Management, Labour Process and Software Development

Reality Bites

Rowena Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134361168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

This revealing book is about software development, the developers themselves, and how their work is organized and managed. The latest original research from Australia, Europe, and the UK is used to examine the differences between the image and reality of work in this industry. Chapters also cover issues surrounding the management of 'knowledge work and workers' and professionals in order to expose some of the problems of the management of software development work and workers.

1 Introduction

Myth and reality

Rowena Barrett

Introduction

This book is the result of research conducted in five countries on three continents. While the end result may look like a cohesive and unified whole, it certainly never started out that way. These five studies were conceptualized, developed and conducted independently of one another. Indeed, prior to the September 2001 Work, Employment and Society (WES) conference in Nottingham the collective existence of these independent studies was unknown as were the researchers to one another.

The catalyst for this book was listening to two papers at the WES conference: one by Dorothea Voss-Dahm and the other by Bente Rasmussen and Birgitte Johansen. As I sat through their presentations (which for some reason I had not originally planned to attend) I could have sworn they had spoken to the same software developers I had for my research. Both papers were illustrated by quotes from developers and what I was hearing from developers in Norway and Germany about their work, their commitment, identity and the firms they worked for was pretty much the same – to all intents and purposes it was identical to what I had heard in Melbourne, Australia. I now realize this is not just the case with the three projects in Australia, Norway and Germany as the same can be said about the US and the UK. And not just about the studies reported in this book where there is a common analytical approach. For example in Swart and Kinnie’s (2003) article about sharing knowledge in knowledge-intensive firms they cite a senior software developer who shared some responsibility for recruitment in ‘SoftWareCo’ saying, ‘I think of it as inviting someone to a party. You know, sometimes you invite people who you want to come along – not necessarily those who deserve to come along’ (‘senior software engineer’ quoted in Swart and Kinnie 2003: 67).

In my research (this aspect reported in Barrett 2004), while the CEO and founder of Webboyz did not use those exact words he meant the same thing when he explained their approach to recruitment.

When we recruit people what we look for is not so much what brains they’ve got or how smart they are or anything like that, it’s how passionate are they about this area. Is this something that means more to them than just a job? Is this really where they want their life to be and are they smart enough that if we step back and say ‘here’s a broad picture of what we want you to do go away and fill in the details yourself', will they do it?

(Webboyz, CEO)

Similarly in the article by Johanna Shih (2004) looking at the pace and rhythm of work in Silicon Valley high tech firms she reports the Vice President of a new start-up saying ‘I am looking for a person who is committed to the company, who is committed to the project, who believes that the idea can really take off in the marketplace’ (‘Chen’ quoted in Shih 2004: 234) and this is interpreted as total dedication to the moment, not a long term commitment to the company. ‘Chen’ goes on to explain how he expects people to work,

You must be independent and motivated. I always tell my engineers, you are your own managers. There is a pile of work on the table and I don’t want to give you the deadline to finish the work because the work is almost infinite at this point in time so why don’t you just dive in, and find your own work and deadlines and it’s up to you to figure out how to swim.

(‘Chen’ quoted in Shih 2004: 234)

For me the key issue is, how, given different national cultures and institutional features and arrangements with respect to business and employment, different product and labour markets, firm sizes and cultural and social expectations about work and employment, do you get workers and managers in software firms in different parts of the developed world thinking and behaving in a remarkably similar fashion?

Software work and workers: a labour process analysis

This book is part of the process of trying to understand this phenomenon and therefore it seeks to shed some light on the differences between the image and reality of both software development work and those who undertake this work. The term ‘software’ first began to appear in the late 1950s (Ceruzzi 1998), while the importance of software as opposed to hardware can be pinned to the late 1960s when it started to become a tradeable commodity (see Philipson this volume).¹ Software is variously defined but is essentially ‘a uniquely designed, highly structured set of assertions, instructions and decisions all of which must be negotiated, codified, analysed for consistency and validated for effectiveness in a constantly changing environment’ (Weber 1997: 37).² It also has the capability to radically alter the location, timing and content of work for other workers as it increasingly shapes the core of multiple systems (Quintas 1994; Zachary 1998).

There has been an ongoing debate between the ‘agilists’ and ‘formalists’ about whether developing software is an ‘art’ (where ‘code and fix’ or ‘hacking’³ may best describe the software development process) or a ‘science’ where an engineering discipline can be applied to software development (see for example Quintas 1994; Austin and Devin 2003). These debates are important as they frame the techniques of software development, but by and large they have taken place within the more technical software development literature, both practitioner and academic.

This book, by way of contrast, comes from a non-technical, sociological perspective. It is also driven by the view that the work of developing or producing computer software is generally seen as a new occupation. Software developers are often seen as typical of ‘knowledge workers’ (Reich 1991; Scarbrough 1999): the small elite of entrepreneurs, scientists, technicians, information technologists, professionals, educators and consultants (Rifkin 1995) or symbolic analysts (Reich 1991) who trade globally in the manipulation of symbols. They are also central figures in Richard Florida’s (2002) creative classes and they are the ones who created the Internet which Manual Castells says ‘is the fabric of our lives’ (Castells 2001: 1). These workers are among those predicted to be the future aristocrats of the labour market (Reich 1991; Castells 1996) given the centrality of knowledge as a commodity and characteristics of the contemporary economy.

