Most Software Dev Jobs Are Bullshit Jobs

Since I published my piece on leaving software development, people have written me to ask what we can do to make software development a better profession for workers. I’m not sure, as there are people who are perfectly happy with the way things are now, though I wonder about the long term effects it will have on them both physically and mentally. I believe that there is literally no reason software developers should ever work 80, or even 40 hours a week.

Let’s look at other professions with long hours. Like surgeons. Some operations take long continuous hours that cannot be broken up. For example, the surgery to separate conjoined twins takes around 20 hours. I’m sorry, as important as software devs (and the recruiters who call us “rock stars”) want to think they are, they are not surgeons. With a few rare exceptions, you as a software developer are not saving anyone’s life. Think about the work you’re doing. It is really probably not very crucial at all to anyone. It might even what David Graeber calls a “bullshit job”:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it

I’ll look back to the last time I worked late nights. It was to make a website for a stupid product that is critical to no one. That frankly the world would be better off without. I’ve spent thousands of nights like this over the past ten years. I don’t care about working for bullshit, but I do care if it takes up a significant portion of my life. My work didn’t make the world a better place for anyone, it just made some guy that wasn’t me rich.

One mistake software devs make is they think our high salaries make us “rich”. Especially if you work long hours, you end up paying a lot to doctors, therapists, nannies, and restaurants. The only person who gets genuinely rich in the long term, who doesn’t have to worry about health insurance or retirement ever, is the person who owns the company. Getting paid well is not the same as being rich. Owning capital makes you truly rich, not being a laborer.

The people I felt really bad for were the people with kids. My dad worked long hours too in tech. He missed a lot of my childhood. That’s a choice some people make to do what they love, but some people make it for less glamorous reasons. He has the same crippling arthritis I started developing when I was in my late twenties. That’s despite the fact we both have had excellent diet and exercise regimes, and all the standing desks and other widgets our salaries could buy. Sorry, you can’t exercise to make up for sitting or standing at one place for 40 hours a week.

Also I’d like to have kids myself. I respect people who want to do the 40-hour-work-week and kids, but I can’t imagine doing that myself. I don’t get enough fulfillment from work to justify paying someone else to raise my kids while I push blocks around on a page for some dumb product.

So long hours in software development don’t make you rich, and they probably damage your health, they might even hurt your family. The only reason people tolerate this is because they’ve been convinced that this is the way we do things. Because companies have made sure it is a harder path to do anything else. As I’m sure many people were before labor activists pushed for the weekend. I bet a bunch of bros were like “Oh two days off?? Such a luxury, those [insert whatever the equivalent SJW was at the time].”

But newsflash, this isn’t the way we do things. If it was, it wouldn’t harm our bodies so much. Our bodies which evolved over millions of years, in which sitting in front of glowing screens or even wage labor wasn’t even really a thing.

Workers are more productive than ever, but the benefits aren’t going to us workers in the form of more time for ourselves and our family. They are going to the people that own the companies they work for. You can go on about how that’s just the way things are and you can’t expect work to be fun or whatever, but don’t forget you’re just boot licking.

We should call bullshit what it is, and demand our lives back from it.