Power to the Programmers
Talking with Stefan Morales about organized labor and ethics in Silicon Valley on the Working Together Podcast
I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Working Together’s founder, Stefan Morales for The Working Together Podcast about how a progressive and humane technology sector is an important ARCHIPELAGO of a Possible Future. Stefan’s expansive theme for his show is that all-around us right now, there are islands of possibility for a more progressive and sustainable world. All we need to do is find those archipelagos, and help them grow.
Our conversation was wide-ranging, ending with a bit of a call-to-arms to my fellow tech workers: from those of us on the cushy end of the spectrum (full-time salaried positions as software engineers, managers, and executives) to those of us trying to make ends meet in the gig-end of the tech world (from Uber drivers to the contractors at Google).
(You can listen to the full episode here)
In our conversation, Stefan and I talked about how Google employees shut down Google’s bid for the Project Maven military contract, and Amazon employee’s similar (but ultimately failed) efforts to get Amazon to back out of providing their facial recognition services to American police forces.
We also talked about Google employees’ walkout over Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s $90 million payout after leaving the company in 2014, following a sexual assault allegation, and Susan Fowler’s outspoken writings about the toxic, patriarchal culture of Uber. Stefan reached out to me after reading my articles It’s Time For Tech Workers to Get Political, and Technologists Should Abandon Their Craft, both of which drew inspiration from Susan Fowler’s piece for Vanity Fair, Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They’ve Created a Monster.
At the end of the piece, Fowler underscores that it is only the ones who are enabling the problem (the software engineers) who really understand the looming threat that the surveillance and gig economy poses to workers and broader society. With that understanding, there’s an aspect of responsibility and ethics that software engineers should be exploring and thinking about as part of their work.
This is important because highly valued laborers, like software engineers, still have a rare ability to strike before automation eats-up their work too. Valuable workers like software engineers can walk away from their desks, organize amongst themselves, and make their concerns and interests tangible to the owners and investors.
Stefan and I both believe that they should continue organizing amongst themselves to do more of this, and begin forming archipelagos within the tech world. This work starts with recognizing the ethical and political complexity of the software engineering work that is central to Silicon Valley’s innovation engine.
The following is an excerpt from our conversation, slightly edited for clarity. The whole episode can be found here.
The Economic, Political and Social Power of Software Engineers
Tyler: “Fowler’s article was about the ways in which Uber’s software convinces and offers incentives to Uber drivers to do more.
There are lots of different ways and lots of different rates at which you can be paid, depending on how many rides you do per period of time, how high you get rated during those rides, and there are tiers for drivers. So, if you give more rides and you accept a higher percentage of rides that come to you through the automated queuing system, and you get higher star ratings, you can make more money.
There’s tons of power on the software engineering side to just tweak those tools a little bit and say ‘OK you know now you need to do 700 rides per week before you can bust into the next tier, and we’ll bump your pay up by X amount.’
Fowler describes overhearing a conversation between two software engineers that are basically saying, ‘you have to dangle the carrot right in front of the stupid driver’s face and then they’ll do whatever we want ’em to do’
“…That’s very appealing to people like me, who got a computer science degree. It’s very mathematical. It’s very cold…”
So people who have this power — and they’re sometimes aware of it like these two engineers were — to design incentives on those systems need to think really carefully about what that means for the human on the other end of those systems. Because if you’re thinking of a driver as someone who needs to be tricked into doing Uber’s bidding by paying them the least possible amount of money, that’s an optimization problem. That’s very appealing to people like me, who got a computer science degree. It’s very mathematical. It’s very cold. And you can do it. You can ask: ‘How do I get the drivers (and you don’t think of them as Tim or Sarah or whoever, driving, you think of “the drivers”) to move the maximum amount on the least possible distance between rides, and how much do I have to pay those cars in order to get them to follow the behavior that I’ve chosen for them.
So, one of the things that I’m trying to get across to people through my writing is: if you’re someone who’s in an industry like that, and you have that kind of power, you need to think really carefully about it. You need to think about what the implications of your work are going to be, and for whom. Not just your responsibility to the company — and you do have a responsibility to the company, they’re paying you and you have to do what they say to some extent.
“…I’d like people to think a little more carefully about that calculus and include some other outputs as valuable outputs…”
But you also have to think about what your impact on society is, and how willing you are to just take orders from the company. Given the position of power that you’re in:
- you have an engineering degree;
- and you’re making the top salary because they think that you’re valuable to them;
- and you have access to the people who are in decision making positions.
Those are three things that a lot of people don’t have. And if you have those things… I really hope that more people will start thinking carefully about how they can guide those things to say not just ‘how can I maximize profit for Uber?’ but also ‘How can I ensure that drivers, who are doing their best and trying hard, are compensated fairly with a good wage?’ for example.
