Fantastic article. So many people in our community have very limited perspectives on the possible ways to organize work and workers. It’s depressing to read article after article proposing minor adjustments to the shibboleth interview questions du jour as though these were radical changes. The possibility space is so much larger than our self-proclaimed culture of creativity and disruption can usually imagine, and much of it has already been explored by other workers in other industries.
I agree with almost all of this. There’s one point I’ll argue against.
We’re paid well by dint of…a temporary labor shortage that’s buttressed by our shitty, unwelcoming culture?
I’m not sure that I’d connect the two.
First of all, let’s talk about social class and its connection to income. Lower-class (sorry, “working class”) people are paid based on the market value of their labor. Middle-class people are paid based on who they are (e.g. esteemed professor, clerked for SCOTUS, well-educated, “bred for leadership”). Upper class people are paid what they can get. (Notice that there’s more similarity between lower and upper class than between either one and the middle-class insistence on “meritocratic” pay. Cultural similarities between the U.S. lower and upper classes are a major cultural force and you can’t understand U.S. conservatism without noting them.) At any rate, we programmers are the upper-working class. Because programmer pay is reasonably high right now and those middle-class jobs are falling to pieces, some people of higher native/born social classes are joining in the game (middle-class as elite programmers, upper-class as founders) but it’s mostly an upper-working-class gig, with truly middle-class people doing it for a variety of reasons (career move, lack of properly middle-class jobs, idealism and love of the work). I’m not denigrating it, or the people who do it, by saying this either. Sociologically, ~85 percent of the population is lower/working class in most large societies and the contemporary U.S. is no exception (while 1950s America, arguably, was).
What does our shitty culture have to do with it? Well, we could debate for hours whether programmer skill matters. Technically, I agree that a really good programmer is “worth more” than 20 mediocre ones, but that might not always be true. For one thing, most VC-funded “entrepreneurs” are more interested in hiring middle management and executives than grunts, and tend to favor their own kind (MBA culture) who tend to be headcount fetishists (i.e. they measure themselves based on how many people they managed, not what their teams accomplished). Hire 5 exceptional, 37-year-old programmers and you’ll struggle to get your MBA-culture buddies to deal with them. (Let’s be blunt: you don’t become a great programmer if you don’t have a bit of a problem with authority.) Hire 100 commodity ScrumDrones and it’ll go much easier– from their perspective.
Now, the commodity programmer phenomenon (bubble?) is pushing up salaries at the low end. That’s hard to debate. We have programmers out of boot camps making $80,000 (which, outside of programming and finance, is still a high salary for someone under 30, as easy as it is to forget that) because their employers seem them as call options, and because there are economic and social incentives for headcount inflation (acquisitions, more positions in middle management for the founders' buddies). Salaries at the high end are probably deflated somewhat because we have to fight so fucking hard (side projects, esoteric languages that we end up begging our bosses to let us use) to distinguish ourselves from the commodity programmers.
The shitty culture costs us some high-talent people. It also attracts a lot of low-talent people. Workplace sexual harassment isn’t something that “just happens”, like lightbulbs breaking. It exists because there are a number of people who like to act like assholes. It makes them feel powerful or important or they see it as improving their social position. And the sexual-harassment cultures are tolerated because of all the low-talent, low-quality individuals that they attract (and because, in many businesses, such low-quality people are– as dirty as I feel for admitting this– useful due to their bravado). The shitty culture exists to create a “halfway house” for kids longing for their fraternity days. It might make the space unsafe for women and minorities and anyone over 35, but it makes the space safe for macho-subordinate man-child who’s likely to have the unconditional work ethic that these companies desire.
On the balance, the low-quality, low-talent people are winning (with the assistance of middle management). Most good programmers hate open-plan offices. Most shitty programmers love them, because they like jobs where they can shoot Nerf guns at their boss and rarely have to do actual work (because no one can concentrate). What’s the norm in the software industry? Open-plan offices.
If we killed the commodity programmer culture (which would be very hard to do, that I grant) then we’d probably see the salaries and numbers of jobs drop, but what’s left would arguably pay better.
