Software Taboos

Every professional culture places certain topics outside the scope of legitimate concern, and those who choose to discuss them publicly anyway run the risk of being ostracized as radicals. For example, medicine was slow to discuss error and malpractice, while law was slow to discuss access and cost. A similar pattern is visible in the literature written for software engineers: thousands of pages on management, leadership, and technical decision-making, but almost nothing on workers’ rights, collective action, or alternative ownership structures. As with medicine and law, the topics excluded are ones that threatened the interests of the profession’s most powerful practitioners. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas argued that that what a group treats as taboo is not random. Taboos cluster around the boundaries of the group itself: what is forbidden defines who belongs and who does not, what counts as legitimate thought, and what marks the thinker as dangerous or confused. The things…