Parables Regarding Software

Attend well. You might find yourself in these bitter words.

Margins

Consider the dev shop. A bright band of capable people set out to produce software. They develop a business out of a gaggle of support and development contracts. Sometimes they are asked to build something, yielding a lump-sum contract; sometimes they are asked to serve as ongoing support, yielding a recurring contract. The margins on both are terrible. Seasons of feast and famine recur and recur, going nowhere.

Our clever folk are not without ideas. They think, we could make a product. Rather than hash out a contract with every new client, they could code a checkout process for some automated facet of their core expertise. Using their scarce funds, the team plots out the work.

At first the effort is intriguing and engaging. Experienced professionals are given green fields to explore and develop, and they flourish there, flexing architectural skills they have spent many years nurturing. Early on, it is easy to refactor, redesign, and adapt to changing requirements, but their small pool of labor and expertise struggles with its gaps. Accounting, deployment, design, documentation, maintenance -- the scale of the work blossoms beyond their means.

Six months later and they have a prototype, but no clients and no paywall. The paywall, it becomes clear, is itself an overwhelming task prone to problems with borders, sanctions, taxes, and so on. Six more months and it seems it's all they've worked on. Prospective clients have shown sparing desire for this product after all, intrigued in theory but offering worse margins than for custom service. One begins to feel they threw yet another year in the trash.

In the end the service is humbly shuttered. Before that, ties between overworked colleagues become frayed. Some among the team leave for better-paying pastures, soured by the stress of the ordeal. Others learn nothing, and project yet more hubris into dreams of hockey sticks and better margins.

The business barely survives. They usually don't.

Burnout

A developer begins with an idea, given to them by a misrepresented and underserved community. They require a service, a complex solution based on open-source tools and protocols. The developer commits their nights and weekends to architecting the service and all its components, expending sweat and foregoing sleep as they furiously birth this longed-for thing.

After some time, other developers express interest, and the initial maintainer takes on project management roles attempting to effectively divvy the work among a growing rag-tag gaggle. The community pours feedback through this system, with valid needs but whose requests often approach confusing and border on nonsensical. It takes time to organize these discussions into actionable issues, and increasingly the de facto organizer finds they lack the sweat and sleep to spare for this effort. Though the community raises some funding to afford labor hours, it doesn't pay the bills of the project's expanding labor needs. It seems unlikely that it ever will.

Development stalls. The community loses interest or becomes impatient. The initial maintainer finds they too struggle to muster the sense of vision and purpose that once inspired them, and as they force themselves further they find a depression bleeds into the rest of their life. Things that once delighted them now exhaust them. The future feels meaningless, and they struggle to persuade themself that all hope is not lost. Even suicidal ideation turns its gaze upon the overworked.

Eventually the initial maintainer walks away. They need time to recuperate, though this leaves the project disorganized and virtually without any committed labor. Other core volunteers peel off for similar reasons. Much as they respect and admire the concept and the legitimate need for it, they have other things to do. Bills to pay, a family to raise, a life to live. Things they are not willing to sacrifice as a volunteer making software.

It takes years for the most involved to return from burnout. They lose hobbies, relationships, opportunities... sometimes even the will to live. What survives is jaded and burned. They return to the work hesitantly, if at all.

The community goes on, underserved and misrepresented.

Excluded

Another frustrating meeting dispirits an engineer. They are unheard, unseen, uncared for. The fruits of their labor are gobbled up by profiteers that prove increasingly untrustworthy. Teammates whisper of their shared dissatisfaction. Complaints and appeals fizzle in HR. With phones left behind, a small group brews an ambitious plot: to unionize.

Secretly, they meet with representatives of labor federations and other unions, seeking guidance and resources. They intend someday to hold a vote to form a union, to force management to recognize their demands with the law's support. A pseudonymous social media account rallies interest. Through measured words, they appeal to their colleagues to recognize their power as laborers and to protect it by organizing. Famously clueless bootlickers fill their mentions, even including some of those at their company.

Despite all their precautions, before long they are found out. Management intensifies their scrutiny over those suspected of involvement, and enforces requirements heretofore unspoken. Some of the organizers are laid off under trumped-up pretenses of lacking productivity or improper procedure. Though word spreads fast in support of the wronged, they are nevetheless fired. The law stays silent as the unionization effort grows into a protracted and contentious conflict.

Those who remain at the company must exercise ever-growing care in approaching others about the matter, and those approached silently consider the danger of saying or even hearing such words. The would-be union's social media presence proves prone to virality, but the company's internal culture grows increasingly paranoid and controlling; thunderous light and sound goes silent in company channels. A successful vote for unionization, if it will ever happen, begins to feel very, very far off.

For those ejected from the company, the episode follows them. Comrades occasionally know their names, offering commiseration and admiration. But managers often know them too. Doors close more than they did before.

A prospective employer says during an interview one day, "I googled you." The interviewee tries not to blanch. The manager mulls their next words carefully but blood is already in the water.

"Did you get fired for trying to start a union?"