The Moral Economy of the Coder

The moral economy of the coder is the extension, to the contemporary software engineering profession, of E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy—the framework of customary norms and mutual obligations within which a community judges economic arrangements. The software engineering profession has developed, over approximately four decades, a set of unwritten but deeply felt norms about what constitutes fair professional practice: expectations about compensation for expertise, about quality as a craft obligation rather than merely a business consideration, about attribution of contribution, about the mentorship obligations of senior engineers toward junior ones. These norms are not universal, not always observed, and not legally enforceable. They function as an implicit consensus, enforced through the collective judgment of the professional community, and their violation by specific deployments of AI explains why the resistance to those deployments is so deeply felt by practitioners who are not, by any reasonable measure, afraid of technology.