I was recently re-reading Paula Bialski’s Middle Tech (Bialski, 2024), an ethnographic account of her time at a German software company that explores culture of Good Enough in software. It is an engaging book that seemingly moves against the Move Fast and Break Things culture, but I am wondering if it holds water there as well. That is, software maybe moving fast and breaking things, but it holds where that is good enough for that culture. Bialski does a service by studying a mid-size, more common, company.
The chapter that I found most rewarding for my interests is the one on software, Software’s Sociality. I did bridle a bit at the idea of maintenance as not social and requiring ‘code monkeys’ to fix and patch. Such work is boring but necessary to keep things going and to react to updates, upgrades, and users (or testing on production). It has a different sociality though that is predicated between the programmer, development environment (both IDE and version control), and the varying coding standards.
The idea that this sociality can be used to move against the Move Fast and Break Things culture is a powerful one. I am seeing this as a call to reframe the concept of Taylorist productivity and to having software as allowing the human in to its processes. The most productive places that I have worked at often involved breaks, coffee, and being able to explore as a person. This was, of course, tempered by the requirement to produce work but we often had some innovative responses.
One of the things that I think is going to be increasingly important in studying culture and it’s relationship to software is the one between user and tool. It’s a well-covered set of fields but what I am wondering how this can be combined with a medium-specific approach. That is, software has its own sociality that is embedded into it that affects how it is used. I was slightly surprised that there was not more push back against the language of some tools (git blame?) in this world. I do think that a critical exploration of the language in version control systems, drawing from the reading of Basic at Dartmouth (Rankin, 2018), might shed light on some of the cultural assumptions in software would be order.
I doubt that I am the core audience for this book, but it provides a set of useful lenses to take on software and software cultures. I found myself going off on tangents and chasing some of the ideas for further exploration.
Bialski, P. 2024. Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.
Rankin,J.L. 2018. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
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