It’s not our job to fix our employers

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I have a Patreon!

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The full essay

I have a Patreon! #

I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing.

I’ve been here a while and am not going away.

But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in publishing.

For that, I’d like your help.

Hence, a Patreon.

It’s going to offer exclusive material, support tiers, and hopefully a few novel goodies that I’m working on at the moment.

Currently, it has two membership tiers:

Supporters, who get access to all the stuff. €7 / month.

Patrons, who get access but also mentions in the newsletter, podcast, and are listed at the end of the video. €25 / month.

Any support you can give is very much appreciated.

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It's not our job to fix our employers

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This broken industry is too big of a problem for software developers to solve alone #

As I wrote in my last newsletter, software developers don’t seem to be doing well.

I can relate. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for dysfunctional software companies and startups in the past, and those dysfunctions have increasingly become the norm across the industry over the past few years.

The response was greater than I expected, both on the newsletter and elsewhere, so I wanted to pause and try to put those responses into context.

I had already written and recorded the next couple of videos and newsletters even before I uploaded the last one, but I’m postponing those, because I think it’s important to sometimes stop and listen instead of constantly lecturing at people.

Even though most of the responses were positive – at least, positive in the sense that they could relate to or recognised what many software developers seemed to be going through – some were less supportive.

This is the internet. Obviously some people are going to be annoying. Most of it you can ignore, but a few of them highlighted the big shift in attitudes towards tech that has been taking place over the past decade.

People aren’t on “our” side any more. Quite a few have gone from having largely positive feelings towards tech – considering it to be a force for progress – to thinking it’s an industry that’s ruining the world.

Tech is the new tobacco.

So, if we’re miserable, the attitude some have is that it’s our own fault for making the world we live in worse.

Or, that we deserve what’s happening to our field because we didn’t do enough to prevent bad things from happening.

Or, our work in the tech industry, no matter what it was we actually did, means we have it coming.

This is what falls out from the now relatively common public sentiment that tech is the new tobacco industry. How that framing has played out in media coverage and discourse, has quite correctly emphasised the abuses, the legal shenanigans, how tech is spending money to manipulate the public, and other strategies that the tech industry seems to have copied from big tobacco.

But the other consequence of that shift in public sentiment is: if your industry gets the reputation of being like the tobacco industry, people stop having any sympathy for those of us working in that industry.

Nobody cares if a sales person in a tobacco company burns out from stress or pressure. If your job is selling opioids to college athletes – “but it’s legal! I’m only helping doctors decide on the correct treatment” – hearing that you’re suffering will only make people smile. Now, finally, a sign that the world is just place.

This is a little bit unfair to many of us for two reasons:

First, the industry wasn’t this bad when most senior people in the industry started. You don’t have to have gone into coding thirty years ago, like me, to have had reason to believe it was an industry with p