Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor

by Erik Dietrich

Show up, get a good score, get “promoted.” The criteria were objective and unassailable. You never had to threaten to drop out of school to get into AP physics.

According to a recent article written by Bock, the best current technique they have as part of the hiring process gives candidates a test that simulates work they would actually do, but it only explains 29 percent of a candidate’s future performance. This is an improvement from the 14 percent rate of the unstructured interview and from the 7 percent rate of checking their references, but it’s hardly a lock.

You are the company you keep.

Well, it’s a hearty pat on the back, an “attaboy, keep up the good work,” and a 5 percent cost of living adjustment (COLA) instead of a 3 percent one in twelve months, at your annual review. At your $100,000 salary, that means that you get an extra $2,000 per year, which totals out to $1 per hour. And that’ll start in a year, minimum, rather than when you start providing the value.

So you make your company an extra $150 an hour by being awesome, and they toss you a buck. And the next year, they toss you another. Then, maybe in year three as an overachiever, you’re “ready” for a promotion. They bump your pay by $10,000 annually, bringing you up to a total increase, over the course of four years, of $7 an hour. In your time at this company, you’ve earned them an extra $1,200,000. They’ve responded by letting you keep $20,000 of it.

So your choices, as an efficiency machine, boil down to “collect $50 per hour to look busy but coast and duck out early when no one is looking” or “collect $52.50 per hour to put the pedal to the floor and give your all.”

There are 2,080 working hours in a year and forty working years in a career for a grand total of 83,200 career hours.

obligatory five-year

To the opportunists themselves, believe it or not, it just seemed inevitable the whole time. Once in power, they bear the burden of pandering to both the pragmatists and idealists, albeit in different ways.

Forty-hour-per-week employment is a completely risk-maximized, non-diversified arrangement. When it comes to investing, you’re encouraged to spread your assets across a whole host of industries, companies, and countries. But when it comes to earning a wage, you’re encouraged to put all of your eggs in the basket of your current employer and loyally do anything that they tell you to do.

So I announce that I’m no longer paying people to dig ditches. Rather, I’m paying them to work for me in general. When it’s sunny, I pay them fifteen shells for a day of ditch digging. When it’s raining, they stay inside and earn their fifteen shells cleaning and maintaining the tools. I’ve switched from paying them for the market value of specific labor to paying them what amounts to a retainer for “do whatever I tell you.” I now sort of own them. At least, I own them as long as they need the money.

As a worker, you cease to offer your labor as a commodity. You instead offer yourself as a commodity in exchange for a dependable wage. “For fifteen shells per day, I will do whatever you need done.”

This arrangement creates a certain opacity to the value of anything that the laborer does. The arrangement is no longer one in which an activity with clear value is completed for clear compensation. Digging ditches may be worth half a shell per cubic foot, but being a laborer of mine is worth fifteen shells a day,

Instead, evaluations take on the more nebulous form of the “performance review,” which I’ll cover shortly. Suffice it to say, this is not a review of the way a human performs a job. It’s rather a review of the human himself.

However, there’s a deeper philosophical question at play here: why aren’t organizations worth our faith?

The modern software craftsmanship movement

So began the transition from martial command and control of organizations to bureaucratic command and control.

For the first time in recorded history, we easily own our own significant means of production.

But a growing trend is emerging, particularly in software. A growing contingent of us define success by our proficiency with hobbies within the workplace.

After all, commerce consisted only of opportunists for nearly the entirety of civilization’s history. It wasn’t until Industrial Age merchants put serfs to work as wage employees that we acquired pragmatists, and it wasn’t until Taylor tapped slightly more genteel grunts to manage the human chattel that we had idealists.

Knowledge workers tend to be well compensated, so they chase new, more subtle goals: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

The most basic paradox of corporate Scrum is thus the edict from on high to be autonomous, but not so autonomous as to stop listening to edicts from on high.

To put this another way, software developers settle into idealism for far less than other workers. Most employees demand more in the form of carnival cash or even real consideration. They tend to shoot for line manager positions with direct reports, offices, and perhaps a company credit card. We, on the other hand, settle for meaningless titles like “architect” or “tech lead,” bragging rights about technical acumen, final decisions on which unit testing framework to use, and the right to gleefully sharpshoot prospective candidates during interviews.

The tragedy of corporate Scrum is that the very behavior that gets us branded as good developers also limits our

career prospects and forces us to remain in subordinate positions. This tragedy is compounded when it bleeds through to the job search and interview process. There, it becomes career-limiting not just at one organization but everywhere we go. Let me repeat that more plainly. Being a good developer—participating gamely in team activities, learning enough algorithm trivia to pass interviews, being attracted to the best organizations using the coolest tech, and so on—is bad for your career. The real tragedy of all of this is that the current corporate structure forces you to choose between being a good developer and having a good career.

He convinces himself

completely that applied programming skill translates directly to profitability when this idea is, in fact, absurd.

