3 -what duct tapers do

Page 40-41: 3. what duct tapers do

Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. I am adopting the term from the software industry, but I think it has more general applicability. One testimony from a software developer describes the industry like this:

Pablo: Basically, I have two kinds of jobs. One involves working on core technologies, solving hard and challenging problems, etc.

The other one is taking a bunch of core technologies and supplying some duct tape to make them work together.

The former is generally seen as useful. The latter is often seen as less useful or even useless, but, in any case, much less gratifying than the first kind. The feeling is probably based on the observation that if core technologies were done properly, there would be little or no need for duct tape.

Pablo's main point is that with the growing reliance on free software (freeware), paid employment is increasingly reduced to duct taping. Coders are often happy to perform interesting and rewarding work on core technologies for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible, that means the same coder are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them work together. This is a very important insight, and I'll be discussing some of its implications at length later, but for now, let's just consider the notion of duct taping itself.

Cleaning is a necessary function: things get dusty even if they just sit there, and the ordinary conduct of life tends to leave traces that need to be tidied up. But cleaning up after someone who makes a completely gratuitous and unnecessary mess is always irritating. Having a full-time occupation cleaning up after such person can only breed resentment.

Sigmund Freud even spoke of "housewife's neurosis": a condition that he believed affected women forced to limit their life horizons to tidying up after others, and who therefore became fanatical about domestic hygiene as a form of revenge. This is often the moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organize one's working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) because more important people could not care less.

The most obvious examples of duct taping are underlings whose jobs are to undo damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.