But, as becomes clear early in the novel, the manager has no real political power. Composed of eight arms attached to a central hub, each arm has a “manager,” something like a mayor.

It was built by a consortium of Swedish, Thai, and Chinese business interests and is politically autonomous. The city of Qaanaaq is one such city, situated off the coast of Greenland in the now iceless Arctic Ocean. Many new polities have struck up in the form of floating, ocean-bound cities. The novel is set in the twenty-second century, a time when flooding and political upheaval have destabilized most of the globe. And most importantly, over time, I learned how to empathize with members of those other disciplines, to try to see problems their way as well as my own.Įffective team software engineering, I discovered, is also effective team leadership, and with leadership comes power, and with power comes a host of new hazards to be navigated.īlackfish City is a novel about power, its application, and about the empathy required to use it well. I learned how to ask for help in the right ways when I ran into a problem that couldn’t be solved with code, a problem that needed a skillset from somewhere else in the office.

I resolved my plight by doing what all software engineers do-I broke down the problems facing me into bite-sized, manageable chunks and dealt with them one at a time. It didn’t help that I was surrounded by people who had been engineering software for years, even decades, longer than I had. As a junior professional software engineer, I experienced acute imposter syndrome. One of the many hats I wear is that of a professional software engineer.

Blackfish city