Developer Hegemony

The Future of Labor

Erik Dietrich
This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/developerhegemony
This version was published on 2016-06-07

This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and

publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is
the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools
and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have
the right book and build traction once you do.
2015 - 2016 Erik Dietrich

Tweet This Book!

Please help Erik Dietrich by spreading the word about this book
on Twitter!
The suggested tweet for this book is:
Knowledge work can be improved dramatically. I want to start
thinking about how.
The suggested hashtag for this book is #DeveloperHegemony.
Find out what other people are saying about the book by clicking
on this link to search for this hashtag on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/search?q=#DeveloperHegemony

Contents
Introduction .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Note About Leanpub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Who am I, and why should you care? . . . . . . . . . . . .

Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Intended Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6
6
6

Introduction
This is my books equivalent of githubs readme (at least for now).
Expect this to change a bit as I go. Im really going at this thing
in true lean/TDD fashion, so Im publishing the bare minimum
required for someone to identify this as something that will eventually be a book about the future of developer work.

A Note About Leanpub

Im adding this section temporarily to the book to address some
confusion that Ive seen about how Leanpub works. If youve
purchased this book through Leanpub, what youve purchased is
actually the right to the book when finished. You can read in more
detail about the Leanpub model on the site, but the tl;dr version is
that Leanpub aims to allow people to purchase a book while its
being written. Its like a pre-order, but its a pre-order that allows
you to see the authors work in progress.
This is good for me, as an author, because it allows me to get
feedback on the book as I go and because it allows me to build
momentum and anticipation instead of just a big-bang, tada
release one day. Its good for readers because you get the chance to
contribute feedback, if so desired, but also because you can get the
book cheaper. Leanpub advises that the price only ever get raised as
you go, so if the book becomes popular, authors are advised to raise
the price. I imagine that its also kind of interesting to see a book
get written (Ive never done this myself, so I dont actually know.)
So the confusion here has arisen from a handful of people contacting
me, surprised that the book is unfinished and/or really short. Thats
a feature, not a bug. If you purchased the book and are surprised by
this, you have 45 days to get a refund, and I encourage you to do so.
The last thing I want is for someone to have purchased the book,
believing it was finished, and to feel short-changed.
Your purchase isnt a purchase of a completed book, per se, but
rather of the rights to the book when it is completed. By purchasing
now, youll have access to every update through its entire life, up
to and including its official release. So I invite you to come along
for the ride, if youre comfortable doing so, and Im deeply thankful
for your support!
2

Who am I, and why should

you care?
Given that this is a book about how I think you and I should
work, this is a very reasonable question. I may have a vision, but
is it credible, does it make sense for you, and have I carved out a
path that may be worth emulating? In other words, what are my
bonafides?
Well, a bit about myself. Ive made my career in software development from start to present. I worked my way up through
what you might consider to be the standard technical path, starting
as a programmer, and then acquiring designations like senior
and lead. Eventually those designations turned into org chart
placements as I became an architect and finally exited the salaried
workforce from the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO) to
go into business for myself.
This decision was an inflection point for my career. At 33, I was the
CIO for a small company, which meant that I could easily bide my
time a bit and then interview for a CIO role in a larger company,
commanding higher salary and increasing the number of people
below me in the org chart. From there, if things had gone well, who
knows? The result no doubt would have been a career of very high
salary and stable employment.
But I just couldnt bring myself to enjoy the prospect. I didnt
mind the work and org chart leadership presents its own unique
kinds of challenges compared to the programming and architecture
challenges that I had faced previously. But the whole corporate
structure that Id so ably charged into and conquered (at least to
some degree) just didnt feel right, and I was looking for something
more open-ended and self-guided. It would take me more than
3

Who am I, and why should you care?

