Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply 鈥済ood enough.鈥� In Middle Tech, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn鈥檛 perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work鈥攐r at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls 鈥淢iddleTech,鈥� Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings.
The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird. Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result, they don鈥檛 feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good enoughness.
Paula Bialski is associate professor of digital sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is the author of Becoming Intimately Mobile and a coauthor of Communication.
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"[Middle Tech] proves indispensable for demonstrating how the mundane but nevertheless consequential choices inside AI companies, indeed in all software companies, are made by engineers as they navigate the material and ethical stakes of what is 'good enough' and who it is good enough for in their daily work."鈥擡manuel Moss, Public Books
"A most welcome addition to the sociology of work, organizations, and occupations and an important contribution to readers' understanding ofthe creation, change, and maintenance of workplace culture."鈥�Choice
“A sharp-eyed exploration of everyday life in the trenches of tech, far from the magic sparkle of billionaire CEOs and the cries of their techlash antagonists. This book is a welcome antidote to our cycles of hype and despair.”—Fred Turner, Stanford University
“While so much popular and academic writing has focused on hacker-techies or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, we seldom have research on the everyday, mundane, often boring-at-first-glance software developers that code and maintain the growing mess of our day-to-day software systems. Bialski’s intimate and rich portrayal of Middle Tech developers is innovatively conceptualized, deeply researched, and brimming with critical insight.”—Gabriella Coleman, Harvard University
“This is a much-needed and refreshingly honest account of computing cultures in the mainstream of established software development/maintenance companies. It makes a significant contribution to demystifying the practical organizational realities and everyday labor of software development, well-articulated within the rubric of ‘good enough.’”—Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
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