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Sigh, I suppose we're supposed to feel outraged. Believe it or not, other industries have faced their share of exploitation too. Software development, at its l
by evv 12y ago
Sigh, I suppose we're supposed to feel outraged. Believe it or not, other industries have faced their share of exploitation too.
Software development, at its lowest level, is a new form of labor. It's only natural for the economy of the world to search for the next big source of labor which can be exploited for cheap development. The market is also experimenting with different schemes and mechanisms by which to exploit. Let's not act surprised- what we do is not incomprehensible magic; the labour situation is fundamentally the same as every other industry. Software is new though, so it will take a while for the global economy to figure out just who and how to squeeze, in order to harvest that sweet sweet software juice. Lets just say globalization has its consequences.
If you're living in the third world and you can code for work, you're probably doing better than most people in your area, who are likely being exploited for their physical labour or worse. We should feel outraged for those living in slave-like working conditions. Lets talk about ending that. What we're seeing here is just a tiny side-effect of economic development; lets try to address the worst.
- lhc- 12y agoAre you arguing that, because other industries also face exploitation, we should not be concerned about it in software development? Just because there are others who have it even worse doesn't mean that we should ignore exploitation in our field. That argument makes it very difficult to take any action, because you can almost always find someone else worse off.
- evv 12y agoI'm suggesting that, as hackers, we ought to try and "cure" this disease that the economy tends to have on the world, rather than complaining about the symptoms that pertain to us. If we're gonna talk symptoms, there are more serious examples of human labor exploitation. And I'm all for action against any type of exploitation, but I haven't heard any ideas suggested here. If you have an idea on how to specifically address exploitation of software developers, I'm all ears. Maybe those ideas could later be transferred to help protect workers in other industries. Lets figure out how to fix this. One of the most basic ideas is a union. It would be easy to unionize in a basic form, but I wonder if a developer union could hold any power. What if some hip new language/framework had a unique license with some higher-level ethical clauses, backed by a tight-knit developer community? Such that developers are at least theoretically protected when they write code in that ecosystem.