Middle Tech

Middle Tech
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 224
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780691257167
ISBN-13 : 0691257167
Rating : 4/5 (167 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Middle Tech by : Paula Bialski

Download or read book Middle Tech written by Paula Bialski and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why software isn’t perfect, as seen through the stories of software developers at a run-of-the-mill tech company Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” 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’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” 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’t 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.


Middle Tech Related Books

Middle Tech
Language: en
Pages: 224
Authors: Paula Bialski
Categories: Computers
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-05-21 - Publisher: Princeton University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why software isn’t perfect, as seen through the stories of software developers at a run-of-the-mill tech company Contrary to much of the popular discourse, no
High Technology and Low-income Communities
Language: en
Pages: 434
Authors: Donald A. Schön
Categories: Architecture
Type: BOOK - Published: 1999 - Publisher: MIT Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How will low-income communities be affected by the waves of social, economic, political, and cultural change that surround the new information technologies? How
Modern in the Middle
Language: en
Pages: 346
Authors: Susan Benjamin
Categories: Architecture
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-09-01 - Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century a
The United States and Mexico
Language: en
Pages: 244
Authors: Cathryn L. Thorup
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1987-01-01 - Publisher: Transaction Publishers

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rapid technological advance is fast changing the nature of the relationship between the industrial countries and the advanced developing countries. This volume
Sharing Foreign Technology
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Subcommittee on International Scientific Cooperation
Categories: Exchange of publications
Type: BOOK - Published: 1989 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK