Pronetarians and peaceful revolution.

I have been reading Why Should Software Architects Write Code? and I was like hey it was our job before.

Like I noticed a pattern for more of our added value work requiring an intuition of our job to have been taken away from coders: QA, product management, higher stages of design. On the other hand we have been as coders given more and more time consuming side tasks like administrative and management tasks (such as agile), coordination, specifications that are normally better efficiently given to near orthogonal sets of skills while the expectations in terms of productivity have been held the same in an increased workload.  Generating the -proven to responsible for burnout- crunches.

On the other hand the juicy part of our job have been deported to better paid more business friendly units with less and less know how of practical software. A know how necessary in the estimation of prices and costs (time is money). Thus efficiently making business.

Project management, business analyst, product managers, Human Resources, even boss lead the work of skilled coders are not themselves coders taking decision impacting the economy without the experimental knowledge of cost and feasibility. Experimental first hand knowledge seems to be the only true knowledge that betters software cost estimation hence pricing and costing, not by much. But by a tad. Hence should lead to a tad more cost efficient business decisions.

Having people steal our jobs without skills sure hurt the whole economy. The very few businesses that succeed in IT are those whose executive have been amazing geeks themselves. And the most successful one are professional organization with all the function of the company fairly coordinate together in terms of authority (benefits of position) vs responsibility (inherents risk of the realisation).
There  is a simple name for the total non overlap of authority and responsibility : it is called  total stress.

We are facing an incredible time of stress of the interests of those whose codes and those who craft the market.

But in the first place it hurts even more to deny the true nature of creation that is both hard to deliver and which benefits of the creation are given as an incentive to ignorant of the craftsmanship who can just need to capture more coders (designers, redactors, journalists, event organizer) in their factory generating rents of IP in exchange for flexible jobs and squeeze them like lemons without regard for neither the economical nor human costs to make more money by having enough money in the first place. You can even generate the first batch of capital by spending your free time to craft your own capital. Giving anyway for this an unfair advantage to the people having time and money in the first place to have hobbies. IT market is rigged on the demand side.

Our market is rigged by Intellectual Property on the offer side. And how it favours birth and antagonizes the know how. On both the offer and on the demand level. And it makes a very counter productive systems. The regulations creates this unstable equilibrium by favouring the capital over the craftsmanship in the worst possible way possible that cannot result in anything than a counter-adaptation of the business to the market, then contradicting the very sole purpose of economy which is to efficiently handles the limited physical resources on earth. Our Computer based economy is just dystopic, giving incentive to actually use resources far less efficiently compared to sooner in our progressive history. Like a first example of dys-ruption. A negative industrial revolution that fuels its local success on being inefficient at global level. Like a bug in the design at the macro economical level.
 
Even among coders: they are the ones who get their legitimity by experience others by expensive diploma even though Computer Science diploma are still not correlated with any clear proof of indeed producing better (or worst) coders. Another distortion of the market leading to a double problem of over confidence of the under skilled (Doner Kruger effect?).

Regulations and perverted macro economical effects are affecting locally our work organization and it is proving to be having an adverse effect. And (dys)efficient software are amplifying this in structure adopting their work organization to our software build on wrong assumptions of the value of human in the creation of business value.



Giving the benefits and the authority of the works not to those who know their jobs (praxis) but to those who to know to make benefits out of it that have totally contradictory interests (doxein) is creating a bug in our actual world with non null consequences.



The word pronetarians can be used in this context.




And this does not apply to coders only, it apply hence for the heart of the whole "service" economy. 

And that is the ugly secret behind our modern crisis. Giving the reins to create working innovative business models to those who have interest in conservatism and lack of disruption. So the interest our bosses are conflicting our interests. And using our work to make it more efficient in the process to destroy our past progress. Plus, we are incentivized at building a system efficiently helping our bosses to get rid of us for their benefits. 

It is time we face the truth: this is a clear effect of the intellectual property economy. But also of probably more interconnected political system that like our software counterparts is having leverage effects able in worst case to amplify good and bad directions very fast.

The same reason that makes works inefficient or of low quality exists in the organization in the first place generates software that will reflect it. Also dys-organising the economy by changing the way people are accounted for their creation of value.

Software and coders model the real world.

And if IP is the root cause, since it is a global context, thus it affects all software.And also chaotic properties of our system are affecting our economy (HFT) the other way round.

We can be smart here, and also think that software affecting the world we can change the world by thinking politically the implication in refusing to code.

So now, I hereby prefer to resign being a coder in these economical conditions.

As long as this situation goes on I quit coding, because I had enough good realization to live happily ever after remembering  some smalls successes while waiting for the improvement.

Stepping down and not taking part in a poorly designed system, be it at the sacrifice of the only stuff I know how to do in life, is my share of trying to improve the system.

Sometimes, you can vote with your feet. In mass it would make the software economy unable to sustain itself with an high level of stress and attrition. And that could change a lot of things. Not only people have power in not buying, but they also have power in not offering their workforce.

The peaceful revolution we can make is to leave the market and make this economy die slowly by lack of offer and also of demand. I myself disfavor amazon and apps stores and find cheaper low tech substitutes to software functions.

I quit this market to object our actual way of coding software, and to stop taking part in this game of slaughter on both customers revenue, coders revenue, and some profession we take part in enslaving.

I did not wake up any morning in my life thinking I was the bad guy. But sometimes I go to sleep thinking it.
I accepted and made my juniors accept knowingly a job where we would be in-equitably stripped from the value we were creating transforming fixed wages into incredible levers called patents/IP rights resulting in disproportionate revenues of capital that are rents obtained preferentially by birth rights. And we did this by transforming and modeling others job or traditional knowledge in an ultra competitive way.  Competition efficiency at lower level of works to support birth biased practices efficiently resulting in de facto monopolies. Monopolies are bad. Concentration of power and money results in historical high amplitude fatal issues.

And I think I am plain stupid for having believed in being able to improve the world by building good software or using open source/free software. I did the opposite.


Hell is paved with good intentions. And our economy is suffering from our lack of questioning not our intentions at being good at heart but refusing to face the objective daily truth of the evolution of our society towards a dystopia the better we code.

The more I am good at my work, the more I hurt someone else.

This is I think what the Milgram experiment is all about.

You know, the pain was not true (Milgram never let people die). But sometimes it is okay to reason with empathy. Even if emotions are clouding are reasons. They can be a good compass in life. I suffer for having written piece of code of big brother like software making telemarketers closely monitored in a precise inhuman way. I was imagining their life when I was taking part at improving the monitors' view while degrading the UI of less paid user's side by more kludge making their work harder. Our way of building software is resulting in making the less skilled worker's life horrible.

We lie to ourselves saying the world will end if we stop coding or someone else will take our job and nothing will change except we would be miserable given the economy. But the more we invest with our skills in this economy the more we enforce this situation.

Times will be tough. Today, I courageously plan to never work again in the actual software industry. I will also selectively change for a more reasonable use of computers, software and incite people to be careful themselves.

Rethinking to work in my field is peaceful and if it inspires 1.1 other persons, I will have done my job at trying.

I wish the market to slowly change so we don't destroy the good stuff we made. A revolution made by the coders peacefully refusing to code in these conditions could be smart to avoid other less peaceful one.

And I wish myself to find a job where I have objective way to check I improve people's life, everyone's life.  Not only the one from my boss, coworkers, or providers but also from all the people, even the beggars.

I am scared as shit for I am taking huge risks on a feeling.

Wish me luck, for like Odysseus I set once again my sail away having erred too much in the arms of Nausicaa. Still unsure I will defeats the Gods and the hazards of my new journey to come for something claimed to be a  delusion. To live happily ever after, making people happy around me.