The Shape of Code

A very late post on the interesting books I read this year (only one of which was actually published in 2020). As always the list is short because I did not read many books and/or there is lots of nonsense out there, but this year I have the new excuses of not being able to spend much time on trains and having my own book to finally complete.

I have already reviewed The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, and it is the must-read of 2020 (after my book, of course :-).

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. This small, short book provides lots of interesting insights into the motivational factors involved in joining/following/leaving mass movements. Possible connections to software engineering might appear somewhat tenuous, but bits and pieces keep bouncing around my head. There are clearer connections to movements going mainstream this year.

The following two books came from asking what-if questions about the future of software engineering. The books I read suggesting utopian futures did not ring true.

“Money and Motivation: Analysis of Incentives in Industry” by William Whyte provides lots of first-hand experience of worker motivation on the shop floor, along with worker response to management incentives (from the pre-automation 1940s and 1950s). Developer productivity is a common theme in discussions I have around evidence-based software engineering, and this book illustrates the tangled mess that occurs when management and worker aims are not aligned. It is easy to imagine the factory-floor events described playing out in web design companies, with some web-page metric used by management as a proxy for developer productivity.

Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century by Harry Braverman, to quote from Wikipedia, is an “… examination the nature of ‘skill’ and the finding that there was a decline in the use of skilled labor as a result of managerial strategies of workplace control.” It may also have discussed management assault of blue-collar labor under capitalism, but I skipped the obviously political stuff. Management do want to deskill software development, if only because it makes it easier to find staff, with the added benefit that the larger pool of less skilled staff increases management control, e.g., low skilled developers knowing they can be easily replaced.