, knowing when we're doing something wrong is pretty easy. We can tell when a program or a configuration looks ugly or wrong, and we have enough sense of our own ignorance to know that we're missing other things that could also be wrong or faulty. Naturally, it's easy for us, in the middle to late stages of being a journeywoman in a given craft, to overcorrect and become fearful that everything we're doing is wrong or flawed. The role of the teacher is then to tell us what we're doing right, what about our work is good and on the correct track, and even, towards the later stages of the journeywoman phase, where we begin to surpass the teacher in certain areas. This is important to mastery, as true mastery comes with effortlessness and confidence, and it's almost impossible, in my experience, to develop this without external confirmation. I'm sure some people have, but the main failure mode here is that you work hard on building confidence as opposed to building skill or mastery, and thus wind up overconfident, destructive and honestly, probably still not secure in yourself despite everything. BigBalls and his ilk are an excellent example of what this looks like: it's māyā in the worst sense of the word. External confirmation of confidence, by contrast, is more likely to come with humility, compassion and humanity in general. Even before mastery becomes a consideration in the fullest sense of the term, knowing what to avoid doesn't help you develop or learn. You can write the cleanest code ever, and yet without knowing what about it was good and in what directions you can extend the good in it, you will not be able to progress. A teacher can encourage you to develop your skills in ways that align with your talents and natural inclinations, and help you become the most masterful, liberated and true version of yourself.

Finally, a teacher is a clear example that what you seek is possible: mastery, effortlessness and an ability to bring your skills and abilities to the world in a light, liberated way. When trying to seek mastery on your own, you're working in darkness, trying to feel your way towards something that you know should exist but that you can't entirely find. Being able to see that it's possible and that other people have already done it makes the path that much clearer. To this extent, failings and differences of opinion with the teacher are actually good things: they show that flawed humans with failings and pasts can do what you wish to do, and that you do not need to aspire to some hypothetical perfection to achieve it.

Of course, humans have been doing human things for thousands upon thousands of years, which suggests that what I've described is not a new idea. So, where did it come from?

Tantra, Dzogchen and esoteric transmission

Many of the ideas I've discussed here around mastery and capability are expressed clearly in the schools of Tantra and Dzogchen in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. While describing the schools fully would take a lot of words and a lot of experience that I simply don't have, we can delineate some basic principles. While mainstream Buddhism usually focuses on developing an awareness of emptiness or non-being, with an awareness of and revulsion for the suffering that material reality causes being a baseline requirement, Tantra aims to move from an awareness of emptiness to an understanding of non-duality: the idea that Nirvana and Samsara are not different things or in opposition to each other, and consequently the idea that there is not really a way of escaping the world, for better or worse. The aim, therefore, becomes to transform negative emotions and experiences into something positive and useful rather than to simply detach, and to develop an attitude of spaciousness and effortless mastery, with a mind to solving practical problems and developing practical power. It is, in short, a practice ideally suited to the practice of engineering.

I will note that, due to my above noted lack of experience with the tradition, I can't speak to the details of the practices themselves. However, what we can speak about is the externally observable practices of teaching and learning, and that still brings us considerable value.

The relevant point is that Vajrayana practice heavily emphasises practices such as abhiṣeka or wang, depending on whether you prefer Sanskrit or Tibetan. The idea here is that even if you read about or find out about a given teaching, it's no good to you unless you're ritually empowered to understand it by someone who understands the teaching already: they are, in the phrase used by teachers, "self-secret". Similarly, the practice exists of "pointing-out instruction", where a lama simply points out to the students what the nature of mind is.

Obviously, one shouldn't buy in to the idea that there's some specific supernatural phenomenon going on here: in fact, I imagine that a whole lot of Buddhist teachers would find that idea a little weird. The fact, however, is that for a lot of us who've mastered something hard, this kind of experience of bringing unconscious knowledge consciously into the forefront of one's mind by having it pointed out to you by a teacher whom you trust is absolutely a thing that happens: often quite a lot. In short, direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student in a way that can seem pretty magical is a thing, and it's an important thing if you want people who are genuinely really fucking good at what they do. Moreover, pretending that it isn't is almost certainly fucking up our ability to teach people: it turns teaching into a mechanistic kind of thing that you can force with sufficient worksheets and teachers that have been flattened by bureaucracy into apparatchiks with little flexibility or freedom. We simply aren't going to get seriously talented people this way².

