I considered myself a leftist for a long time but I gotta say, nothing has radicalized me faster than my first tech job.
I should preface this with the fact that my background is in science, and I’ve been unemployed since graduating from grad school. I’m unfortunately taking a job offer at a large financial institution so I don’t starve and become homeless. I hate that I have to take this job but as of right now, I have no other way to live.
Anyways. Its been a several months long process to even get hired as an intern. I applied back in November of 2021, did months of workshopping and projects, and I’m doing pre intern training the whole month of April. In May I start an internship that goes on for several weeks and leads to a full time job given I don’t mess literally everything up (we’ll see how this goes).
During this training, we learn about agile and scrum. For those out of the loop, these are just industry processes for creating products. The main figures of this process are the product owner, the stakeholders and the dev team. After reading and watching countless articles and videos about this process, I’ve come to realize plain and simple that the product owners and stake holders produce literally nothing of value. The owner ultimately decides the products general direction and that’s it. Stakeholders tell the product owner what they want and the product owner tells the devs what to work on or not work on. The devs end up creating literally everything of value and yet they are getting shafted by both product owners and stake holders. Fuck this shit man.
This is also not to mention the fact that the Devs are the skilled laborers here. We’ve put time and effort into education, skills and general wisdom about the work we do, and somehow make the least money out of the product we make.
I’d also like to add that I know this comes from a place of privilege, I acknowledge that. Tech jobs are well paying (mostly), and I’m better off than most, but it’s crazy the profit that’s made mostly ends up in the pockets of the people who do the absolute minimum.