IT Industry and Software Developers

employers more regularly than 30 years ago, looking at the empirical, quantitative development of jobs and occupations without considering who performs the job does not provide enough information of the actual changes. Working at McDonalds as a high school student, for example, has different implications than working there as middle-aged women. All in all, looking at careers as understood by Arthur et al. (1989) can give more important information about the consequences of labor flexibility and the impact of ICT than just looking on the quantitative development of labor time.

Concerning economic trends related to time, among the issues that need to be addressed within the IT industry and concerning software developers specifically are the number of turnovers and the high level of temporary employment. In addition, the decrease of labor time during an individual’s lifetime needs to be studied in detail. High turnovers, a high level of temporary employment, and a decreasing volume of work are all indicators of increasing flexibility on an economic level. A comparison between US and German data gives information on how influential the different institutional frameworks are or if we can witness a more global trend concerning these developments.

Conclusion

Although the dimensions of space, work, time, and employment are separated for the purpose of analysis, they are in reality not always distinguishable from each other. As Chris Benner already pointed out, these four dimensions are inter-related (Benner 2006). Nevertheless, analyzing them separately is helpful to understand the various changes and processes involved in the shifting nature of labor.

I apply the SWET analysis to the development of the IT industry and software developers. Because the increasing influence of ICT on labor is most obvious in that industry, changes within the labor process of informational capitalism are most likely obvious and current within that industry. Within the SWET analysis my particular focus lies in aspects of flexibility. In each of the dimensions I am particularly analyzing the role of flexibility and with that I try to point out recent developments within the flexible labor process.

informational capitalism should have the most developed impact. Quantitative empirical material on the development of the IT industry in general and about the development of labor in particular should give information about general trends of flexibility, especially concerning the dimensions of employment and time. I am considering the development of the IT industry in both the United States and Germany using national data and data gathered in quantitative empirical socio-scientific studies. However, some trends that are important when considering labor flexibility in informational capitalism, for example the changing role of communication, organization, and nature of work, are probably not evident in quantitative data. Therefore, I am also looking into qualitative aspects of the changes, which can be found when looking more closely at changes within a specific profession. I choose to look at the occupation of software developers and will elaborate this decision in the next paragraph.

To look for specifics of labor flexibility in informational capitalism I have concentrated my research on looking at the profession of software development.³⁷ Software developers are the “protagonists of the information economy” (Hartmann 1995, 1). Even after the burst of the tech bubble this statement is still reasonable, because this occupation is intensively faced with innovations in the area of ICT and with other processes within informational capitalism. A software developer writes programs for computers. Some software developers are specialized and some have general knowledge of multiple software programs. Sometimes software developers are also called software engineers, software analysts, or simply programmers. In the following I am going to use the terms synonymously. The quantitative data will address all variations of that occupation. The individuals I interviewed, however, belong to the group of software developers whose job requirements are rather complex, and whose tasks are not restricted solely to routine programming. Therefore, they belong to the category of the “knowledge workers,” rather than just being part of the new group of

“routine workers” in the sense of how Robert Reich defines a big group of software programmers. In general, the work of software developers can be characterized as highly skilled technical work. The work involves a tremendous amount of information processing. It is usually described as being highly flexible work performed under mostly highly flexible employment conditions. Software developers are one of the professions

37 The qualitative interviews were conducted among that group and I have tried to include studies about that group. Sometimes I refer to empirical results from other occupations if they address my particular research question.

that grew enormously important during the rise of the New Economy. In general,

“expertise in IT depends both on formal knowledge, that is generally acquired in the context of formal education and on situated knowledge that is specific to a work or problem situation” (National Research Council (US) and Committee on Workforce Needs in Information Technology 2001, 4).

I am looking at the development of the labor market performance of software developers in particular, because I argue that software developers experience changes in labor that are characteristics of informational capitalism. The profession of software developers is especially apt for this investigation because it is both involved with information processing issues and typically a very flexible profession. So, it is a profession that is highly involved in recent changes. Software development is one of those tasks that has been very much shaped by the process that accompanied the growing intensity of working with ICT. The impacts and changes that can be observed in labor flexibility should be closely connected with the important role of ICT.

The following are aspects that I will be analyzing regarding the changing labor process of software developers within informational capitalism: important role of ICT, general economic development of the IT industry, the changes in education structures in the IT field, changing values, and needs of employees. The fact that I am focusing my analysis on the IT industry and at software developers, does not mean that the results are limited only to that specific area. There are numerous hints that the developments are not restricted to the IT industry and to software developers. Analyzing the changes that affect software developers will be particularly important when considering the development of flexibility within the dimensions of space and time.

In addition to secondary information about the development of IT workers and in particular the software developers’ profession, I collected empirical data in interviews. In total I talked to twelve software developers within four different companies in two countries.³⁸ Although, the interviews are not definitive or comprehensive in representing the profession, they are very helpful to get an impression of the current and previous conditions in the software industry and in particular to gain insights into the profession in the United States as well as in Germany. To understand current changes within the labor process it is crucial to get an impression of workers’

personal experience. Even though a lot more occupations are involved with a high percentage of work with modern ICT, focusing on software developers is helpful,

38 The companies and interviewees will be introduced in part II of this study.

because the occupation is pretty well-defined and much of the work of the software developers directly deals with technology, knowledge, and information. The interviews augmented information about the current situation of software developers that is not available from the quantitative data. Most valuable is the information that the interviewees can provide about how they personally deal with the changes.