Software development and “people management” are today one and the same thing. There is almost no relevant new application that doesn’t target relationships (of all sorts) between people (of all kinds, machinic included), and existing relationships themselves are being constantly and increasingly intercepted by these new software applications. That can be considered a universal phenomenon, so far as we don’t postulate the eventuality of cultural worlds being so deeply split (tech and non-tech) that it becomes irreversible, which is hard to even imagine – yet quite possible. Meanwhile, the software development process has been itself overwhelmed by the dynamics of relationship networks. Again, a far-reaching event: upstream, relationships become increasingly central to the software business; downstream, the design teams have largely become virtual communities themselves – sometimes gladly, often not.
A paradox: the enormous amount of data that is being produced all along this process is mostly “about nothing”. Since there isn’t a clear distinction anymore between product and producer, written speech (which is now massively stored, linked, and tagged) in general ceases to be “about something”, and becomes just talking for the sake of it. All that wild data is already more abundant and more important than all the structured, organized data in the world.
Make no mistake: it gets stronger and more meaningful exactly because it is wild. Also more human, if you will, as it gets more machinic. When will we realize that program writing itself follows the same principle?
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