Randall Hansen

“I hate to say it’s like a conversation, because computers are really fucking stupid,” Randall Hansen is telling me, in a gruff voice thickened by a cold he’s fighting off.

“It’s more like submarine warfare. You’re in an unfriendly environment. Any sort of breach in the system or error in your process could cause catastrophic damage from which you and your co-workers are unlikely to recover. You periodically fire things off into a murky void, which may or may not return results, and may or may not accomplish their purpose. And the people who do it for a living tend to spend a lot of time hunched over keyboards in the dark, becoming specialists in arcane tasks, because there’s no other way to get it done.”