Fantastic article. So many people in our community have very limited perspectives on the possible ways to organize work and workers. It’s depressing to read article after article proposing minor adjustments to the shibboleth interview questions du jour as though these were radical changes. The possibility space is so much larger than our self-proclaimed culture of creativity and disruption can usually imagine, and much of it has already been explored by other workers in other industries.
I agree with almost all of this. There’s one point I’ll argue against.
I’m not sure that I’d connect the two.
First of all, let’s talk about social class and its connection to income. Lower-class (sorry, “working class”) people are paid based on the market value of their labor. Middle-class people are paid based on who they are (e.g. esteemed professor, clerked for SCOTUS, well-educated, “bred for leadership”). Upper class people are paid what they can get. (Notice that there’s more similarity between lower and upper class than between either one and the middle-class insistence on “meritocratic” pay. Cultural similarities between the U.S. lower and upper classes are a major cultural force and you can’t understand U.S. conservatism without noting them.) At any rate, we programmers are the upper-working class. Because programmer pay is reasonably high right now and those middle-class jobs are falling to pieces, some people of higher native/born social classes are joining in the game (middle-class as elite programmers, upper-class as founders) but it’s mostly an upper-working-class gig, with truly middle-class people doing it for a variety of reasons (career move, lack of properly middle-class jobs, idealism and love of the work). I’m not denigrating it, or the people who do it, by saying this either. Sociologically, ~85 percent of the population is lower/working class in most large societies and the contemporary U.S. is no exception (while 1950s America, arguably, was).
What does our shitty culture have to do with it? Well, we could debate for hours whether programmer skill matters. Technically, I agree that a really good programmer is “worth more” than 20 mediocre ones, but that might not always be true. For one thing, most VC-funded “entrepreneurs” are more interested in hiring middle management and executives than grunts, and tend to favor their own kind (MBA culture) who tend to be headcount fetishists (i.e. they measure themselves based on how many people they managed, not what their teams accomplished). Hire 5 exceptional, 37-year-old programmers and you’ll struggle to get your MBA-culture buddies to deal with them. (Let’s be blunt: you don’t become a great programmer if you don’t have a bit of a problem with authority.) Hire 100 commodity ScrumDrones and it’ll go much easier– from their perspective.
Now, the commodity programmer phenomenon (bubble?) is pushing up salaries at the low end. That’s hard to debate. We have programmers out of boot camps making $80,000 (which, outside of programming and finance, is still a high salary for someone under 30, as easy as it is to forget that) because their employers seem them as call options, and because there are economic and social incentives for headcount inflation (acquisitions, more positions in middle management for the founders' buddies). Salaries at the high end are probably deflated somewhat because we have to fight so fucking hard (side projects, esoteric languages that we end up begging our bosses to let us use) to distinguish ourselves from the commodity programmers.
The shitty culture costs us some high-talent people. It also attracts a lot of low-talent people. Workplace sexual harassment isn’t something that “just happens”, like lightbulbs breaking. It exists because there are a number of people who like to act like assholes. It makes them feel powerful or important or they see it as improving their social position. And the sexual-harassment cultures are tolerated because of all the low-talent, low-quality individuals that they attract (and because, in many businesses, such low-quality people are– as dirty as I feel for admitting this– useful due to their bravado). The shitty culture exists to create a “halfway house” for kids longing for their fraternity days. It might make the space unsafe for women and minorities and anyone over 35, but it makes the space safe for macho-subordinate man-child who’s likely to have the unconditional work ethic that these companies desire.
On the balance, the low-quality, low-talent people are winning (with the assistance of middle management). Most good programmers hate open-plan offices. Most shitty programmers love them, because they like jobs where they can shoot Nerf guns at their boss and rarely have to do actual work (because no one can concentrate). What’s the norm in the software industry? Open-plan offices.
If we killed the commodity programmer culture (which would be very hard to do, that I grant) then we’d probably see the salaries and numbers of jobs drop, but what’s left would arguably pay better.