Hello y'all. I've been trying to understand the software development industry from a societal POV but most sources I find have this liberal corporate bootlicking theme or don't have much hard data. Search engines provide few good sources 🤔
In specific I would like to see some research in the self-assessment of bullshit job status in the industry or a similar analysis. In my anecdotal experience a gigantic portion of jobs I've seen provide basically no benefit to society (but pay well I guess), and I would like to check if this belief of mine holds up scientifically.
Anybody know any places to start?
From my point of view, many 'bullshit jobs' seem like that because of the high level of abstraction of the software industry nowadays.
I am actually halfway through this book that touches some of this called Survival of the rich by Rushkoff (its freely available in Annas archive on ePUB format), it develops ideas on 'the mindset' of the tech bros.
In their mind, regular competition and continuos improvement is irrelevant, theyve programmed themselves to be destructive creators (schumpeter concept) or paradigm shifters so theyre stuck in this cycle "going meta" (concept by the writer) which boils down to abstracting some practice through software, and since software is easily scalable and expandable, we end up with abstraction of already abstract businesses that offer nothing of value but end up in the middle of consumers and providers extracting value such as cryptocurrency exchanges.
As i said im still halfway through the book and i need some time to organize my thoughts, so my interpretation may be wrong but it is an interesting read for sure.