Popular middlebrow programming influencer and tech industry shill Gergely Orosz sure knows how to play to his audience. His recent apologia for churn on LinkedIn suggests that you, dear software engineer, are afforded excellent compensation and perks relative to other engineering fields because you possess the rare and valuable ability to keep up with technology’s rapid pace of change.
Of course an audience of software engineers will love to be told that they are special. All this crazy hustle to keep up with the digital Joneses is proof that we actually deserve all this money. It’s an inherent virtue within in us that makes us resilient and clever enough to remain the vanguard of the field. We just have the right stuff. Other types of engineers? They ain’t got it.
What a crock of shit. People get paid what they get paid according to the market structures of their field. Software engineers get paid the big bucks because our work has been able to produce systems that can be operated at very high margins with few assets and negligible raw materials cost. And digital technology has been successful in wedging itself in every part of human existence over the last 40 years, generating huge rates of return for all investors involved. Software engineers get paid best in the US, where the tech industry has demonstrated the most rapid and consistent growth rates, and obvious need for software engineers as part of of this process has driven demand up like crazy.
Put more simply: software engineers are well paid because software companies make a lot of money, and to attract top talent, the wealthiest companies ofter the best pay and perks, pushing up the market for everyone in the field (again, especially in the US). There’s nothing inherent about the job that makes it deserve this pay more than other fields. Sure it churns faster, but that’s mostly because there’s no physical manufacturing or construction process to slow down the delivery of a designed product. Software “builds” are typically measured in minutes.
I could go on about how folks in other fields are under just as much pressure to change precisely because they have adopted software, programming, and data so thoroughly into their workflows, but that would distract from my main point: this is a Management Approved™ message meant to coddle you into compliance. Investors and executives hate that software engineers command a premium. They want to reverse it, and the narratives around AI give them the perfect opportunity to do so. This message, while on the surface complimentary towards engineers is also an admonition: get with the program or don’t expect the perks to keep coming.
Software engineers have always dealt with churn—we’ve been joking about the insane pace of web framework releases for at least 15 years now—but the past few years have seen orders of magnitude more buzzy, heat-generating change than I could have imagined. We are all under to do more while understanding less, while having endured the constant hum of hype about our jobs being “solved.” The notion that we must embrace and integrate all of these rapid changes right now without thought or question is absurd. We are a spoiled bunch, for sure. But we’re not as spoiled as our bosses, and I refuse to concede any points that put the ball further into their court.
Gergely Orosz has always struck me as an unwitting apologist for technocapital. His pragmatism is slanted more towards career pragmatism rather than technical pragmatism. He takes the industry’s incentive structures as a given, and works backwards from them, a default framing that is on full display in the post that I’m responding to. But the industry isn’t some natural phenomenon that we cannot change; people made it the way it is. And people help perpetuate its current form by engaging with it on its own terms.
If we ever want to build a less nakedly exploitative version of the tech industry, we have to stop accepting the values of the current one. And that means rejecting the kind of post-hoc social Darwinism that undergirds Orosz’s take, or the kind of lottery economy mentality prevalent among the young hustlers of Silicon Valley trying to win a ticket out of the permanent underclass. You’ve already won a small lottery if you were a software engineer during the ZIRP heydays. Maybe it would be nice to use whatever you’ve gained to resist the industry getting even worse.