Employability and boring technologies

Many voices have recently advocated the use of "boring technologies" as opposed to flashy new ones. But this decision is not only technical but also economical and social.

I recently read Choose Boring Technology, by Dan McKinley, and mostly agreed. The older I get, the more I agree with the feeling, but it is also worth thinking why companies choose flashy new technologies. The simplified version is that it happens due to a vicious circle of “employability”.

This term is made up, but not mine. I read it first in The New Spirit of Capitalism, by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. The main gist of this book is that capitalism is an amoral system (not necessarily immoral, that would be a different conversation), so it relies on borrowed ideological constructs to justify itself. Every now and again, when cornered by critics, it subtly sheds its skin and adopts a new set of beliefs: it summons a new spirit. Sometimes it even borrows ideas from its critics, leaving them too disoriented to pursue the attack.

The Weberian first spirit of capitalism was built around the foundations of the household. Its values were derived from the domestic realm. When its ethos was questioned (the back-scratching, the favour-returning, the patriarchy) a new spirit arose, this time build around meritocracy, rationality, and explicit hierarchies. Youth in the 60s and 70s criticized this oppressing coldness of firms’ machinery and demanded autonomy and creative freedom. These demands opened the doors to the third spirit of capitalism, with its flat hierarchies, autonomous decision-making, and bean bags.

But when something is won, something else is lost. The price of freedom is stability. The main reason why people in their 20s and 30s jump from job to job is not because of fear of commitment, or a puerile sense of duty, regardless of what Simon Sakey enjoys to babble (at some point Boomers became his main audience). Companies cannot (or do not want to) offer a life-long career prospect to employees. Autonomy and entrepreneurship are ideological constructs around real occupational and economical constraints. We no longer work for companies: we jump from project to project, and sometimes, out of sheer chance, three or four of these projects happen to develop consecutively under the same corporate umbrella.

This means that companies need a never-ending stream of new hires to replace the ones that have moved on to another project under a different company. And how do they attract talent? By promising them that their employability (understood as the ability to jump to another project at any given moment without a loss of status) will remain intact. Firms are essentially saying: “Hey, we know you will not stay with us forever, but we can promise that if you join us for a while, you will be able to jump to bigger and more exciting projects when you decide to leave.” Companies aim to guarantee a career, although not among their ranks.

(I remember reading a while ago that the main responsibility of a manager was to make sure that her direct reports got a better job than the current one after two or three years. In a new company. As if they were corporate Charons. Someone must have written that with a straight face.)

We can dwell on this idea for a second. When capitalism shapeshifts to a new spirit, part of its strength is built upon the discredit of the former spirit. Startups define their culture for they are not as much as for what they are: no hierarchies, no bureaucracy, no authority. However, some of these “old” ideas are so pervasive that they linger way after the spirit has died. The notion of career is one of them: we cling to it as if it still meant something. And even though the burden of career-making has moved from the employer to the employee (disguised as self-development and “personal growth”), firms still feel the unconscious urge to nurture their employees somehow.

(It seems like there is a paradox here: if they are so hungry for talent, why don’t they offer a career? The answer, in most cases, is two-fold. First, how can you offer a career to anyone as a Series A company? Second, even if you could survive for twenty years as a software company, isn’t it tempting to hire a younger developer for half the salary, twice the enthusiasm?)

Facebook creates a new technology (React, for instance) which is a product of their frontend team given free rein to experiment with technical solutions to their specific problems. They then embark on an expensive promotional tour to showcase this technology. Basic marketing principles apply. Developers from other companies experience a dual emotion: the excitement of newness, but most importantly the fear of missing a boat that could cost them employability status. So they come back to work and insist on adopting this new technology in any random project (what Stefan Tilkov calls Conference-Driven Development). Companies have two options: they either dismiss the angst and work with proven solutions, or surrender to the hype. What should a company do? Ship a product and become a boring company, or be cool and battle with solutions to problems that are not their own? Do you know what happens to developers that work at boring companies? Do you know what happens to their employability?

When companies adopt new technologies, they use them to position themselves in the hiring scene, and they attract developers who are interested in learning new libraries and languages to boost their employability. In turn, these developers will demand and implement new technologies for problems the company does not have.

There is no easy way out if there is one. Maybe a big crisis (hello corona) might help balance offer and demand for the tech sector, or maybe remote work becomes ubiquitous and expands the talent pool, so employees do not enjoy the same authoritarian decision-making power inside companies. Possibly firms can safeguard themselves from this “Magpie Effect” by hiring older developers, more experienced and less willing to spend evenings and weekends coding tic-tac-toe in Elm or Svelte. Or we could sit and wait for the fourth spirit of capitalism. Maybe it is all about PHP.

Discussion on Hacker News.

(Header photo by Caroline Attwood on Unsplash)