This BlueSky thread from Cat Hicks is on the money.
There actually has not been enough reflection in the tech community about DOGE
all I see are "they're not engineers" "that's not what engineering is" I want a thick good really real piece to sink my teeth in about all the parts of this that ARE "like engineering"
I would write it except I want to stay safe
Engineering can be so much better than this and more than this. It's absurd how much we're resigned to this entire area of human work being held hostage by this kind of culture.
I do not believe that the majority of the software people I have worked with all these years sit around thinking, "I want cancer research to be destroyed." We have mountains to climb no doubt, we are trapped in some bad cultures no doubt, but I do not believe this of you for one moment.
Our tech community needs SO much more repair, processing, and collective reflection. The people who worked to support government and science were so betrayed by other groups. The people in flashy big tech cos feeling like their values were betrayed. Just so much repair needed here
I absolutely agree that our tech community needs quite a lot of collective reflection, processing, and work on repair. For a variety of reasons I've done a fair amount of casual research into recovering from trauma of various types. Some of this comes from having lived through the dot-com, great recession, and profitability-crunch contractions in the tech market, and some from good old fashioned life experience outside of the workplace. Trauma is trauma, and we have some pretty good ideas what chronic (ongoing, persistent) trauma does vs acute (single traumatic event) trauma.
Acute trauma: sudden-death layoff.
Chronic trauma: never being allowed to stay on one project long enough to get something good for your performance review, making you constantly fear the next layoff will have your name in the list.
Each of these affects the body and mind differently, and when entire populations are subjected to chronic traumas you get population-level reactions. When those chronic traumas are structural, as is the case with management culture in all of big US-tech, remediation becomes next to impossible. When individuals in this chronically traumatized population can't fix it, you get three big trauma-responses:
- Cynicism. I can't fix it, that's just how it is. If you set your expectations low enough, you get to be happily surprised once in a while! It's great.
- Heroism. Rally your fellow workers to overthrow the corrupt system! Who is with me? If not, I'll do what I can alone.
- Trauma harder as a way of life. Obviously, we're in a cut-throat system which means I need to cut throats. QED.
Big-tech management likes workers in the trauma harder category, is somewhat tolerant of cynics, and is designed from the org-chart out to prevent the heroes from getting anywhere useful and to redirect their energies in positive directions like burnishing the company's reputation among diversity hires. Do this for a few decades and you have an entire population of highly educated workers who have been trained their entire careers to look at the next sprint/month/quarter's deliverable for your team and kinda ignore what the rest of the company is doing. How your quarter's project to reduce stream latency by 15% at the p95 level relates to the efficiency of data-analysis in ICE isn't always obvious, don't look up or you might find out.
So take these workers who live in this pit of oppression every day for their day-jobs, and put them into an open-source community for their fun-time activity. What happens then?
- The cynics contribute as they're able, expecting corporate malfeasance to show up at any point, often seeing it when it isn't there.
- The heroes go about building a community that actually is healthy for a change! Whew.
- The trauma harder crew perpetuate corporate-style power structures because that's how tech works, accidentally reinforcing the cynics and frustrating the heroes
Fixing this sort of thing requires so much work.
- The cynics need to be taught that their defensive pessimism is not appropriate by repairing the structural injustices
- The heroes need to understand they're not alone and are being listened to through an effort of collective reflection
- The trauma harder crew needs to realize that alternate structures are viable, and understand the damage they've endured in the existing system through extensive processing
You can't do this overnight, it will take a revolution of some kind. Some revolutions are slow, like the heroes getting somewhere with governmental support allowing unionization to creep in higher and higher numbers until union contracts dominate worker terms and conditions rather than Radford salary reports. Some revolutions come quick like whole industries getting nationalized after a socialist junta and remodeled away from oligarchic control. Some come generationally, like China overtaking the US for big-tech exports forcing the oligarchs to look elsewhere to stay fat.
Our tech community needs SO much more repair, processing, and collective reflection.