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The idea that the tech industry is a secure field with jobs and opportunities for growth is a myth. There is widespread precarity among software developers, who experience uncertainty, anxiety, and imposter syndrome as technological advancements threaten job security. Max Papadantonakis investigates this phenomenon in his revealing study, Canaries in the Code Mine. He indicates that precarity is not just about the risk of losing one’s job; it is about living in a career where basic needs and rights are not guaranteed.

Interviewing 120 software developers from leading tech firms, Papadantonakis shows how temporary contracts, project cancellations, and company downsizing undermine the security of even highly skilled professionals. He also highlights the systemic inequalities that shape the tech industry, showing how age, race, and gender often dictate the opportunities and responsibilities software developers have—or are denied.  

Canaries in the Code Mine highlights a disturbing reality of privilege and vulnerability within the tech industry. Papadantonakis engages in a critical discourse on the evolving nature of work in the digital era, emphasizing the need to shape an equitable future in the rapidly evolving landscape.

The practice of Model-based Systems Engineering is becoming more widely adopted in industry, academia and commerce and, as the use of modelling matures in the real world, so the need for more guidance on how to model effectively and efficiently becomes more prominent. This book describes a number of systems-level 'patterns' (pre-defined, reusable sets of views) that may be applied using the systems modelling language SysML for the development of any number of different applications and as the foundations for a system model.

A number of interrelated developments are changing the nature of software technology. Developments in hardware are putting greatly increased power at the disposal of the software technologist. Advances in formal methods are providing the means to bring greater precision into the early stages of system development. Techniques such as expert systems are being brought into the domain of software technology as a result of advances in the application of artificial intelligence research. Developments in paradigms of system development are giving the software technologist better models of system structure and better tools and techniques for creating large systems, and greater political recognition of the importance of information technology is resulting in increased funding for research and development in software technology.

Modern computing systems of all kinds accumulate various data at an almost unimaginable rate. Alongside the advances in technology that make such storage possible has grown a realisation that buried within this mass of data there may exist some knowledge of considerable value. This could be information critical for a company's business success or something leading to a scientific or medical discovery or breakthrough. Most data is simply stored and never examined, but machine-learning technology has the potential to extract knowledge of value (i.e. data mining).

Software engineering products are becoming ever more complex, because software is being used in the solution of more technically difficult problems and because the size of software projects continues to grow. A key question for software engineers is how to cope with this complexity. There is no single answer, and software engineers must attack the problem from a number of perspectives. A technical perspective reveals new paradigms for system development, including two paradigms that show particular promise: object-oriented design and formal methods. A management perspective recognises that good project management is vital to the success of a complex project. The scale of modern projects makes it essential to use automated support, so software engineers must also look at how to manage complexity from an automation perspective. Automated support can come in the form of discrete tools for particular tasks, or a packaged set of tools in a support environment.

Games are often a fun perk of a tech company job, and employees can “play to win” in the competition to succeed. But in studying “Behemoth” (a pseudonym for a top American tech company), Tongyu Wu discovered that gaming work culture was far more insidious.

Play to Submission shows how Behemoth’s games undermined and manipulated workers. They lost their work-life balance and the constant competition made labor organizing difficult. Nonetheless, many workers embraced management’s games as a chance to show off their “gamer” identities and create a workplace culture with privileged insiders and exiled outsiders, with female and migrant workers usually in the latter group. Moreover, Wu indicates this may be the future of work for high- and low-skilled and, creative workers in an environment where capitalists have heightened demands for technology and creativity.

Drawing from 13 months of ethnographic work, Wu presents a persistent reality in which the company reaps the reward of surplus productivity, leaving employees themselves in a highly competitive and sometimes precarious work position.

Winner of the 2017 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Software developers work rhetorically to make meaning through the code they write. In some ways, writing code is like any other form of communication; in others, it proves to be new, exciting, and unique. In Rhetorical Code Studies, Kevin Brock explores how software code serves as meaningful communication through which software developers construct arguments that are made up of logical procedures and express both implicit and explicit claims as to how a given program operates.

Building on current scholarly work in digital rhetoric, software studies, and technical communication, Brock connects and continues ongoing conversations among rhetoricians, technical communicators, software studies scholars, and programming practitioners to demonstrate how software code and its surrounding discourse are highly rhetorical forms of communication. He considers examples ranging from large, well-known projects like Mozilla Firefox to small-scale programs like the “FizzBuzz” test common in many programming job interviews. Undertaking specific examinations of code texts as well as the contexts surrounding their composition, Brock illuminates the variety and depth of rhetorical activity taking place in and around code, from individual differences in style to changes in large-scale organizational and community norms.

Rhetorical Code Studies holds significant implications for digital communication, multimodal composition, and the cultural analysis of software and its creation. It will interest academics and students of writing, rhetoric, and software engineering as well as technical communicators and developers of all types of software.

Many IT projects are doomed before the ink is dry on the contract. In this highly readable book, John Smith sets out the 40 root causes of troubled IT projects and explains how these can be avoided at each stage of the project life cycle.