It has long been assumed that high-tech fields like software development will provide a solid foundation for the skilled white-collar workforce of the future. However, recent deteriorations in employment conditions within the software industry have placed this assumption in doubt. Will the software workers of the future enjoy, as many have imagined, secure careers, ample pay, and an elite social status, or will they face a bleaker future of insecure employment, tedious work, and an entrenched position in the working class? This is a question of importance to the millions of people now employed in software development as well as for a wider society in which the fate of skilled white-collar occupations is inextricably linked to the maintenance of the middle class.

The results of this project, a yearlong ethnographic study of the software industry in Dublin, Ireland, suggest that the prospects for workers in the Irish software industry have been diminished in the past decade as companies have pursued new strategies for lowering costs and consolidating control over the production process. These strategies include the development of a global labor market that has brought Irish workers into keen competition for jobs with software workers from other countries, the creation of an elaborate division of labor that has made it difficult for workers to maintain employability over the course of their working lives, and the implementation of temporary work contracts that have made it impossible for many workers to achieve the kinds of careers they desire.

I argue that in combination these strategies, which I call knowledge management, have had a profoundly disempowering effect on Irish software workers and have neutralized their ability to influence the conditions of their employment. The Irish case demonstrates that in the contemporary capitalist regime there is no automatic connection between specialized expertise and occupational success and that despite its futuristic reputation high-tech industries offer workers no particular advantages relative to more prosaic forms of labor.