Is "Good Taste" Valuable in Technology?

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me...all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. - Ira Glass

We have a lot of technology. There are many programming languages to choose from, and the list of algorithms from which we can build our applications is extensive. We make choices when we write our applications, when we design them, when we compile them, and when we run them—at every step. Sometimes it can feel fragmented, as if we're floating in a river of ice, looking for a specific-looking chunk and reaching out to grab it out of the freezing water as we float by.

Choices. Choices. Choices.

But variety is good because it leaves room for us to show good taste. As humanity continues to improve our use of computers—how we work with them, how we write code, how we remove the tension between the "social" and the "technical"—we will find that we have more opportunities to use our good taste, to build on it, and to create something wonderful. That's how it works in art, and that's how it works in computing. I think that is a key part of the growth of a technologist. I mean, what is a hi-tech business if not the curation of people, technology, business acumen, and ideas into a singular thing? A collection of good taste.

I've felt for a while that part of working with technology is some kind of form of good taste, and one of the people who inspired that in me is Ira Glass, famous for his work on the podcast This American Life. In the quote at the beginning of this article, he talks about how what gets us into creative work—what makes us want to do what we do—is our good taste. We enjoy some kind of work or art, and we want to make something like it, perhaps something better. But in order to make something better, we have to grow, learn, nudge, and shape our taste into something useful and valuable, which can be a long process.

While good taste is subjective, I believe that great code, great technological systems, and great businesses require more than just years of experience, there's something else that's required, something else that people grow over time.

Good Taste

At first it seems that we need only know the diverse sources of our pleasures in order to acquire taste, and that once we had read what philosophy tells us on this subject, we would have good taste and could boldly judge works of art. But natural taste is not the same as theoretical knowledge. It consists in the rapid and subtle application of the very rules which we do not know. - Montesquieu

• "I know what I like."
• "I know it when I see it."
• It's something internal. It's based on what we want to see in the world, not what the world pushes back on us, we "pull" it out of the fabric of our surroundings.
• There is "your taste," it's neither good, nor bad, instead it's part of you.
• Something that creates a reaction in you.
• Perhaps something that you had to fight through to learn to love; it wasn't easy to realize that you enjoy it, that it is a "good thing."

Ira Glass on "Good Taste"

Here's the video in which Glass discusses the quote that starts of this article.

The part where he plays a piece of his work when he was eight years (eight years!) into his journey is particularly illuminating—he is very hard on himself:

Every part of this is is ill-conceived. Okay, like like the writing is horrible. You can't even follow what I'm talking about...and then the performance... - Ira Glass

(Some) Technologists Like Technology

You want to make TV, because you love TV, and you've got really good taste. - Ira Glass

Replace TV in the quote above with anything we do, such as technology.

You want to make technology, because you love technology, and you've got really good taste.

You don't have to enjoy technology to use it, to work with it, or to make it your job. But some technologists actually like technology. Working on something new or rediscovering something old can be enjoyable.

One thing I think some of us are addicted to are the "small victories" we experience every day; it's a dopamine hit when a program runs, or a computer does something we tell it to do, or there's a new technology we can investigate and try to understand—and in the end, "it works!" And in some fashion, we are surprised that it works.

As we progress in our careers, there is often significant pressure to abandon personal preferences and embrace mainstream technologies. While many organizations will work to enforce how the company creates technology through requiring specific tool use, once you have left that company, you will be dealing with new tools and technologies. Furthermore, a crucial aspect of personal growth is gaining insight into your preferences and the reasons behind them. If you succumb to peer pressure and abandon these preferences, you may discover in the future that technology is no longer as enjoyable as it once was.

We have a wide range of technology and a wealth of content discussing its usage and benefits. How this technology over here better than this other technology over there. We have algorithms that tell us to use certain technologies in certain ways, and AI can and will do more to make that content richer, and more generic, and more plentiful, at the same time.

Computers haven't been around that long, and yet the rapid pace of their development has created a fragmented environment where we're quick to discard technology and tend to stay within the mainstream. But our growth in computing will lead to more choice, and we'll need our good taste to deal with that variety, and there will be more opportunities for heterogeneous, perhaps even unique, systems in our world.