a year of retrospection on my corporate career to solidify my

misgivings into the start of this book and a fully developed theory
of where corporate America is vis a vis knowledge workers, and
where it ought to go.
Since going off on my own, enjoyment of my life has gone up
dramatically. I bill out at relatively high rates ($75 - $200 per hour,
depending on a number of factors around the engagement) and
make more money than I did even in the C-suite. In addition,
through a variety of content creation vehicles and increasing visibility of my blog, Ive secured a pretty nice passive income stream
and begun to receive compensation in various forms for activities
that I used to do for no compensation. I can pay most of my bills
these days without doing billable work, and Im looking to go from
most to all relatively soon.
I mention all of this not out of any kind of hubris, but to explain who
I am, what Ive done, and why. I think this is critical for you, as a
reader, to frame your opinion of what Im saying. In the chapters
that follow, particularly the critical evaluation of the current state
of the corporate world, it might be tempting to frame my words
as those of a crank, malcontent, hippie, or someone who has been
burned out by or lost at the game of being a corporate citizen.
But Im none of those things. I played the game and found it relatively easy to navigate my way to promotions and better situations
through a combination of opportunism, hard work, and luck, and
I feel no bitterness in any way about my life. In fact, Im happier
than Ive ever been professionally, and that is whats motivating
me. That happiness arose from a great deal of looking critically at
the nature of the game and, like Neo facing agent bullets at the end
of the first Matrix movie, saying, no, and stopping the bullets.
No, I will not work endless overtime for the same amount of pay.
No, I wont accept that I cant enjoy making a living because thats
why they call it work! No, hiring authority, I do not need to be
thankful to have a job. No, I will not accept 2% pay raises per

Who am I, and why should you care?

year independent of how much value I add to a company. No, I

dont believe that I should need to commute, dress up, and punch a
clock to perform knowledge work. And, no, I dont believe that Im
somehow special.
Everything Im saying applies to you just as much as it does to me,
and that is why Im writing this book.

Explanations
Intended Audience
I started out writing and continue to write this book with programmers in mind as my intended audience. That said, its becoming
increasingly apparent to me as I go that this applies to a much
larger set of knowledge workers. Software testers, designers, and
engineers occur, off the top, as people for whom the subject matter
here could be intensely relevant. If you are any sort of knowledge
worker, I encourage you to read on because I believe that you will
get value out of what I have to say.

Names
For the names in this book, Im using the site Fake Name Generator
with the name set American. This is in part to outsource the activity
of coming up with names but also to absolve myself from any
perception that Im baking any statements or opinions about the
issue of programmer demographics. In other words, if I describe
a team that has 3 men and 1 woman, it is because thats what
the name generator generated, and not because I think men should
outnumber women 3:1 in the field.
The only exception to true randomness was that I chose a random
female name for the protagonist of chapter 1. I did this not to pander
but because I truly think that the suggested future that I will propose
for the industry will naturally lead to more equal-opportunity entry
into the field of software development. I will likely devote a section
to describing why I think thats the case, but suffice it to say that
http://www.fakenamegenerator.com

Explanations

Im proposing a scenario with less indirection between knowledge

workers and the customers that pay their bills. Currently, salaries
are determined by a large corporate structure in which employees
are kept in the dark about pertinent bargaining information over
salary and the employer and employee are ipso facto adversaries.
Employees wanting more salary hurt the company and companies
minimizing cost hurt the employees. As such, it is with rational selfinterest in mind that a hiring authority with a budget uses an tricks
at his or her disposal to minimize employee pay, up to and including
taking advantage of societal trends that allow certain groups to have
disproportionate downward pressure exerted on their salaries (e.g.
woman being paid less on average).
Advocacy to stop such practices is thus difficult for a number of
reasons. In the first place, the practice is rational for those who are
doing it. In the second place, corporate pay tends to be shrouded
in secrecy, making it generally hard for individuals to confirm
instances of bias, and in the third place, its hard for advocacy
groups to exert enough pressure on a company to make it act
counter to its own financial best interest. In other words, if youre
the CFO for Acme Inc, you might make the calculated decision that,
while paying women 20% less on average is creating some negative
publicity for your company, the negative publicity isnt costing you
as much as giving the women at your company 20% pay bumps
across the board.
Now, lets imagine instead a world where there were software
development teams structured simply as LLCs or S-Corps. Imagine
a hypothetical scenario where a team of women and a team of
men were competing for a contract to do software development,
and a client company appeared to be allowing sexism to influence
the decision. An advocacy group now could easily kick up a large
stink and more easily change the outcome by virtue of the fact that
theres going to be little difference in cost between the two groups.
Alternatively, a well-funded advocacy group could subsidize the
group of women, allowing them to underbid the group of men while

Explanations

quoting the same price to the customer.

In a world that looks more like this, closing the gender gap in
programming doesnt involve taking on corporate juggernauts with
a vested interest in opacity, and it doesnt involve attempting to get
people to act counter to their own best interests in order to do the
right thing. Advocacy groups will thus be in a position to have a
much more profound impact.