Harper Reed And The Choice To Program: “I Was Never Going To Not Program”

Harper Reed And The Choice To Program: “I Was Never Going To Not Program”

In October of 2013, hundreds of thousands of Americans ran into a brick wall. Healthcare.gov was broken, spitting back errors for 30% of Americans trying to register for health care coverage. Someone on Twitter asked Harper Reed to help.

On paper, Harper is more than qualified. He was the CTO for President Obama’s reelection campaign, and a life-long programmer. But just because you could do a job, doesn’t mean you should do that job. Harper rebuffed the Twitter nudge because his heart wasn’t in it.

If he’s not personally invested in a project, he doesn’t work on it. He can tell the difference between a product someone built, and a product someone built with care. The new challenge for developers like Harper isn’t to build the newest, shiniest product. The challenge is to infuse the personal care you have for a product into the code you write, the product you build, and the customers you contact. The people who do this best, Harper argues, are vampires.

Once You Invite Them In

When Harper interviews engineers looking to join the Modest team, he looks for a hunger to build tools, to improve processes and to ship great code. “They have this hunger. It’s closer to a vampire,” says Reed. This type of innate hunger can’t be satisfied, but only quelled for a brief period of time. Once Harper sees this, he’s assured he’s made a good hire.

Reed can’t quite put a finger on where the ideal qualities in candidates come from. “Every once in a while you stumble across someone, it doesn’t matter when they were born or what their experiences were.” Harper just knows the passion when he sees it, mostly because it was the same inherent thirst for programming that set him off on the career he has today.

“I was never going to not program,” explains Reed. Programming was the prism through which Harper learned math, logic, and English. He got started early at age five, simultaneously navigating how to use his first language, English, and learning Logo on an Apple II Series computer at his local library. Before he graduated middle school, he knew he’d be programming for the rest of his life.

The Non Choice

Harper can’t point to a moment where he decided he would devote his life to programming. Probably because that moment never occurred. That reality was just there in front of him, plain as day, for his whole life. “It was like, ‘Well, there it is.’,” he says.

Now that he’s well past the “what should I do with my life” fork in the road, his new challenge is making sure his passion for what he builds transfers into his relationship with customers. With a million ways to obfuscate person to person communication, it’s easy to lose sight of the real human being on the other side of the screen.

On Personhood

“You’re communicating with people. You’re not communicating with Twitter clients. You need to make sure you’re thinking about that,” says Harper.

A Twitter client is not an audience. A SIP endpoint is not an audience. A SMS gateway is not an audience. When you’re communicating on behalf of your business, there’s always a person at the other end of the line. Harper implores everyone to remember that, and to remember that customers are people, full of personality and personhood. They should be treated as an ends in themselves and not a means to an ends such as a sale or sign up.

Harper credits direct and personal communication as a bedrock for the successful 2012 re-election campaign of President Obama.

“Look at campaigns. They’re anachronistic. A campaign doesn’t give a fuck about Twitter. You know why? Because a campaign is all about calling people on the phone and knocking on doors. These are things people don’t naturally do anymore, but they still work.”

“How do we make it so that we go back to the roots of communication and instead of doing the thing that’s shiny and cool, which works in a context, we focus on the thing that actually solves the bigger problem.”

You can hear Harper talk about the future of communications at Signal, May 19th-20th in San Francisco. Grab your tickets here.