Middle tech

Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply 'good enough'. In this book, 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.