What we can take from this, as well as the earlier notes which interact with the existence of this phenomenon, is that as students, we often don't know what we know. The presumption, therefore, is that our understanding is lacking and that we need to put effort into understanding. Mastery, by contrast, is associated with real confidence (not the false kind that we see everywhere, which is associated more with deep insecurity than anything), lightness, spaciousness and effortlessness; all important virtues in Buddhist Tantra. And it's very, very difficult to go from mere competence to mastery without the intervention of a teacher. This isn't supernatural either: without a teacher to tell you that you're doing the right thing or that you're capable of doing the right thing (to empower you, as it were), even when you master the skill, you still find yourself wracked by self-doubt, preventing you from developing the effortlessness needed to truly master a field. Having that confidence without a teacher empowering you is even more dangerous: while a teacher can look for signs of falseness and insecurity, those are things that are a lot harder to see inside yourself, and can lead to things like our current epidemic of vibe coders. Confidence in your mastery, in general, comes from a teacher confirming it.

We now have a decent model of how the presence of a teacher in learning is indispensable to developing true mastery. The question then becomes: knowing this, how do we apply it?

Technical mastery

There's not much to be said about applying these insights on an individual level beyond "find a teacher whom you like and respect, and learn from them."³ Structurally, however, the tech industry does not support this kind of teaching relationship anywhere near as much as we should. What, then, can we do to encourage more teaching and learning of this kind in the tech industry?

I will note ahead of time that many of the best tech people I know already register that this is needed. An awful lot of us practice things like meditation and martial arts: discipline where mastery is at play and where learning from a teacher is indispensable. This has been a noticeable pattern for a long time: it shows up in a lot of Eric Raymond's writing, for example. The idea, therefore, is hardly alien to the technical mind.

First and foremost, we need to register the genuine power and mastery that truly great engineers have. Our institutions, and particularly the companies that most of us work in, tend to de-emphasise engineering skill in favour of managerialism, and love making out that engineers don't really harbour much in the way of skill or power at all. The first step, therefore, is recognising that our teachers have a level of mastery that the student doesn't. Given that I somehow doubt that institutions will do this willingly, we need to step outside of the institutional structure to do it. Buddhist Tantra is an excellent example of how this might be done: it is, in a sense, a fusion of marginal and aristocratic practices, and is wholly opposed to the middle-class values that dominate our industry. It's considered dangerous, outside the pale, outrageous and over-the-top. We need to match that energy, and as we hardly have people in our society that can be considered aristocratic⁴, the best way to to do this is to lean into the marginal aspects of it. The trans girl programmer, in this light, is the engineering version of a Dakini, a flesh-eating witch who cultivates power and who originally taught Tantra to the first practitioners. While we should probably avoid cannibalism, we might certainly benefit from making learning the deep magic of software seem a little sexy, a little secret, a little transgressive. Among other things, that lets student and teacher get into the right kind of mindset. maia arson crimew is an excellent example of one kind of vibe that we can channel: there will be others as well.

On a structural level, we really need to de-regiment our places of work and learning. As is, everything is too structured and institutionalised for real insight to occur: most real insight happens in informal interactions, when trying out weird shit and kind of just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, then talking about it with your teacher. There is less than no space for that in most places. While I can't imagine that most places of work will go along with this, we need to free space in our calendars for deliberate practice: setting aside one day a week to practice and upskill with other engineers (project management and whatever other horseshit comes up in corporate spaces doesn't count here), along with deliberate week-long retreats to get good at coding would be an excellent start. Importantly, this has to be about those engineers with power and mastery that we spoke about earlier: neutered versions of the practice that are corporate-friendly are not going to work, and you need genuinely world-class people to make it effective. We also need to make spaces during the day for people to investigate, talk to each other and try and work things out: when the focus is too much on shitting out code in volume, there's no space to learn anything.

