Developer Hegemony: The Future of Labor

by Erik Dietrich

pyramid corporation employment.

The entire advantage of the corporation is tied up in risk mitigation, so when it no longer provides that, it will no longer have pragmatists. They will move to the world of efficiencer firms and partnership-oriented knowledge work offerings. Inasmuch as pragmatists in the future can continue to do manual labor, that will more and more frequently take the form of contractors and subcontractors.

In the context of a massive, lumbering corporation where an individual contributor’s value is utterly opaque, they charge at what the organization tells them is valuable.

We have created and nurtured a technology that democratizes opportunity. All we need to do now is throw off the shackles of an institution that resists that democratization. Pragmatists, idealists, and opportunists will all play their part.

The agile software movement suggested that we break down the barriers between business folks and IT folks so they can work more effectively together. I say we reject that premise in its entirety and go forward believing that business folks and IT folks should be the same people. This is, of course, a disconcerting proposition for the business folks. Managers and former developers will need to come face-to-face with an uncomfortable question, and that’s “What do you need me for, then?” My honest answer to that is, “I don’t know. You’ll probably figure something out.”

Right now, there’s a whole transformation industry out there dedicated to quixotically helping them get better at it. The next wave industry will be the one that helps them realize there’s a

better division of labor.

The way these companies consume software and implement programs will become more distributed and decomposed, kind of like the way that microservices have replaced monoliths.

When I’m asked how to scale agile, I simply answer, “You don’t.” You see, when you try to scale agile, it gets complex, process-heavy, and massively inefficient. My more nuanced answer is that you slice up the work into loosely-coupled autonomous chunks that don’t require coordination, thus obviating the need to scale at all.

If you look at a lot of larger successful tech product firms, they seem to succeed with similar loose coupling philosophies. As I understand it, departments or teams at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all operate with a large degree of autonomy and independence. To a certain extent, you might think of those as organizations comprised of smart folks capable of forming excellent efficiencer firms if they weren’t more content with pragmatist and journeyman idealist career scripts. But any way you look at it, the decomposed, targeted, automation-expert path is going to win.

We’re all knowledge workers, having replaced non-thinking work with automation. I’m proposing a world where those of us who trade and specialize in humanity’s most valuable commodity are justly compensated. I’m proposing developer hegemony as the future of labor.