Pick up almost any novel or film about the technology industry, and it will fall into one of three categories. It will be a warning with the systems winning, humans crushed under the weight of progress they can’t control, or it will be a solution; here’s the broken system, and here’s how we fix it with a revolution. Or it will be a joke with the absurdity of the open-plan office, the pointless stand-up, the manager who’s never written a line of code, asking for pointless reports to make themselves look important.
The Warning
The dystopian tradition is the oldest and most persistent. From Orwell’s 1984, where the system is total, surveillance absolute, and resistance futile, to contemporary tech anxiety like Black Mirror, the warning story has a clear shape. Technology is coming for us. The humans who built it have lost control of it. The ending is dark.
More recently The Handmaid’s Tale applies this logic to institutional control with devastating precision, and Robert Harris’s The Fear Index brings it into the world of algorithmic trading with genuine thriller momentum. These are serious, important works. The warning is real.
But the warning story has a problem. It requires the system to be malevolent. In my experience, the systems that grind people down aren’t evil. They’re indifferent. Nobody is twirling a moustache. The damage is done by accumulation, by small decisions, by people trying to do their jobs in conditions that make that increasingly difficult. That’s harder to dramatise. It’s also more true.
The Solution
Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project was a genuine revelation when I first read it. Finally, I thought, someone is writing about the world I work in every day! The chaos of daily IT, the competing priorities, the systems held together with stubbornness and institutional memory. I felt seen.
Then I put it down and went back to work. And nothing changed except I was thinking, how can anyone who has read this not get frustrated with the reality of the day to day?!
The Phoenix Project and its successor, The Unicorn Project were obviously inspired by Eli Goldratt’s The Goal. These are all business manuals wearing a fictional wrapper. Their story exists to deliver a framework and the characters exist to illustrate the principles. The ending is always the same: the organisation is transformed, the teams are humming, the business wins.
In thirty years of corporate software engineering, I never once saw that ending. What I saw was the framework quietly abandoned six months later, the team restructured, and everyone back to keeping the lights on at 3 am while pretending the last eighteen months didn’t happen.
These books matter. They opened a door for many people, including me. But they’re selling a bill of goods and the gap between their promise and the reality of most organisations is why I wrote Human Software.
The Joke
Mike Judge’s Office Space is probably the most accurate depiction of corporate tech culture ever committed to film. The TPS reports. The multiple bosses. The management consultant who’s never done the job is telling everyone how to do the job. Anyone who’s worked in a mid-size technology company will wince with recognition from just the opening scene.
Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero does something similar but gentler. A corporate incomer arriving in a small community and slowly having his certainties dismantled by the place and its people. It’s warmer than Office Space, more elegiac, and the ending lands somewhere unexpected.
Both are brilliant. Both ultimately treat the corporate world as material for comedy or gentle satire rather than as a place where people’s lives are genuinely at stake. The joke requires distance. And distance, in my experience, is a luxury the people inside these systems can’t always afford.
Then there’s something epic like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. A masterpiece of satire where the systems never work, and everyone is happily waiting for Christmas while the resistance is attempting to bring everything down.
The Gap
What I kept looking for and never quite found. I wanted a fiction that took the tech world seriously as a human place. Not a warning, not a solution, not a joke. Just true with a hopeful thread.
A story about people who care deeply about what they do, trying their best in conditions that make that increasingly difficult. About the engineer who knows where the bodies are buried and keeps showing up anyway. About the executive who genuinely believes she’s doing the right thing. About the small decisions that accumulate into something nobody intended and everybody has to live with.
About what it costs to be human in a world increasingly run by machines. And not in the dramatic, dystopian sense, but in the quiet, daily, relentless sense that anyone who’s worked in these systems will recognise immediately.
I couldn’t find that novel. So I wrote it.
You can find out more at Human Software.