Enterprising and lost: Professional lives of programmer interns

作     者：Wang, Chadwick Yang, Kunyun 

作者机构：Tsinghua Univ Dept Hist Sci Beijing Peoples R China Tsinghua Univ Ctr Sci Technol & Soc Beijing Peoples R China 

出 版 物：《CHINESE JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY》 (Chin. J. Sociol.)

年 卷 期：2021年第7卷第2期

页      面：252-279页

基　　金：The author(s) received no financial support for the research  authorship  and/or publication of this article 

主　　题：Enterprising-self game programmer intern subjectivity 35-year-old crisis 

摘      要：Programmer interns are a distinctive group of precarious laborers. They undertake the same jobs as junior programmers with formal employment, while suffering from high pressure and earning low pay. Still, they are convinced that only a long-term internship can keep them on the right track of professional career development. We explore their consent-making through six months of fieldwork in an internet company, and propose the enterprising-self game to explain their subjective orientations. In the enterprising-self game, programmer interns become accustomed to identifying themselves with a particular type of quantifiable labor product, for instance, the positioning of their sticky notes on company whiteboards and the expected T-levels that represent their employability in the industry, by which their enterprising self is a by-product. Programmer interns seems to believe that, rather than higher education, state-owned enterprises, or multinational enterprises, only domestic internet companies can help them attain their enterprising selves. Even though the supervisor-intern relationship and the gender game of masculinity performance constitute part of the programmer interns enterprising-self game, the essence of the game has never been challenged and in some ways is only being reinforced. Though only a few lucky employees can win the game by attaining promotion to the senior engineer or management level, most of them still get lost in the periodic and imperceptible time of life as a programmer, which is characterized by full devotion to the company, until the 35-year-old crisis.