When we make software like it is a commodity that is manufactured, and that can be managed like a manufactured product, we are bringing in all the baggage of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s ideas that dehumanize the labor force in service of an efficiency-centric view of labor productivity.
The first problem with that is that creative labor – a class that includes writing software — is inherently effectiveness-centric and this creates a square peg, round hole conundrum whenever we attempt to measure the efficiency of labor that is principally concerned about effect as a measure of its productivity. The next problem we create is that using efficiency as the window through which management views the world is more closely aligned to a finance-centric worldview than it is to a human-centric worldview, and this pulls software writing into the arena of conflicts between capitalists and humanists, a set of conflicts which software writing has virtually no ability to influence or impact, but which inevitably leads to mistreatment of people for the sake of financial reports, something that can be considered evil itself, but which when coupled with the mismatch between efficiency and effectiveness results is worse software as the incentive to be artful is wrung from the writer of software and they produce only well enough to not get fired by a manager that routinely exhibits that they don’t care about the art.