CodeX

Everything connected with Tech & Code. Follow to join our 1M+ monthly readers

Member-only story

Rating Engineers On A Scale Of 1 To 10

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
5 min readFeb 24, 2025

--

The Prisoner has nothing on the modern day corporate practice of reducing employees to mere inconsequential integers.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

The Prisoner, a truly stand out series from the 1960s, was prescient in so many ways regarding the modern world and especially one in particular that related to how the description of a person is reduced, quite inhumanely, to a mere number on a printed page, locked away in a filing cabinet in a deep, automated, vault.

The only thing really being different, in the modern day corporate dystopia of the Grand Game of Software Engineering (or in many related fields I’d wager), is that while you’re now just the same impersonal number it’s now a number in cell on a spreadsheet, typically Microsoft Excel¹ of course, locked away in a very similar fashion in a file, on a disk, in a data centre, somewhere out there in the nebulous cloud.

You might be lucky if it’s encrypted, or even in a data centre at all, should your HR department or “people manager” have remembered to actually save it, or rather you, but that’s a whole other story. It’s not like the management hierarchy or the HR enforcers excel² at security after all, but then again, that’s yet another whole story we don’t have time for today.

Suffice it to say that you are that number in the cell, probably misunderstood to be a DATE³ in the…

--

--

CodeX
CodeX

Published in CodeX

Everything connected with Tech & Code. Follow to join our 1M+ monthly readers

Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

Responses (4)