
Class, capitalism and the tech industry - kalkin
http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/24/class-capitalism-and-the-tech
======
omouse
This is the important part:

> _...programmers are often thought of as "professionals," like doctors or
> lawyers, and not part of the "working class." But this is misleading. Most
> programmers are neither self-employed nor employed in an organization where
> they have a meaningful say, and most can't expect any kind of tenure or
> partnership status, no matter how long they work._

> _...Programmers are typically hired at-will, and are not generally accepted
> to have any professional obligations that could supersede management 's
> authority, nor the ability to do research or pro bono work on company time.
> Management styles range from the likes of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss to a
> hierarchy so flat that it's almost invisible--until it's time for somebody
> to get fired. Still, for most programmers, management authority is a
> constant._

Professionals without authority.

I like this highlight of collective bargaining:

> _the right to contribute to open source projects or veto the release of
> insecure, privacy-violating or otherwise unprofessional code._

Sure would be nice if the red flags we raised would actually have an impact.

> _Most important, however, might be the idea of solidarity._

This is something that Michael O Church mentioned in a blog post; how the
managers always say nice things about one another whereas programmers always
slag one another and always blame the last guy for crappy code instead of
trying to build each other up. I once had two senior devs basically force me
out of projects; where did they end up? at different companies 1 year after I
was forced out. where did the executives end up? they merged the company and
gained some $$ or completely cashed out. Solidarity would have been the better
choice.

At another place, the devs weren't listened to and juniors/contractors were
hired to develop a project. The devs had to deal with the mess that was
created. What happens on the next project? They aren't listened to again and
can't even flag down the fact that the previous project has generated like
0.001% ROI.

~~~
carapat_virulat
I am not sure if the concept of working class and proletariat as the
revolutionary subject is useful anymore, specially when many of the new
members of the so called working class may not be able to get a job in their
whole lives, depending on how the situation evolves. We will have to see if
the redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital stops at some
point or inequality just keeps increasing.

Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this
holds in the long term, seeing that the main goal of a perfect programmer
should be to automatize himself out of a job in some sense.

Anyway, malthusian apocalyptic predictions are fun, but one should not forget
that just because they were wrong once it doesn't mean they will be wrong each
time, we don't have "father God" nor "mother Nature" to cover our asses
anymore. All responsibility is in our hands.

~~~
kalkin
> Now it's the golden age for programmers, but we will have to see how this
> holds in the long term

Yeah, the article takes that up a bit:

"Since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism has shown a long-term tendency to
deskill labor and separate conception from execution in a way that increases
the power of management. As industries mature, they tend to try to make
workers interchangeable units."

"Nobody has yet figured out how to Taylorize software development. The task of
writing a working program has yet to be broken down into subtasks that can be
performed without specialized knowledge and some grasp of the whole system...
[But] the larger trend doesn't bode well for the relative privileges that
programmers have acquired."

~~~
icebraining
I think a difference is that as soon as you can break down parts of the
software development work into rote and unskilled tasks, you can _write
software to do those tasks_. An example would be compilers, which do plenty of
routine work (converting higher level algorithms into low level machine code)
which used to be done by hand.

That said, I also don't agree that software development hasn't been at least
partially "Taylorized"; it's just that, like the factories where the original
Taylorization happened, that work has been moved overseas. There are plenty of
companies doing custom development upon preexisting platforms (Wordpress,
Sharepoint, etc) and which employ people that could barely code Fizzbuzz, to
do stuff like adding a field to a report, add a simple conditional filter or
read some XML file into a database.

------
ericmo
I've listened to this Planet Money podcast -
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/06/404701816/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/06/404701816/episode-621-when-
luddites-attack) \- a couple of days ago about luddites. In it they describe
the luddites as highly skilled workers - it is easy to forget that those
spinning frames weren't actually easy to operate - and they were well paid and
even gave themselves the privilege of not working on mondays. Sounds a lot
like these tech workers today.

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switch007
> _There are plenty of less glowing stories to tell about tech 's top
> executives: narratives of privilege, excess and incestuous ties to the rest
> of the power structure_

So true of small tech companies at which I've worked. External PR is a rags-
to-riches story, the truth however involves mainly being middle/upper class.
Even as the company grows, you know you'll never rise anywhere because they
won't permit the advancement of anyone who wasn't born in to money or those
that didn't attend Oxbridge.

------
camgunz
Programmers would really benefit from a professional organization. Just like
medicine, the law, or engineering, the world cannot now live without code.
It's irresponsible to go on without professional standards, and we see the
effects practically every day (hilariously insecure smartphone apps,
vulnerabilities that affect 90% of web services, etc.).

We've also ended up with a glut of programmers who end up doing nothing but
building database frontends all day. When people talk about a programmer
shortage, they mean there's a shortage of programmers who can actually code.
There's simply more work than there are workers able to do it.

The result of this is that all programmers are treated as suspects. No other
profession requires you to do a dance in every interview you'll ever undergo.
Your experience and connections speak for themselves; the interview is to root
out personality issues and establish expectations.

The reason, of course, is that law/medicine/etc. have serious consequences for
incompetence. You have to be licensed, and you have to prove your competence
routinely. Coding should be the same.

~~~
ashurbanipal
This is a great idea - is there any reason why there isn't a generally
accepted coding equivalent of a CPA or a CMT or any of the other very
successful professional certification programs out there? Does the field move
too quickly? Is there too much dispersion in talent (or perceived dispersion)
by programmers themselves to make it worth turning them into "certified
programmers"?

~~~
woodman
There are a lot of things in computer science that are very stable points for
the certification industry to hook into, foundational things - like where it
overlaps with philosophy (logic) and math (set theory, etc). I'm all for
higher quality code, but are we going to require web developers to master
first order logic before they can throw up isitdownrightnow.com?
Specialization is why we aren't dying from rotten teeth or soldering daughter-
boards into our PCs anymore, abstraction is what allows us to progress at
breakneck speeds. I guess there is a point where the two lines meet, the
burden of bureaucracy and rate of quality work - protocol standards come to
mind. But I don't think the correct place to lay that burden is at the
individual level, put it higher up the stack - company liability for private
information disclosure. I guarantee you'd see a steep decline in the number of
companies demanding your social security number.

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astaroth360
Kudos to the authors, I really enjoyed reading that!

