When I was growing up, my dad was an engineer, and many of his friends and colleagues were trained, licensed engineers as well. Not software “engineers”, where there is truly no such thing (yet). But people who have proven themselves capable and responsible for maintaining the public good and safety by applying known, verifiable-in-advance processes to known, verifiable-in-advance inputs to produce creative, innovative known, verifiable-in-advance-and-validated-afterward outputs.
In that world, someone with a mere 10–15 years of paid experience would typically be well into his journeyman years. Double that, with a suitably wide variety of experience, and one starts to be recognised as a senior engineer on her or his way to becoming a master; a leader of teams and projects on which large sums of money and even larger sums of public trust, including life and limb at scale, may be plausibly trusted.
I’ve been writing software with the expectation of being paid since 1979. I’ve been told to my face, numerous times, in several different countries, that I’m “too old for the job” or “too experienced for that level work” (when no other is available at that company) and numerous variations thereon. I’ve experienced companies that expected people to routinely work seven-day weeks and 12–14-hour days for years on end, flying in the face of 150 years of collected knowledge correlating quantity with quality of work. (See here and here for two fresh-off-the-cuff discussions; a moment with your search engine of choice will turn up many more.) Young people are preferred, I’ve also been explicitly told, because they’ll work harder for longer with less real benefit to show for it. (At Microsoft and IBM, I knew far more recently-divorced people than happily-married people.)
We’re easily exploited because we have no collective solidarity, and because we have no shared consensus on an organised, shared, recorded body of knowledge, no professional standards, and no loyalty to anyone but ourselves. So long as we let others define our roles, and deny our professional advancement and recognition, things will continue to get worse, in Sili Valley and elsewhere.
Henry Ford doubled his profits within two years by imposing an eight-hour work day and raising pay. Plenty of other authentic capitalists have followed his example. That none of this fits the current corporatist narrative tells us how far we’ve diverged from authentic, sustainable capitalism, and gives us a good idea what needs to be remedied.
Nobody should have to repeat the experience of a 28-year-old kid I used to know, who worked 162 straight hours (with version-control commits and logbook entries as corroboration), shipped mostly-kinda-sorta-working crap that had to be tossed and rewritten six months later and, during the after-action meeting, had a stroke that the doctors later said put him within “30 seconds” of dying. There’s a word for company managers and directors who knowingly put their people into situations where that sort of thing can occur: malfeasance. Contrary to Sili Valley Received Wisdom, the Myth of the Hero Programmer is a myth.
