Software is political, just like everything else

I came on to keep a system alive and rewrote it from the ground up, learning OO along the way. The system solved an office politics problem; this was intentional. If you’re in your early 20s and you tell CEOs they fucked up their org chart, you’ll never get anywhere, but if you just build a tool which requires a certain structure of social interaction, you can fix the problem the CEO caused without anyone ever seeing you do it. Designing social software is as much about social engineering as anything else.

— Giles Bowkett, How I Got Started Programming

2 Comments

  1. benek says:

    that’s so true. especially if your CEO is a pri##

  2. […] But Amy doesn’t just know loads about developing in AJAX, JavaScript, and Rails. She goes beyond the ephemera of coding, delving deeper into the things that make programming matter. She asks (and answers) some of the hard questions about usability, including a pair of my own favorite points on the topic. She knows that software is also political. […]

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