And this problem exists in a lot of different places within the software industry, not just Uber. There are tons of people solving those kinds of optimization problems that involve paying people as little as possible to get the maximum amount of work possible, and I’d like people to think a little more carefully about that calculus and include some other outputs as valuable outputs.”
The Inherent Policy Work of Software Engineering
Stefan: “…You kind of touch on this a little bit in one of your pieces where you say that you’d like to see more software engineers leave the Valley and move into other positions entirely (like legal positions, etc.) and bring their knowledge to those spaces, and I actually see the need also for another reversal of that as well. There is this sense in a lot of tech circles where a lot of problems — and some writers have talked about the ideology of “solutionism” — you know, a lot of problems are just simple logical puzzles that we need to solve or optimize, or whatever the case may be.
And in many respects, they’re thinking a lot like government policy and legislative analysts think about incentive problems and incentive regimes, and how to organize society and things like this. These are the same kinds of questions that a lot of my colleagues (from when I used to work in government) were thinking through all the time. But they had a totally different system of checks and balances in place that kept them thinking about optimization, sure, but also thinking about a broad array of interests within that field of optimization.
So, it wasn’t that you just had this one interest here (the capitalist interest) which is to grow and to profit, but you had maybe a collection of those, and then you had some public interest groups (that were organized and had something to say and had their interests articulated), etc. And you had to balance this whole field of interests as best as you could in what kind of policy you were designing.
And the way government works is that you go through a policy analysis and development phase, and then you go into a legislative analysis and development phase. And it’s in this policy phase where things are quite messy: you’re sorting out questions like ‘what are the governing principles that we need to have in place to begin even thinking about this problem?’ and ‘what kind of solution could we design that would satisfy these different interests in the best possible balance?’ and so on.
And you’re doing that analysis while you’re also being directed by a political authority that is elected by the people, and they’re being held to account (supposedly) through that relationship. But, of course, they’re also being funded by private entities that gave them money during their campaign, or whatever the case may be, and so they have those interests in mind as well. It’s skewed in those senses. It’s not perfect. But it gives you a kind of framework for [understanding the interests that they are trying to represent through the policy].
And then they go through all that process and come out the other end with instructions for legislative drafters, who then come in and piece together the actual legal code for how these things are going to look on paper and how these relationships are going to play out (who is allowed to do what, who must do this, who may do that, etc.)…
All that is happening in government all the time.
[Designing incentive regimes] is a government-like problem that the tech world is now having to think through. Software engineers are having to become policy analysts and legislative analysts.”
Tyler: “Or at least maybe they should!” (laughs)
Stefan: “They should. But they’re also already doing it… but within a very tight environment of interests. So, they’re doing good policy work, but they’ve only got a very tight realm of interests that they’re working within: the owners, the shareholders, etc.”
Tyler: “And to an extent the customers.”
Stefan: “Right. But it’s just that tight little bit [of interests.] They’re basically using technology for the process of optimizing incentive outcomes, that then appear in the real world, that then affect workers and communities, and how gentrification works and all of these things which are big huge system-wide problems.
In a perfect world, we would be thinking through that broader system through the sorts of things that we’re doing, together. But we’re not and so there’s a need for workers who have the power and who have the capability to make that tight bundle of interests feel something.
There’s a need for them to flex their muscles. And not just in the traditional socialist sense. That’s one approach to organizing that works, but there’s multiple other ways that folks can organize themselves and there’s multiple other ways that people can use the technology that they’re already comfortable in, to create different outcomes, different collaborative efforts within organizations and across organizations.”
So, Where to From Here?
In our conversation, Stefan and I talk about the challenges of organizing labor (Amazon employee’s efforts with facial recognition come to mind), especially amongst the precariat class of workers. It’s certainly not an easy task, so it’s important to start with small steps which we outline in more detail in the podcast episode:
If you are a valued employee, recognize the power of your position, and begin to express yourself and your values when it matters.
Start a study group with fellow colleagues around…
Follow the Tech Workers Coalition connect with them on slack (https://techworkerscoalition.org/subscribe/ ), and if you live in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston or DC, consider attending one of their events.
If you are a member of the precariat class, stay tuned to the podcast and this publication as Stefan will be covering this topic more in the future (potential interviews with the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, and Guy Standing, to name a few).
Lastly, if you are an entrepreneur who is looking to start something. Consider the Zebra instead of the Unicorn! The digital cooperative, like Enspiral or Outlandish, instead of the conventional hypergrowth startup.
Stefan and I are both very curious about your thoughts, so please leave a comment below! Stay tuned to the Working Together Podcast, and this Medium publication for follow-up conversations on this and other vital ARCHIPELAGOS of a Possible Future.
