“I fight for the user” has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that “I don’t need a union, I’m a temporarily embarrassed founder.”

Oof. I don’t like this sentence, because I’m in it.

All respect to Mr Doctorow, but he’s got this wrong:

Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.

…and…

Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents’ funerals and their kids’ graduations to ship on time.

It wasn’t “vocational awe” it was money that lead tech workers to work long hours and sacrifice. Lots and lots of money, five to ten times what your non-tech same-aged peers were getting. It was so much money that if you didn’t live too high on the hog, it set you up for a very nice retirement and having “fuck you” money in your late 30s and 40s. During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.

With all the tech layoffs and enshitification, those meteoric salaries are starting to come down to Earth. They’re still high comparatively to other professions though. So I think tech unions will gain more traction now, but employers also have more tech workers (right now) so they can bully their current workers to try to avoid unions. However, tech is cyclical, as is hiring. I’ve been in tech long enough to see 3 large downturns, but when the pendulum swings, the hiring returns and (so far) those high salaries have too. If the pendulum swings too quickly and the high salaries (and now “work from home” requirement) returns, tech unions will be back to where they were struggling to establish themselves in the industry of job hoppers jumping ship from one employer in under a year or less chasing the larger compensation.

“The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.”

– from George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda

vs

“Vocational awe” describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in “caring professions.”

I do not like the 21st century. Richard Scary you were my only hope.

Blame the “corporate buzzword”

“The web” “The cloud” “Blockchain” “AI”

Get non-technical management out of technology and you’ll see a 180° change

I would say the only silver lining here is that the exploitation of labor puts these giants in a precarious position where all of their critical work is being done by unhappy, extrinsically motivated people who are often only still there because they’re relatively immobile (i.e., they aren’t good enough at their job to find another one easily) or they were kept on because their salary is lower and they’re less experienced. It makes these massively complicated technology ecosystems extremely brittle, which is why software has been shit across the board for the past decade or so. It’s possible there will be a pendulum swing if and when quality becomes an attainable and marketable feature again.

Full-stack and DevOps were enshittification events in my book.