Software Engineering and the Social Contract

From time to time, I get the question “Why did you move from the USA to Sweden?” The one-liner I deploy in most situations is that I moved “in search of a better life.” While this isn’t an entirely untrue statement, it’s a simplification of a more complex set of motivations related to social responsibility and values that not everyone is interested in hearing in the moment. This is my attempt at articulating those underlying reasons.

I am a software engineer by trade, and it’s an interesting time to be in my line of work. Never before in history has such a large group of workers had such a high degree of mobility. Look at the top economies across the world and you’ll struggle to find a country that doesn’t list software engineering under its “in-demand skills” list for labor migration.

Unlike other high-demand roles like doctors, healthcare professionals, and engineers of other sorts, software engineers need no formal qualifications when landing a job: no certification or license from some nationally recognized standards body, no years-long specialized higher education program–in fact, increasingly no degree is needed at all. In competitive labor markets and especially at multinational organizations, software jobs are typically performed in English too, reducing language as a barrier to mobility for many.

Given strong global demand, compensation tends to be relatively high for software engineers. Nowhere is this more true than the United States of America, where even entry-level engineers can earn six figures, with more experienced engineers clearing three times that in total compensation (even more for exceptionally experienced engineers and for those working at the largest tech companies).

Put simply: an English-speaking software engineer with more than a few year’s experience could choose to work just about anywhere in the world and live comfortably.

This, to me, has profound implications in the context of the social contract—the general idea that individuals give up some freedoms in exchange for broader social benefits, legitimizing the state and norms governing that society in the process. For most, the idea of a social contract is something of a farce: how many people can say that they chose the society that they live in?

But to be able to choose where to live and work means that staying in the USA is itself a choice, one that implied that not only was I fine with the state of things around me, but that I was happy to benefit disproportionately from it. Even if I didn’t feel like I was personally signing off on the gun violence epidemic or the student debt crisis or mass incarceration or the opioid crisis (etc), cashing a big check every month felt at least like legitimizing the values that bred those societal ills.

It’s more than abstract philosophy too: you can vote with your wallet and avoid that unethical chicken sandwich chain or subscription service, but a software engineer can have several orders of magnitude more impact by voting with their labor (and redirecting the tax revenue that it generates elsewhere).

…Which is what I chose to do. Sweden is no perfect society, but the sum of the vectors of its social values are more closely aligned with my own than my home country’s. I had a good life there, just as I have a good life here; I wasn’t looking for a better life for myself, but instead a better way for all to live that I could contribute to.