"Increasing numbers of people who had formerly been self-employed in workshops and cottage industry, often on a subcontracting basis, assumed new roles as part of an emerging wage-earning class. Labor increasingly became viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold. And since these changes eliminated earlier systems of production, for the new wage earners the process was irreversible, making them dependent on the wage system."-- Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization
The separation of design from making bifurcates the labor force into people who design things (products, supply chains, marketing campaigns) from people who build them (assemble product, deliver the merchandise, place the advertisements. This is the separation of primary and secondary labor forces.
A firm's primary labor force consists of highly-skilled people with detailed, company-specific knowledge. They have financial and career ties that bind them to their employers to reduce the attractiveness of leaving. A firm's secondary labor force is generally lower skilled and lower paid. They serve as a buffer that allows a company to expand and contract with prevailing economic conditions without jeopardizing core operations. This gives a company greater control over its business, because the labor associated with "making" is a variable as opposed to a fixed cost of the business.
This separation defines both role expectations and career paths. A person in the primary labor force is a knowledge worker: they are expected to be highly skilled, abstract thinkers who are concerned with systemic issues. A person in the secondary labor force is a line employee: they are expected to be lower skilled, concrete thinkers who are primarily concerned with execution. Of course, in software development, we often see highly skilled, abstract thinkers in the secondary labor market and lower skilled, concrete thinkers in the primary. Although this may be the case, generally speaking a business is less effective if it's primary labor force consists of people who are concrete thinkers, and it is less efficient if its secondary labor are abstract thinkers.
The economics of this arrangement favor the few who design over the many who build. Members of the primary labor force will command higher incomes and their occupations are more likely to be wealth generative (that is, offered equity in their employer). Their positions are less vulnerable to economic downturns and consolidative mergers. Members of the secondary labor force can command outsized incomes - particularly those with scarce skills that are in high demand - but will not generate wealth through their occupation. During periods of economic expansion, they will enjoy stable employment, rising incomes and access to credit facilities. However, they are vulnerable to economic downturns (as mentioned, they buffer the shock of a reduction in demand), productivity investments (automation tends to eliminate jobs in the secondary labor market), consolidation (a significant portion of the "synergistic benefit" of mergers are achieved by reducing secondary labor forces), and labor arbitrage (states and countries create tax incentives for firms to build facilities to house large volumes of lower skilled workers). The primary labor market is less vulnerable to these forces.
An employer's relationship with its labor can involve multiple parties and take many forms. For example, an insurance company contracts with a technology consulting firm with deep insurance domain expertise to develop, maintain, and operate major software applications that run its core business. Although the insurance company is renting a large part of its tech work force, the extent of the dependencies the insurance company has on its provider mean that many members of the consulting firm's staff are, in effect, members of the insurance company's primary labor force. The consulting firm's intermediation doesn't change this fact, it simply changes the economic relationships. Alternatively, one firm's primary labor force may be another's secondary. For example, a retailer contracts with a consulting firm to develop custom software, but the retail firm assumes responsibility for the maintenance and evolution of the asset once delivered. The consulting firm may have architects, project managers and other lead staff it considers part of its primary labor force (the people building its business) that it supplements with a large secondary labor force (people who work on projects). However, the transient nature of the contract means that all members of the consultant organization are part of the retailer's secondary labor market. And, of course, a high and poly-skilled developer may be able to sustain a career as an independent contractor through good times and bad, while a low and narrowly skilled tester may only find work during boom times. Both are, by definition, in the secondary labor market, even if for different reasons.
There have been many attempts to create large, lesser-skilled, secondary labor forces that supplement a core primary one in software development. CASE tools rose to prominence in the 1980s. They promised, among other things, that by structuring, integrating and concentrating system design and analysis into a single repository, code could be produced within strict boundaries set by designers. In the 2000s, industrial IT practices took root: analysts and architects produced detailed specification documents that were to be coded by remote development teams, while test leads designed scripts to be executed to a pass or fail outcome by armies of test executers. And, of course, there is the pursuit of maximizing labor utilization: managers will schedule recurring slivers of time across multiple projects from technology specialists, while procurement departments contract for software developers as interchangeable "resources".