Everyone else in the corporate hierarchy trades in guesses and

predictions, strategy and machinations, orders and instructions. The developers are the only ones that trade in actual output. Theirs is the only tangible contribution to the whole pyramid. And significantly, theirs is the only narrative that cannot easily be spun.

Being defined by output rather than spun narrative is the essence of the delivery trap. Opportunists at any stage in their journeys understand this implicitly and seek to position themselves where they can write their ticket by managing their narratives. Idealists also trade in narrative, but only superficially. In idealist-land, the official corporate narrative is the only narrative, whereas opportunists understand that narrative operates at several levels and needs to be managed per audience. Pragmatists are unaware of narrative in a...

You don’t want to be an incompetent programmer, but you also don’t want to be your team’s cleanup hitter. If (and I speak from experience here) you become known as the person on a team of ten that delivers half of each release’s features, you’re fashioning a delivery trap for yourself that’s sprung and made of granite. You’ll never escape because the organization can’t afford to let you. Instead, you need people to say of you something like, “He’s a decent programmer, but where he really shines is getting the most out of the other programmers.”

Opportunists thus view all of their relationships at work as various flavors of partnership.

Think of yourself as a Chinese restaurant, and they’re French, Indian, pizza, and

Lebanese places. You do compete, but can also all benefit simultaneously from a rising tide in the general market.

Of the limited plays available inside the ecosystem of players that others call a company, positioning yourself to avoid failure setups is critical. (In fact, that positioning is exactly what Venkatesh talks about as the core of The Gervais Principle: perceiving failure situations early and maneuvering idealists into place to take the fall for you).

You can do this in many ways, and you’ll need to find the strategy that works for you. Little things like tons of contacts and recommendations on LinkedIn can actually help. Speak extensively about your experience in other places, cultivating an air of the cosmopolitan that stands in stark contrast to your peers that have only had one or two jobs. Moonlight on the side and talk about your experience doing so. Casually cite experience on the level of your superiors in a flattering way. “I like what you’re doing in terms of dividing up the break/fix work—when I used to run a team, I had a strategy that I thought was pretty good, but I’ve definitely learned a couple of things.” The message that’s actually heard below the superficial? “I’m actually a peer of yours, but I’m not here to threaten.”

It helps to play the partnership-centric game of asking yourself “What if I were a small business?” Tell yourself that, instead of recognizing you, the people in question could simply pay you.

Recall that opportunism requires you to act as a business entity and cultivate an air of options—partners with options don’t get pumped about nominal sums of found money. But the opportunist also does not want to be remembered for chasing carnival cash. Partners with options don’t need to aspire to leadership positions with wishful mimicry. So the opportunist stays away—there’s no good outcome to be had here.

Never, ever be in a position where being patted on the head and tossed a treat is an acceptable substitute for compensation for the value

that you bring.

In fact, acceptance of passive reciprocity will bite you. By “passive reciprocity,” I mean any situation in which you spew surplus value with no predefined negotiated compensation.

It’s rare that you have true leverage, particularly in a line-level position. If you’re a positive sum sort of person, look for mutual wins that come from external resources. This helps keep your network healthy and your market value high, as an added bonus.

So form your partnerships as if you were a business. Offer and demand quid pro quos and understand when you have leverage. And always keep moving, lest you gather barnacles. If you seek and offer legitimate consideration and you avoid carnival cash, your rise will be swift and steady.

If that seems horrible and unfair, then the opportunism game will not be for you. Let’s be clear about something—the entire world that you’re venturing into with these ambitions is one of sales and nothing besides. One of the main reason that engineers are so undercompensated is that we opt to create a cocoon for ourselves where we can indulge delusions of meritocracy and skill directly correlating with value. The rest of the business lets pragmatists and journeyman idealists exist in this warm cocoon, and they only charge us a 200 percent markup on labor for it. If you want to start getting some of that back, you’re going to need to get comfortable with creative embellishment.

Once you’re comfortable socializing narratives like that, test the bounds of those around you. Push until someone calls BS, and then back off. If you understand the limits, you can capitalize on human cognitive biases to normalize the stories. Extrapolate and upsell your experience routinely with those around you, and your tale will start to become part of the general, accepted corporate canon.

Whatever you do, accept more responsibility, authority, and organizational power. Always say yes to opportunity, even if you have no idea what you’ll do to make it work. You can figure out a way.

The madness of it all is that we’re prevented from living

this sort of life not by logistical obstacles but by inertia and cargo cult living. We’re factory workers that can’t figure out that we own factories. We’re serfs that can’t figure out that we own manors. We’re founders that haven’t figured out that our legacies are freedom and self-determination.

With a portfolio of clients and prospects, I can push back or refuse requests without putting my entire livelihood at stake. In the corporate context, I cannot.

Coming back to the topic of heavy, pyramidal organizations, this situation leaves them in a crunch. When developers have eight different bosses, paying all those bosses makes it harder to pay the developers. That’s pressure from above. And as competitive smaller firms have increased need, they start filching those same developers, exerting wage pressure from below. Something has to give.