However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.

That is obvious from all the upvotes your comments get on here.

This one belongs to history books, not to the list of contemporary best practices.

Yes, they know how the feature they work on relates to other features, but actually implementing that feature is very often mostly involves fighting with technology, wrangling the entire stack into the shape you need.

In Brooks’s times the stack was paper-thin, almost nonexistent. In modern times it’s not, and adding someone who knows the technology, but doesn’t have the domain knowledge related to your feature still helps you. It doesn’t slow you down.

One may argue that I’m again pointing to the difference between accidental and incidental complexity, and my argument is essentially “accidental complexity takes over”, but accidental complexity actually does influence your feature too, by defining what’s possible and what’s not.

Some good thoughts (not mine) on the modern boundary between accidental and incidental complexity: https://danluu.com/essential-complexity/

One pathological example: if you’re running a server-based product, quite often what stands between you and a new feature launch is literally couple of thousands of lines of Kubernetes YAML. Would adding someone who’s proficient in Kubernetes slow you down? Of course not.

One may say, hey, this is just the server-side Kubernetes-based development being insane, and I’ll say, the whole modern business of software development is like this.

    Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising

    gov.uk has a tendancy to treat everyone like a 5 year old

Probably means this article wasn't written by AI!

It’s so easy to be a starving artist; and in the world of commercial art it’s bloody dog-eat-dog jungle, not made for faint-hearted sissies.

Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.

For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes and duties, than profits the oil production company that supplied crude oil for that petrol.

Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? I don’t know.

“I never read The Economist” – Management Trainee, aged 42.