Pirates of Kattegat

Pirates of Silicon Valley was a very formative movie for me. More than Hackers. More than The Matrix. While I quote “Hack the Planet” and “I know Kung-Fu” as much as the next nerd, they are great entertainment, but maybe not educational in the same way.

The three movies I think anyone working in a corporate environment should watch are Pirates of Silicon Valley, Margin Call and Exam.

On the surface they have very little in common. One is about the birth of the personal computer industry, one is about the financial crisis and one is about a job interview. Yet I find myself thinking about all three with surprising regularity.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Pirates of Silicon Valley is not a documentary in the sense that it tells things exactly as they happened, but it is a documentary of the way things happened.

The names, dates and individual conversations are almost secondary. What matters is that it captures the personalities that built a large part of the modern software industry. The ambition, the ego, the rivalry and the almost religious belief that the future belongs to whoever gets there first. Watching it today, it is still easy to recognize those same personalities in startup founders, open-source developers, CTOs and entrepreneurs.

One of the observations that stayed with me over the years is the realization that for every problem you want to solve, there are ten others waiting for a solution. For every hardware nerd there seem to be ten software nerds. For every software nerd there are ten people who simply want the software to work. Most value is not created by inventing something entirely new, but by taking something you already understand and making it accessible to the layer below.

It is easy to become fascinated by impossible problems and revolutionary ideas. Most successful businesses are built on making existing solutions simpler, cheaper or easier to use.

The movie uses its artistic license to fudge some details, but the spirit feels right.

Margin Call

Margin Call is a movie about corporate culture as much as anything else, and if you have spent time in large organizations, especially in finance, it hits close to home.

The characters are competent professionals. They understand the consequences perfectly well. The problem is that understanding the consequences and caring about them are two very different things.

Within their own frame of reference, they are acting rationally.

That is what makes the film memorable. Nobody is confused, nobody is uninformed and nobody misunderstands the situation. The objective is still the objective.

If you have spent enough time in corporate life, you eventually stop seeing characters and start recognizing colleagues.

Exam

My third recommendation is Exam, which is usually the one that surprises people.

Most would expect something like Ex Machina, but Exam has always stuck with me for a different reason. The entire film revolves around a problem that appears straightforward, yet most of the candidates immediately trap themselves inside assumptions they never stop to question.

Technical problems, business problems and political problems are often presented as though there are only a small number of possible choices available. Once the discussion begins, everyone becomes invested in finding the correct answer and very few people stop to ask whether the question itself is flawed.

Real Life

One of my favourite historical anecdotes that illustrates the point:

The story, as it is usually told, takes place during the British political crisis of 1940. Neville Chamberlain was discussing endorsement of his potential successors with Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill. During the discussion the question Chamberlain asked Churchill whether the Prime Minister should be a member of the House of Lords.

Churchill found himself in an awkward position. If he answered “yes”, he effectively supported Halifax. If he answered “no”, he effectively promoted himself. Faced with a question that seemed to offer only two acceptable answers, he chose neither and remained silent.

What I like about the story is not whether every detail is accurate, but what it illustrates. When presented with 2 options, there are always at least 3 choices.