Software & Its Workers: Teaching Software Engineering to Students for the Rentier Economy

Computer science (CS) students may aspire to many job titles post-graduation, from software engineer to platform architect. Yet likely absent is the term “worker,” which brings up ideas of more “blue collar” professions or even labor in a factory. What might it look like for CS majors to consider their role in the labor hierarchy, while interrogating and re-framing their identities as workers? In this paper, we describe a contemporary theory of political economy (rentier capitalism) in the context of the tech sector and argue that it facilitates connecting CS students with their worker identities. We demonstrate how educators might integrate teaching about the rentier economy into a hypothetical software engineering course design. Along the way, we discuss how different aspects of political economy and computer science intersect, supporting a more complex understanding of what being a software engineer means.