Selling out

In 1973, Tom Lehrer famously sang that “selling out is easy to do”. That may have been true in the seventies, but it’s not true today: selling out requires both technical skill and a careful sense of how large organizations work in practice. One of the goals of this blog is to teach people how to do it.

If you want to live with uncompromised integrity, you don’t need anyone to tell you how: simply always do exactly and only what you want to do. You will be repeatedly punished for it — your managers will dislike you, you will lose jobs and lose out on the chance of getting hired, your financial situation will be less stable, and so on — but that’s just part of the deal. Like deadlifting four plates, it’s not easy, but it is straightforward.

It’s more complicated to sell out a little bit. Sellouts like me walk a fine psychological line: figuring out how to work a large organization on one hand, and maintaining some kind of independent inner life on the other. But is this safe? Does role-playing as a professional inflict some kind of psychic damage?

Marxist alienation

People often tell me that acting professional is dangerous because it’s “Marxist alienation”. I suspect many people have a vague sense that “alienation about your job” is in some sense necessarily Marxist, but the actual concept is more specific. In Marx’s First Manuscript he describes it like this:

The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. … This fact simply means that the object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer.

Marx’s theory here goes something like this¹: when you work for a capitalist boss, they make ten dollars for every dollar you make². The more you work, the more powerful you make your boss with respect to you³. Your work is thus producing a force that is your enemy: a literally “alien” power. For Marx, alienation is proportional to the amount you’re working:

the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature.

So far Marx is just talking about the worker’s alienation from his work. But he does touch on the internal psychological effects as well. Since work is such a big part of life, to be estranged from your work is to be in some sense estranged from your self:

[labor] does not belong to [the worker’s] essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself.

Overall, I can make out four distinct senses⁴ of Marxist alienation:

1. Alienation is when your work empowers your employer more than you, thus making you more disposable over time
2. Alienation is when your work separates you from the physical act of craftsmanship (and thus of the product you’re creating)
3. Alienation is when your work physically and mentally harms you: making you injured, deformed, and so on
4. Alienation is when you do not psychologically “confirm yourself” in your work, because you’re working on other people’s goals instead of your own

I don’t think the first one is relevant to big tech software engineers. The idea here is that the harder you work, the more you (relatively) disempower yourself, so you’d be better off coasting and putting your company in a worse financial position. But this just seems straightforwardly wrong: as a software engineer, you want your company to be doing as well as possible! The more powerful and rich your company is, the better your position will be⁵. A company that is struggling is more likely to treat you badly, lay you off, cut your benefits, and so on.

The second one is more relevant (particularly in large companies), but there’s a missing story here about why that separation is bad. I also don’t think the third sense of alienation applies to me: Marx is talking about the physical toll of factory work or other hard physical labor, which doesn’t apply to software engineering⁶.

The fourth sense of alienation — that your effort is being directed at other people’s goals — is the most straightforwardly relevant to my own experience. But I don’t think Marx has a great psychological account of why that happens or what it feels like. To go deeper into this psychological aspect of alienation, we need to look at some later Marxists.

Situationist alienation

In 1967, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem both published their masterworks. They were members of the “Situationist International”: an influential group of Marxist artists and political theorists⁷. Both of them have a lot to say about alienation. Debord writes:

The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products.

This idea — of the worker’s efforts not going to his own ends, but to some alien power — is straight out of Marx’s First Manuscript. But note how Debord is already talking in terms of “representation”. Elsewhere he writes:

the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires.

The Situationists are all about representation. It wouldn’t be too far wrong to think of them as a bunch of Marxists who saw the rise of advertising in the 1950s and 1960s and lost their minds. TV advertising is Capital itself made real, dressed in multicolored lights, projected into everyone’s homes. So when they talk about alienation, they talk about it in terms of representation. Vaneigem explicitly calls it roleplaying:

The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what he really wants to be. They are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience.

Alienation means giving up your real, authentic self in order to play some “role” (for instance, the role of “effective staff engineer”). It’s a vicious cycle, because the more you lean into the role, the more your authentic life becomes trivial, which in turn makes the role more appealing:

Life is sacrificed, and the loss compensated by means of accomplished prestidigitation in the realm of appearances. The more daily life is thus impoverished, the greater the attraction of inauthenticity, and vice versa. Dislodged from its essential place by the bombardment of prohibitions, limitations and lies, lived reality comes to seem so trivial that appearances become the centre of our attention, until roles completely obscure the importance of our own lives.

