How developers found themselves in the vanguard of labor activism
The pandemic has impacted our lives negatively in so many ways, particularly before vaccines and we were all in lockdown, and one area in particular stands out: our rights as employees.
During the first phase of the pandemic, many companies decided, forced by circumstances, to send their workforce home. Obviously, this was not possible for all organizations or for all jobs: people operating machines, manual labor or those requiring face-to-face attention. But people whose main work tool is a computer — around 37% of the workforce according to a European Union report — overnight found themselves working from home.
Of course, people reacted in different ways, usually depending on their home situation. Some were horrified at the idea of working from home (and even more so if they could not even leave the house to go out for a coffee or a beer during the day), to others who embraced it, probably because they lived in a spacious property with no children to look after. And of course, some people had already been doing it for some time.
But a particular profile soon stood out: developers; people whose job is to convert ideas into executable code, who usually need peace and quiet to do so, and who obviously are comfortable with digital technology. Needless to say, most developers were…
