Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on m

Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle. I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code. In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.