It’s not our job to fix our employers

Contents

I have a Patreon!

I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing.

I’ve been here a while and am not going away.

But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in publishing.

For that, I’d like your help.

Hence, a Patreon.

It’s going to offer exclusive material, support tiers, and hopefully a few novel goodies that I’m working on at the moment.

Currently, it has two membership tiers:

1. Supporters, who get access to all the stuff. €7 / month.
2. Patrons, who get access but also mentions in the newsletter, podcast, and are listed at the end of the video. €25 / month.

Any support you can give is very much appreciated.

Video

Audio

This broken industry is too big of a problem for software developers to solve alone

As I wrote in my last newsletter, software developers don’t seem to be doing well.

I can relate. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for dysfunctional software companies and startups in the past, and those dysfunctions have increasingly become the norm across the industry over the past few years.

The response was greater than I expected, both on the newsletter and elsewhere, so I wanted to pause and try to put those responses into context.

I had already written and recorded the next couple of videos and newsletters even before I uploaded the last one, but I’m postponing those, because I think it’s important to sometimes stop and listen instead of constantly lecturing at people.

Even though most of the responses were positive – at least, positive in the sense that they could relate to or recognised what many software developers seemed to be going through – some were less supportive.

This is the internet. Obviously some people are going to be annoying. Most of it you can ignore, but a few of them highlighted the big shift in attitudes towards tech that has been taking place over the past decade.

People aren’t on “our” side any more. Quite a few have gone from having largely positive feelings towards tech – considering it to be a force for progress – to thinking it’s an industry that’s ruining the world.

Tech is the new tobacco.

So, if we’re miserable, the attitude some have is that it’s our own fault for making the world we live in worse.

Or, that we deserve what’s happening to our field because we didn’t do enough to prevent bad things from happening.

Or, our work in the tech industry, no matter what it was we actually did, means we have it coming.

This is what falls out from the now relatively common public sentiment that tech is the new tobacco industry. How that framing has played out in media coverage and discourse, has quite correctly emphasised the abuses, the legal shenanigans, how tech is spending money to manipulate the public, and other strategies that the tech industry seems to have copied from big tobacco.

But the other consequence of that shift in public sentiment is: if your industry gets the reputation of being like the tobacco industry, people stop having any sympathy for those of us working in that industry.

Nobody cares if a sales person in a tobacco company burns out from stress or pressure. If your job is selling opioids to college athletes – “but it’s legal! I’m only helping doctors decide on the correct treatment” – hearing that you’re suffering will only make people smile. Now, finally, a sign that the world is just place.

This is a little bit unfair to many of us for two reasons:

First, the industry wasn’t this bad when most senior people in the industry started. You don’t have to have gone into coding thirty years ago, like me, to have had reason to believe it was an industry with promise. The sentiment shift has been happening for a while, but it was a gradual one for a long time.

Second, quite a few of us have spent our careers avoiding the kind of work we felt was harmful to society. We’ve tried to do good and our careers and finances suffered for it.

Related to this is another idea that came up. Some people seemed convince that we who work in the industry could have prevented all of this, if we’d done this or that. Most of them mentioned unions. If we’d unionised years ago, none of this would have happened.

The problem is that this is almost certainly false.

Unions are largely absent from the software industry in the United States.

But software development is largely unionised in quite a few European countries. Those unions, many of them large and relatively influential, haven’t stopped the job from changing for the worse here in Europe in many of the same ways it’s been declining in the States.

Union participation in Iceland is well over 90% and is almost certainly higher than that in software. We’re still seeing lay-offs in software development, fewer opportunities for junior developers, a push towards using Large Language Models to make up for all those fired colleagues, and a collapse in college enrolments in computer science.

It’s hard to see how software developers and other employees could have prevented this change when it’s fundamentally driven by much greater forces in policy, economics, and deregulation. These are problems that can only be fixed through politics, not unionisation.

But even if we could have prevented it by forming unions in the States, that still doesn’t make it our responsibility to fix a toxic employer.

Think about it this way:

Imagine that a friend of yours is working retail. The manager is awful. The company has abusive policies. The retailer’s overall strategy is to treat employees as disposable and cheat the customers as much as they can get away with.

You’ve shopped there. You know what I’m talking about.

A labour union will absolutely help prevent the worst abuses your friend is facing. It’ll keep them safer while they’re working for the abusive retailer, and it might give them some leverage when dealing with their employer.

But the union won’t fix the retailer. It won’t make the manager less toxic and won’t stop them from micromanaging. It won’t prevent the retailer’s abusive tactics against their suppliers, which will come back and impact your friend. It won’t make the retailer less abusive towards the customers. It won’t prevent lies, monopolistic tactics, mismanagement, financial fraud, or the pervasive outright incompetence of much of the management. It won’t prevent middle-managers from resorting to superstitions or coercive manipulation.

It certainly won’t prevent them from hire a sociopath CEO.

A union can make a workplace safer, fairer, and more equitable. A large union can function as a political force that will help change society for the better. The big reason why Iceland is a largely progressive society despite having had very right-wing governments for most of the past four decades is at least partly thanks to our strong labour unions that advocate for their members.

But once you’re in the situation where deregulation, financial incentives, mismanagement, sociopathic managers, or owner politics have turned a particular workplace toxic, a union won’t suck out the toxins, and it won’t fix that broken employer.

It’s all well and good to talk about the industry as a whole and how it needs to be fixed, but individuals need to think about their own health and their own survival first before they can worry about saving the world.

Fundamentally, it isn’t the job of an employee to fix their employer. If your workplace is a broken mess and that’s causing you to suffer, the sensible thing is to try and look for an exit while you still have your health.

Because you can’t buy back your health once you’ve lost it.