There is an argument to be made that wage work has historically lifted large swaths of humanity out of poverty. Not without costs, such as pollution and abhorrent working conditions. Still, is there a case to be made that justifies the industrialization of software development because it improves quality of life? After all, even if it is wage work, it enables people to work in jobs that are not physically risky (although they can be highly stressful), rewards people for education and ongoing skill development, and tends not to cause environmental damage. Is this not socio-economic advancement?
It is a Faustian exchange. By its very nature, wage work subserviates large populations of laborers, inherently creating a class division. Because of labor arbitrage and automation, compensation is not highly inflationary and the availability of work is subject to volatility. In an era of financial engineering, wage workers are encouraged to make personal bets (in the form of debt against future income streams) based on the appearance of stability in their employment; this makes wage work exploitative.
In addition, the argument that wage work makes software development more economical, therefore leading to more demand and the benefit of more laborers, isn't compelling. For one thing, as more and more software gets injected into existing things and allows us to make entirely new things, it does not stand to reason that demand will support more industrial workers than craftworkers. For another, given the high degree of project failure, it also does not stand to reason that an industrial approach is a more reliable way to make timely delivery of complex projects.
Software development offers greater benefits to society if it is a profession rather than an industry. A profession requires its members to understand not just the what, but the why and how. This demands more intellectual and creative development from each person. This does not mean more education and training (skill possession), but pursuit of professional self actualization (continuous knowledge acquisition). It creates social structures that are flatter, equitable and offer greater mobility because they are based on collaboration, knowledge and capability (peer & mentor relationships) rather than hierarchy (superior / subordinate). It also offers greater individual freedom because it is governed more by principals than by rules. This is a far more liberating for the individual than the industrial alternative, and no less economically beneficial.
There are at least two counter-arguments to this. The first is that it is elitist: not everybody is cut out to be a professional. I.e., that many software "line workers" aren't naturally inquisitive or motivated enough to be professionals; as industrial workers they have a standard of living that they wouldn't otherwise have. However, this argument holds individuals to blame for factors that are out of their control, such as societal class divisions that discourage mobility, industrially-minded education systems that discourage creative thought, economic conditions that crush motivation. Suggesting that entire strata of people have no hope to become craftworkers is a blanket indictment that denies each person their most basic human intellectual characteristics. Ironically, such thinking holds back people's development while professing to enable it.
The second is that this is idyllic: commercial reality is that buyers are too impatient to allow tradecraft to develop, sellers have incentive to create large-scale businesses, and corporate management and procurement are founded on industrial patterns of behaviour. All true. But it falls to those of us in the business of software development to decide our own fate. If we are motivated purely by the lure of lucre - and with demand still outpacing supply of software development labor there's plenty of money going round - then we inherently choose economics over humanity. However, if we are motivated by intellectual rather than income potential, we can choose to create different types of commercial ecosystems.
This isn't wild-eyed idealism, it's sound business. As economist John Kay points out in Obliquity, "the most profitable companies are not the most profit oriented." Economic rewards benefit the firms that set out to be great at what they do, as was the case for ICI chemicals ("to be the world's leading chemical company ... through the innovative and responsible application of chemistry and related science") in the 1980s and Boeing in commercial aviation ("eat, breathe and sleep the world of aeronautics") in the early 1990s. Both enjoyed substantial financial success even though that was not their primary motivation. Once those firms shifted their focus to be principally economic in nature - "The ICI Group's vision is to be the industry leader in creating value for customers and shareholders through market leadership, technological edge, and a world competitive cost base" - their fortunes darkened considerably: ICI ceased to exist as a company ten years after changing their mission. Boeing's once unassailable dominance of commercial aviation eroded within a decade of shifting to "... a value based environment where unit cost, return on investment, shareholder return are the measures..."
It's a choice, and it's one that all of us in the business of software make again and again in the nature of the companies we create, the contracts we enter into, and how we interact with each other. The sum of our choices will determine whether we form a new generation of knowledge workers or train the next generation of wage slaves.
Choose wisely.
