We also have a lot more managers than we used to. Managers are proxies for the authority of capital to ensure we're providing as much value as possible to them. The more of them we have the less we control our labour.
You don't even need to be building the Torment Nexus. You're simply building whatever makes the most profit for the capital class. Not necessarily what is best for users, people, or the wider public good. You end up talking more about value instead of utility, etc.
Shop around to as many jobs as you want. I'd bet the majority of organizations act this way because these are systemic pressures from how we organize labour in our field.
Your job ends up being framed around your utility to the capital class and how much profit they can extract from your labour. The most common advice you get when you ask, "How do I improve as a developer?" is: think about ways you can do less work and maximize how much customers are willing to pay. What features we should build into our systems are dominated by product managers, engineering managers, etc... as a programmer you'll have more power in a small startup but once your company grows to a certain size, it'll be dominated by executives and the managers: product managers, engineering managers, etc.
The Torment Nexus is really quite banal in the end: subscriptions and surveillance and nags. The kinds of things that lead people to mistrust technology.
You don't even need to be building the Torment Nexus. You're simply building whatever makes the most profit for the capital class. Not necessarily what is best for users, people, or the wider public good. You end up talking more about value instead of utility, etc.
Shop around to as many jobs as you want. I'd bet the majority of organizations act this way because these are systemic pressures from how we organize labour in our field.
Your job ends up being framed around your utility to the capital class and how much profit they can extract from your labour. The most common advice you get when you ask, "How do I improve as a developer?" is: think about ways you can do less work and maximize how much customers are willing to pay. What features we should build into our systems are dominated by product managers, engineering managers, etc... as a programmer you'll have more power in a small startup but once your company grows to a certain size, it'll be dominated by executives and the managers: product managers, engineering managers, etc.
The Torment Nexus is really quite banal in the end: subscriptions and surveillance and nags. The kinds of things that lead people to mistrust technology.