Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Good-Enough Software: an ethnography a Middle Tech company

About

Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In this book talk, Paula Bialski drawn on her newly published 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.