Seeing like a software company

Summary

The big idea of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State can be expressed in three points: Modern organizations exert control by maximising “legibility”: by altering the system so that all parts of it can be measured, reported on, and so on. However, these organizations are dependent on a huge amount of “illegible” work: work that cannot be tracked or planned for, but is nonetheless essential. Increasing legibility thus often actually lowers efficiency - but the other benefits are high enough that organizations are typically willing to do so regardless. By “legible”, I mean work that is predictable, well-estimated, has a paper trail, and doesn’t depend on any contingent factors (like the availability of specific people). Quarterly planning, OKRs, and Jira all exist to make work legible. Illegible work is everything else: asking for and giving favors, using tacit knowledge that isn’t or can’t be written down, fitting in unscheduled changes, and drawing on interpersonal relationships. As I’ll argue, tech companies need to support both of these kinds of work. Thinking in terms of legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies. It explains why companies do many things that seem obviously counter-productive, why the rules in practice are so often out of sync with the rules as written, and why companies are surprisingly willing to tolerate rule-breaking in some contexts. Seeing like a state James C. Scott was writing about the “high modernist” movement in governance that produced (among other things) the tidy German forests of the 19th century. In order to produce wood at scale, the German state demanded legibility: forests that an inspector could visit to tally up the amount of healthy trees. That means that you must be able to walk through the forest - i.e. the underbrush must be controlled - and the trees ought to be ideally laid out in neat rows of a single type. Proponents of legibility often describe their pr...