While I'm not much of a person for renunciative practices on the whole, there are some things that we need to give up because they get in the way of mastery. AI coding assistance and GenAI in general are two massive obstacles to mastery, and if we wish to master the field, we need to renounce them. Similarly, the distraction that tools like Slack and regular email notifications create, to say nothing of smartphones, mean that they need to be given up if mastery is to be sought.

Finally, if you genuinely have mastered some area of software engineering, make an active effort to teach and to make what you know known to other people. Good engineers are generally wary of teaching, but if we wish to develop a more personalistic mode of teaching and learning, we'll need more teachers. Even if (like me) you're still fairly inexperienced, ten years of experience is plenty if you're teaching new graduates how to build a strong foundation for themselves. This is an important way to keep the craft alive and a way to give back to the community. You don't have to do the very serious authority figure thing if you don't want to, so long as your students take you seriously.

Political mastery

Bringing this back to the initial exchange with Liam, I also strongly believe that personalistic learning relationships are something that we have been badly missing in our political practice. I categorically do not mean this in the "charismatic political leader" way: we've all seen where that ends up, and I will note that it is a common and dangerous failure mode of what I speak of here. I do, however, think that the fact that we don't openly discuss personalistic relationships and expect them, at least in parts of the broader left, to not exist, is a large part of the problem. It is, for a start, a large part of the reason why tankies are a thing: people seek out relationships that can take their professional practice further in a blind, undirected way, while simultaneously consciously believing in institutions and scripture (as it were) that will allow them to derive the correct political position. This is, quite bluntly, the description of your average Marxist-Leninist political organisation. Naturally, this attracts a whole bunch of weird cranks and grifters willing to take advantage of people seeking wisdom, and I can't help but feel that it's done a hell of a lot of damage.

Even when we don't have the tankie problem, learning how to do politics entirely from written things and stuff we find online (what we might broadly call the institutional mode of learning) is deeply fraught. First and foremost, the people who write about politics usually come from a very particular political and philosophical background, and write with that in mind. This can make politics feel unpleasantly stifling, as it ends up conflating the core of a political teaching or position with a whole lot of cultural baggage. To that end, being a leftist engineer or a leftist analytic philosopher (to give two examples) can feel as though you're being pulled in two directions. Being able to resolve that, and being able to be a leftist in a coherent way, is made much easier with the presence of a teacher. Secondly and relatedly, the practice of learning politics exclusively from books can have a flattening effect: it turns everyone politically engaged into the same kind of person, or at least tries to do so. The level of context collapse inherent in the process these days means that, for example, political structures developed in the USA are expected to apply just fine to the entire rest of the world, and when they don't, the people writing these things tend to think that it's a defect in the person rather than in the method. Teachers, by contrast, are individual and idiosyncratic: everyone is going to have a different approach, a different view and be a different person outside of the political sphere. Moreover, a good teacher will understand the limitations of the methods and theories they work with, and can present ideas in ways that their students will mesh with well.

The institutional mode of learning wasn't really working to start with, but it especially doesn't work these days, and especially not in politics. We find ourselves having to organise effectively along a wide range of communities, all of which are very different, have different needs and all of which have been brought into rapid contact with each other by means of the internet, leading to significant pain from confused interactions where context is lacking. We simply can't learn how to act effectively in a political sense from texts any more as they simply lack the flexibility we need to make sense of and respond fluidly to our current situation. Teachers are indispensable for fixing that.

We no longer have the luxury of avoiding power and mastery in any field: we need to become the sky gods that Vajrayana tells us we already are. We need to gain lightness, power, mastery and effortlessness. We need to be able to strike against those who would oppress us with the full force of the thunderbolt. And this means that we need to do what works, which is personal teacher-student relationships. Whether we be teachers, students or both, let us aim for the mastery of our field in whatever we choose to do.