Ultimately, Vaneigem describes alienation as an addiction:

This ambiguity accounts to my mind for people’s addiction to roles. It explains why roles stick to our skin, why we give up our lives for them. They impoverish real experience but they also protect this experience from becoming conscious of its impoverishment. Indeed, so brutal a revelation would probably be too much for an isolated individual to take.

This is almost a straightforward preview of the 90s idea of “selling out”: people are born wild and free, but when they watch too much TV they give up on their dreams for a paycheck and become big fat phonies. According to this view, it’s always better to not sell out. It may leave you poor and without prospects, but at least you won’t be unoriginal⁸. What shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?

I’m sure this is an accurate description of some people’s hangups about work. But I don’t think even the Situationists would agree that any advice on how to play a role well — i.e. the advice I give throughout my blog — is inherently harmful. The problem with role-playing is that you risk losing your authentic inner life, but that’s a risk, not an inevitable consequence. Vaneigem has a wonderful quote on this:

Nobody is ever completely swallowed up by a role. Even turned on its head, the will to live retains a potential for violence always capable of carrying the individual away from the path laid down for him. One fine morning, the faithful lackey, who has hitherto identified completely with his master, leaps on his oppressor and slits his throat.

This is a little overdramatic, but it seems straightforwardly true. It sounds very impressive to talk about alienation (or like Marx, to derive alienation from the basic economic conditions of work), but, you know, you can just not do it, right? Healthy people can present different selves for different situations: you can be loose at a party, respectable at church, solemn at a funeral, professional at work, and so on. I’m not convinced this is alienating or impoverishing. In fact, it’s not just humans: my dogs act differently around different people too, and I don’t think that makes them inauthentic.

If maintaining a professional identity is harmful, it has to be because of something fundamental about work that makes it different from regular role-playing. Could it just be that acting professional at work is too inauthentic? Some amount of role-playing might be okay, but if the role you’re playing is completely alien, does it become lying to yourself?

Sartre and De Beauvoir’s bad faith

Another common term for alienation is “bad faith”. The original version of this comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous book Being and Nothingness⁹, where he describes bad faith as telling yourself lies. Lying to yourself is weird because you’re both deceiver and deceived:

Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.

Here’s another quote from Sartre’s partner Simone de Beauvoir, who writes more explicitly about professional bad faith (what she calls the “serious man”):

The serious man’s dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew the denial of this freedom. He chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself.

The key idea here is that professional bad faith — alienation — comes from losing yourself in the role. Instead of just playing at being a professional, you decide that you’re going to take it fully “seriously”, and treat professional values as if they’re absolute. But of course that’s not coherent: you can’t decide to treat a value as absolute, it either is or isn’t. So this requires a kind of continual self-deception where you pretend there’s no decision to be made at all. I have the same attitude to this as I do to Debord and Vaneigem: sure, some people might make this mistake, but you don’t have to.

I can see why it might be tempting to treat work as the ultimate source of value: it gives you food and shelter, it (for Marxist reasons) can feel like a powerful alien force, companies constantly propagandize their employees, and so on. But work is just a collection of people following incentives until they reach some kind of stable equilibrium. From the inside, this equilibrium can look like the structure of the universe. However, if you treat it like that, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed when it turns out to be as arbitrary and pointless as other stable equilibria.

American sociology and the “standardized loser”

I’ve considered a bunch of theories on which work — even well-paid knowledge work — might be inherently alienating:

• Capital is intrinsically an alien force
• Workers can become addicted to role-playing
• Treating work as an ultimate source of value is self-deception

I don’t buy any of these (or at least, I don’t buy that they show that acting professional is inherently bad). But there are lots of types of jobs in the world, and some of them definitely seem more alienating than others. The best books I’ve read on these are C. Wright Mills’ White Collar or Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life¹⁰.

The American sociologists are in the same conversation as Marx, the Situationists, Sartre and de Beauvoir¹¹. Mills writes about the median “salaried employee”:

In the case of the white-collar man, the alienation of the wage-worker from the products of his work is carried one step nearer to its Kafka-like completion. The salaried employee does not make anything, although he may handle much that he greatly desires but cannot have. No product of craftsmanship can be his to contemplate with pleasure as it is being created and after it is made. Being alienated from any product of his labor, and going year after year through the same paper routine, he turns his leisure all the more frenziedly to the ersatz diversion that is sold him, and partakes of the synthetic excitement that neither eases nor releases. He is bored at work and restless at play, and this terrible alternation wears him out.

