Pondering about the relation between worker agency/ownership and the susceptibility of the tech industry to hype cycles
Hypothesis: the fact that tech workers have little genuine agency over the work they do and how they do it (the boss decides in the end, not them) leads to bad technical choices sticking around institutionally because the inertia is hard to overcome if you don't have power over the direction, and those bad technical choices are introduced in the first place through hype cycles because "banding together around an exciting new tool" is the closest thing that anyone has to community organizing.
(This is an unrefined thought)
@joepie91 I think as well novelty/progress tends to be valorized and like maintenance work is deprioritised especially by managers but also by technical folks
@teo Hmm, I haven't quite observed that pattern before, but it's very possible that I missed it. Could you give some examples of what you mean?
@joepie91 sure! I'm thinking of things that are seen as "household chores" like general maintenance, dealing with tech debt, and like glue work things. Also things that are seen as communicative/secretarial work like writing docs. I feel like this categorisation is quite fuzzy (often gender norms are contradictory) and are counteracted by the fact that these things are in fact quite important. But in general I feel like folks internalise the idea that computing is like "men's work" so these things are seen as less important or for someone else to do. I feel like you get this type of stuff quite often with heavily gendered professions like how folks think of nurses vs doctors in very different ways.
@joepie91 yeah that's fair! I think the reason you give is definitely part of it. I think another big part is whether these things are masculine/feminine coded, which is what I had in mind with like novelty vs maintenance