Developers In Revolt

 A while ago Venkat wrote a a great article: Can "Tech" Die? , where he defined tech thus:


"Tech is a growing agency pie, and a Techie could be defined as someone who is participating in a way that they’re gaining agency faster than secondary actors[finance, politics] can take it away."


The "natural state" of the world, the world at rest, is: developers go to college and slave away getting CS degrees.  They go to work for BigCorp and are managed by guys in suits.  Nobody else knows how to program.  This is a fairly stable system.

But what if it gets disrupted?


Developers can revolt in two different directions:  up or down.

They revolt up by playing their cards so as to get more agency within their organizations.  At a recent technical interview, I---


Well, let's back up.  If you've never had one, most technical interviews go like this:  The interviewer(s) give you a relatively simple programming exercise.  Then they say "Do you have any questions for us?"  And you want to ask things like, "Um, will working for you ruin my life?"  but you probably shouldn't ask that, so you say, "No, I guess not."


Anyway, I'd been restless the night before this one.  I went to bed late.  When I woke up I had that perfect clarity reserved for the newly awoken.  I opened a text file and wrote:

questions I'd ask:

- why are you using clojure?
- what is your salary?
- what do you think about macros?
- if I were to take some time in the middle of the day to try and understand a codebase I wasn't assigned to, what would you think about that?
- if I were to take some time in the middle of the day to work on my editor configuration, what would you think about that?
- if I said in standup that I had spent the entire day prior on my editor configuration, what would you think about that?
- if I said in standup that I had spent the entire day prior "looking for ideas," what would you think about that?
- ..."on Hacker News"?
- the entire week prior?
- what's your vacation policy?
- do your developers have access to your financials?
- ...to your marketing data?
- ...to your BI data?
- can your janitor code?
- do you have any DSL's in production?  Would you like to?
- what does homoiconicity mean to you? 
- has anyone received a bonus for something that did *not* affect the bottom line, or help close a sale?  e.g. writing documentation, refactoring, tooling
- what technology are you most excited about?
- what do you think about dynamically scoped variables?
- how much equity should developers get? (the smaller/newer the company, the worse the above answers can be, and the better this one needs to be)

basically I'm trying to figure out if they believe in individually-empowered developers

So in this (remote) technical interview, I shared my screen and went through (some of) these questions.

Now, I know, some of these seem ridiculous.  I was too embarrassed to ask most of them.  But I asked some of them.

The best part:  THEY TOLD ME THEIR SALARIES.  I bet they hadn't even told each other.



Developers can revolt "down" by, like Prometheus, stealing fire from heaven and gifting it to Man.  No-code tools, open-source libraries, providing an API---like a potlatch, where you give away wealth as a show of power.


That's the post, really, as far as it came to me.  I think more developers will revolt this way.  What will happen?  Hang on.

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