However these workers present a challenge to managers: how do you organize work and manage these individuals when their intellectual capacity, creativity and talent is the source of a firm’s competitive advantage? While this is an interesting question in general about knowledge work and workers, it is more so when the nature of software development work is not well understood. For example the hype about technology ushering in a ‘new economy’ and the high drama associated with the IT industry generally, Silicon Valley⁴ specifically and the dot.com boom and bust in particular lead to a view, largely promoted in the business press, of software developers earning high wages, working with enlightened managers in modern (funky, open plan) workplaces that have chill-out rooms and other spaces to promote creativity, and being able to come and go from work as they please. At the height of the dot.com boom these sorts of stories abounded. Indeed even the ongoing effects of the fallout from the March 2000 ‘tech wreck’ (the NASDAQ correction in the US) were used to highlight a particular lifestyle: for example one article reported how Australian Internet workers’ personal spending had become more circumspect with weekly restaurant bills falling to less than A$150/week (Nicholas 7 August 2001); and another suggested that many of the ‘dot.goners’ were ‘busy partying their silicon cash away in LA or catching a tan on the beaches of Bali or Hawaii, waiting for the next [IT] wave to happen’ (Steele 24 July 2001).

The effect of the dot.com boom was that software developers shed the negative connotations associated with the popular image of people working on computers as ‘nerds’.⁵ They instead joined the ranks of the young, upwardly mobile ‘gold-collar professionals’. What also happened, however, was that the hype, and the seemingly rapid technological advances that were made, served to obscure much of what the people developing software actually do from day to day at work and what their managers ‘do’ in order to get software developed. Peter Cappelli (2001: 94) has argued that ‘aside from pay, many IT jobs – but especially computer programming jobs – would qualify as lousy work’. He goes further to argue that employers do not even know which software developers have the best skills (Cappelli 2001: 95).

The purpose of this book is therefore to strip away some of the mystery of how software is developed, how the work is organized and software developers managed and what this means in terms of their identity and commitment to their work and their employment.

A unifying approach

This book is an edited collection in which Beirne, Ramsay and Panteli’s (1998: 142) observation that ‘the nature of the work performed in producing and operating software should be a matter of great curiosity to labour process analysis’ is taken seriously. A dialectical approach is undertaken in this book and the analysis starts with the totality of economic and social relations in the software development sector and takes into consideration all its contradictory constituents in order to conduct a more complete analysis of the labour process of software development. A dialectical approach sees contradiction and change at the heart of society and seeks an explanation for these phenomena. And it is the interaction between structural conditions and agency that provides the explanation in this book.⁶

This is the approach Gideon Kunda (1992) took in his examination of culture and normative control in ‘Tech’. He argues ‘to understand and evaluate normative control, it is necessary to grasp the underlying experiential transaction that lies at its foundation: not only the ideas and actions of managers, but the response of members’ (Kunda 1992: 22). In this book the chapters are based on original research undertaken by academics in Australia, Germany, Norway, the UK and the US to address the software development labour process and the nature of software development work, strategies used to control that labour process and issues of identity, commitment and career.

Such an analysis locates firms within their sector and the sector’s trajectory of development (in an historical sense). At the heart of this analysis lies questions of extraction and realization of surplus value as well as the contradictions and tensions for management that arise at different moments in the circuit of capital (Kelly 1998). However, to overcome charges of this analysis being overly structuralist – where ‘behaviour is seen as determined by and reacting to structural constraints’ (Astley and Van de Ven 1983: 247) – then equal priority is given to how structures constrain and enable action, and in particular how the reality of people’s working lives is formed and constrained by the interplay of the labour market and their expectations of work. The issues of identity and commitment are addressed in this book as are the means of management control as, to paraphrase Marx, ‘people make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing’. In other words, this book is concerned with both the structural forces that lay down broad parameters within which action takes place, as well as how, in confronting those structural forces to varying degrees, actors change both the nature of those forces and themselves.

This is important given the debate over the nature of (and indeed existence of) a ‘new economy’ and role of knowledge workers within it. Many software development firms exist as marginal players in a dynamic and rapidly evolving industry, which means that management are constantly aware of the potential for sudden death or takeover, while employees’ status is equally as temporary and their privileged position in the labour market is relative: events following the NASDAQ correction in March 2000 highlight this fact and brought about a reappraisal of the over-hyped claims of the ‘dot.coms’. While immediate job losses were not significant following the burst of the Internet bubble, the drop off in business investment in technology later in 2000, which continued into 2001 and is only beginning to increase in 2004, led to more significant retrenchment activity in larger firms (Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network 2001). Similarly the recent growth in ‘off-shoring’ or outsourcing some elements of the software development to firms in places such as Bangalore and Hyderabad in India, also highlights the temporary nature of these workers privileged position in the labour market.

A clear-headed and grounded analysis of software development and developers is therefore warranted and the manner in which this book achieves that aim is outlined below.

This book

A more complete an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• 1 Introduction: myth and reality
• 2 A short history of software
• 3 The labor process in software startups: production on a virtual assembly line?
• 4 Managing the software development labour process: direct control, time and technical autonomy
• 5 Trick or treat? Autonomy as control in knowledge work
• 6 Coming and going at will? Working time organization in German IT companies
• 7 Professional identity in software work: evidence from Scotland
• 8 Organizational commitment among software developers
• 9 The reality of software developing
• Index