It's been an interesting week and it has me thinking about labor in the software industry.
There's a lot of talk about toxic cultures that create crunch and harassment. There's a well-known history of exploiting developers who think it's their dream job. These people are cut to the bone because it's assumed that there's a thousand starry-eyed candidates in line behind them waiting to voluntarily get churned up instead.
But what if the pay is good? And the culture is good? And you're being taken care of with raises and benefits? What if you like everyone in your department and morale is high and people openly discuss their pay and conditions and everything a union might fight for is mostly taken care of?
Fey Moods
Everyone probably exists on some spectrum of enthusiasm for the work they're doing. There's boring work, there's tedious work, but sometimes there's really interesting and fun work. To borrow a dwarf-ism, programmers are sometimes struck with fey moods. You get sniped by a problem or task that you absolutely cannot detach from until it's completely out of your head. You know you're supposed to have good balance and leave work at work but you literally can't sleep because you caught the bug.
I think this is a good thing! It's fun, it's exciting, you are proud of the result. Unfortunately, this is one of the many causes behind crunch culture. An employer can shorten deliverable timelines if it's assumed that all dwarves will be caught in a mood at all times. Anyone not outputting at that level is consequently judged and it all goes bad really quickly.
In this instance I would like to mostly just focus on the notion that developers often voluntarily overextend themselves beyond what their employment contract specifically covers. This extra work usually comes as a strict consequence of being struck by that mood, being invested in the product, and being proud of the result.
Working professionally as a programmer (and I'm sure in many other roles) comes at the cost of personal growth, family time, social relationships, etc. and it's often exacerbated by the absence of all the typical toxic corporate exploitative attributes I listed above.
But what's the problem? If everything's mostly good and your work inspires you creatively, what exactly is the issue? I guess I could call it legacy.
Lost Work
A known risk in software development is having your work discarded. There's a ton of different reasons for this, often as simple as prototyping and experimentation and iteration to find the ultimate solution to a problem. It's a known-but-oft-disregarded truth that version 1 of your software is usually thrown away as a prototype and rewritten. The usable output of your first version's development time is really just the knowledge of what you actually need to do to be successful in version 2.
A painful but familiar story, though, is when the work never comes to light due to reasons entirely out of your control. Not your fault, not your team's fault, not your department's fault. It's always something completely over your head: poor sales strategies, lack of product planning, company acquisitions, the CEO of your parent company's ending up in jail for insider trading.
Even worse than your product never reaching it's intended user is it being forced out the door in a compromised state, where it is reviled, mocked, and discarded by it's users.
This doesn't just happen in games, I assure you! Whether it's executive teams firing developers in order to hit their quarterly budget goals and pay out management bonuses, or any other gross incompetence at some higher administrative level, everyone eventually gets to be told that their thing they made is now in a landfill and it's time to move on.
Of course they really appreciate all those extra hours you pulled. Keep up the good work.
You sit there feeling like a fool. You spent a year or multiple years sacrificing yourself for the profit of an employer. You gave away weekends or evenings or maybe just other hobbies and distractions. You didn't do this because you were asked to or pressured to, you did it because you believed in what you were making. You wanted it's users to use it. You were proud of what you and your team made. You look back to all that hope and pride and feel like a goddamned chump, a fucking moron.
How do you come back from that? How do you allow yourself to become invested in the next project? How do you open yourself up to the moods and the pride and the excitement if the difference between 80 hours and ~30 goes completely unnoticed. Who are these people???
The Bosses
Whether you're part of a company that got acquired and driven into the ground or part of a 12-person startup trying to right all the wrongs, you are always going to be at the whims of the executives. Whether it's a giant board room, a gaggle of investors, or just one affluent benefactor, you really don't have any control over your work's future.
Everything you do, the team you have, the benefits and pay you enjoy, could all come crumbling down at a moment's notice because it is all ultimately up to a Boss. This entity is unquestionable, unchallengeable, and most important of all, completely unable to sympathize with your plight.
This entity is not human. They don't qualify. They exist at a plane of existence where human beings are widgets and decisions are macro-scale.
They can never be trusted.
So what do we do?
You might think that a new job will be better. Maybe it's a smaller company or maybe a larger one. Maybe the benefits are better or they have a strong track record of limiting crunch. If the power dynamic of owner and laborer exists, you will have your hard work squandered eventually. Guaranteed.
There is no negotiating with this problem. Trying to trick yourself into thinking that this time it will be different is only going to further damage yourself. Unless you have a controlling or equal share in your company, you'll never be free of this problem, no matter how good anything else gets.
Of course there's always worker-owned collectives! A certain social media site come to mind. But we can't all be 1/4th of Cohost's staff.
It seems defeatist, I guess, to just surrender to the inevitability of executive failure. But maybe there's a sliver of comfort to find here. Winter comes, the moon wanes, and corporate structures rot from the inside.
Knowing this, we can stop fooling ourselves into thinking that this time the millionaires are going to protect us, and optimize for things that actually will help our long term success:
-
Take pride in your work. Be there for it, be present, get caught in your fey moods and throw your whole ass into it. These are the things that go into your portfolio or build the skills and experience that make you stronger.
-
Take care of yourself, take care of your circle, take care of your coworkers. These are the people, yourself included, who benefit from the work you're doing. Never put a company above these people. The company has no loyalty to you. When it all comes crashing down, these are the people you'll have to move on with.
-
When the system fails, and you're made aware that your work is no longer valued. Get the fuck out of there. When the clock tolls and the executives fuck it all up, it might be time to just move on to the next thing. Don't sit there blaming yourself and thinking that it will be better next time.
Cut the cord and go find somewhere new.
EDIT: This keeps getting some engagement and I wrote an amendment reply but I don't think that's getting seen so here it is:
I think I did a not-great job of getting my point across with my labor post and that annoys me. I tied the issues to conditions and firings and layoffs too much when that's not really at the root of my current angst. Rather, that the lack of these typical red flags sometimes puts us into a false sense of security that allows us to still get hurt by the constant unchallengeable truth:
Executive decision affects company direction and strategy. Sometimes this is at the expense of completed work that people poured a lot of themselves into. You don't have any amount of control over whether your work will succeed or even see the light no matter how much or little you try. You are always at risk of lost work and stolen legacy.
