https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs#toc43
Shullenberger speaks of an emerging “voluntariat,” with capitalist firms increasingly harvesting the results not of paid labor but of unpaid interns, internet enthusiasts, activists, volunteers, and hobbyists, and “digitally sharecropping” the results of popular enthusiasm and creativity to privatize and market the results. The free software industry, perversely enough, has become a paradigm in this respect. The reader may recall Pablo, who introduced the notion of duct taping in chapter 2: software engineering work was divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of “applying duct tape” to allow different core technologies to work together, because the designers had never bothered to think about their compatibility. His main point, though, was that, increasingly, open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free:
Pablo: "Where two decades ago, companies dismissed open source software and developed core technologies in-house, nowadays companies rely heavily on open source and employ software developers almost entirely to apply duct tape on core technologies they get for free.
"In the end, you can see people doing the nongratifying duct-taping work during office hours and then doing gratifying work on core technologies during the night.
"This leads to an interesting vicious circle: given that people choose to work on core technologies for free, no company is investing in those technologies. The underinvestment means that the core technologies are often unfinished, lacking quality, have a lot of rough edges, bugs, etc. That, in turn, creates need for duct tape and thus proliferation of duct-taping jobs."
Paradoxically, the more that software engineers collaborate online to do free creative labor simply for the love of doing it, as a gift to humanity, the less incentive they have to make them compatible with other such software, and the more those same engineers will have to be employed in their day jobs fixing the damage—doing the sort of maintenance work that no one would be willing to do for free. ...
How accurate is this observation? I think the division of what is usually considered software engineering into "developing core technologies" and "applying duct-tape" has merit, but I have my doubts about the following:
1. Is "duct-taping" really necessary because of a lack of compatibility between core technologies? I would think that some "duct-taping" will always be needed.
2. Does the "voluntariat" trend really hold for Free Software? I remember that this problem widely publicised regarding OpenSSL after the Heartbleed attack was disclosed, but as I see many big corporations do have people hired to work on "core technologies", like Linux, gcc, etc., and in fact people these days complain about a corporate takeover of Free Software.