In this, we see both Marxist alienation, where the employee is physically separated from his craft, and Situationist alienation, where the employee is absorbed into the world of the “spectacle”. For Mills, this was television, but today it’d probably be scrolling short-form video on your phone. Mills goes on to describe how white-collar work can be humiliating and dehumanizing:

In his work he often clashes with customer and superior, and must almost always be the standardized loser: he must smile and be personable, standing behind the counter, or waiting in the outer office… self-alienation is thus an accompaniment of his alienated labor.

And:

Here are the new little Machiavellians, practicing their personable crafts for hire and for the profit of others, according to rules laid down by those above them.

This is a great articulation of something I write about a lot: that your primary job is to make your bosses happy, and that you ought to shape both your emotions and values towards this goal. When necessary, you must be the “standardized loser”, happy to have your professional plans disrupted. You must be a “little Machiavellian”, quietly laying the groundwork for your personal goals.

I think here we come to the strongest version of “alienation”. Playing the professional is bad because “professional software engineer” is an inherently subservient role. Why can’t you just maintain a healthy mental distance (as the Situationists suggest)? Because humiliation takes its toll, whether you’re role-playing it or not. As an analogy, suppose you’re an actor in a film where you get slapped in the face. There’s a sense in which you’re not really getting slapped — everyone’s just acting — but you’re still being physically hit with each take, which will leave bruises over time.

The spectrum of compromise

There’s a tradeoff here that everyone has to make in their own way. At the one end is becoming fully alienated, like de Beauvoir’s “serious man”, and at the other end is leaping up to slit your master’s throat, as Vaneigem describes. Here’s some examples of points on that spectrum:

I am making the world a better place by achieving my OKRs. My yearly review cycle tells me how good of a person I am. I must work hard to ensure my company succeeds.

I have my own goals and values, but while I’m at work it’s in my best interests to be as professional as possible. My yearly review cycle tells me how effective I’ve been at pulling the strings in the organization. I must work hard to make money.

I have my own goals and values, which I try to accomplish as best I can in the context of work. I often argue with my managers about their priorities. It’s my responsibility to push my company towards my set of values, which is hard work and often unrewarded.

My workplace is an enemy I fight every day in order to get what I want done. I routinely ignore my manager’s priorities and do the things I think are important. My yearly review cycle tells me how much of a sellout I am: I wear bad reviews as a badge of honor.

I agree with my sources above that the first point is a big mistake, if for no other reason than that companies don’t follow their own stated values. If you prefer the fourth — the path of pure integrity — fair enough. You get to decide what tradeoffs to make with your own life. I land on the second point here (occasionally the third). I suspect it’s also a mistake to purely occupy the second point. Having some values that you occasionally trade off against your company’s values prevents you from slipping into the first point.

Conclusion

I don’t bring my whole self to work. My coworkers and bosses see the most professional version of me: friendly, cooperative, largely apolitical, patient, and so on. I try and save the edgier, more opinionated version of myself for my friends and family in real life. Readers of this blog get something in the middle.

When I write about being a software engineer, I give a lot of advice about mindset. I don’t just say what you should do, but what you should think and feel. In effect, I’m advising my readers to adjust their personalities into a more professional mold. This definitely works. If you turn yourself into the kind of person who’s successful in big tech companies, you will probably be more successful in big tech companies. Is this safe?

I think so, as long as you’re adjusting your work personality, not your authentic internal self. The well-known accounts of why it’s dangerous either assume that your work takes a physical toll (like Marx’s factory workers), or that you’re unable to maintain any mental distance between your personal and professional selves (like de Beauvoir’s “serious man”). Debord and Vaneigem say that role-playing can be dangerous, but if you’re able to avoid treating it like an addiction you’ll be okay.

Another danger is that being a professional is often humiliating, and humiliation does mental damage over time. Still, there are jobs that are way worse in this respect than “software engineer”. If you approach the job right — and you’re good at it — technical ability gives you quite a lot of power. Power is an antidote to humiliation.

Everyone gets to make their own deal with Mammon. You can decide exactly how much you want to compromise in exchange for wealth and career success. I don’t know if this is the best way to organize the world, but it’s the way the world is organized right now. Given that, I’m comfortable with my blog serving as a guide for how to get the most bang for your buck. If trading your integrity for wealth and power is sad, it’s even more of a tragedy to throw it away for nothing.