I recently started working at a Large Software Company in Seattle. It’s my first job out of university, and I’ve been working on being mindful of the experience.
Increasingly it seems to me that Large Software Company is, internally, a socialist utopia. People work as much as they’re going to work, and are compensated quite handsomely… enough, I’d say, for most resources to not be scarce. Within reason.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
To me, this nominally constrained post-scarcity is what socialist and marxist thought envisioned about 100 years ago. By nominally constrained, I mean it’s not a perfect utopia. There’s no fountain of chocolate, and everyone can’t be an artist/singer/poet. It’s a socialist utopia not in the sense of some idealistic asymptotically impossible heaven on earth, but in a real-life, this-is-actually-happening sort of way. No to downplay the situation, a real utopia is more utopic than one imagined.
Here are some key points to consider, in no order:
- Individual contributors at Software Company have job security. That is, they rarely get fired unless they’re seriously underperforming—i.e. not working according to their ability.
- We each make enough to not need to worry* about short term finances. From the point above, we have job security, and our minds and wallets are free to wander from
- There’s horizontal mobility within the company: individuals are free to devote their working hours to whichever pursuits fit their fancy. Again, this is in a nominally constrained sort of way… Most pursuits available to fit ones fancy involve building software, albeit across a wide range of markets and audiences. You can’t really be anything you want to within the company, but you could for instance be any type of software engineer.
* I want to emphasize financial worrying in particular. There’s some amount of research which indicates stress associated with finances can seriously reduce life expectancy, resilience to disease, and all those other Bad Things which come with constant fretting about how you’re going to put food on the table.
…But what about everyone else?
We, the employees of Large Software Company, as well as the employees of most all other large software companies, get to participate in our socialist utopia-of sorts… but what about everyone else? Most of the residents of a place don’t work for Large Company… or may even work for Other Company. With exceptions, everyone not working for a company (any sort, including non-software), is either seeking employment at a company or attempting to start their own. And even most startups seek to be “aqhired” by other, larger companies.
The web of each company’s workers permeates through a fractured society of other such webs. Tribes, each pulling together the resources for themselves to survive. Some, seeking to be gobbled up by other, larger webs. Company A employees ride the same bus and use the same grocery store as those working with Company B, but will likely never share words or thoughts with each other, even sitting 8 inches apart every morning. We each do not mix with others, we merely share the same space. And they do not mix with us.
America is a cultural wasteland. Very little unites us besides coincidence, the same borders and physical space are not the stuff of true unity. We think different thoughts, we interact with our own, and on occasion build bridges to incorporate new people and their groups in turn.
Our 21st century social climate is populated by roving strandbeests we call corporations, built out of congealed sweat, blood, and hardened legalese. Mounted by the people who’ve climbed on or in, those who now fuel its Product Development furnaces and Business Marketing Decisions. Protected by our modern knights clad in the armor of Law. The machines slowly crawl over the vast swaths of employment-seeking human ants, reaching down towards the chaotic ground to selecting new members of itself, those once separate are sublimated eagerly into the whole.
In exchange for pieces of our individual self, we are given a taste of utopia.
Viraj's Notebook 