How are we still doing Taylorism in 2025?
In 19th century America, society was changing fast. Lands that were once farms were now becoming factories and the very people that worked the land were heading to cities for better pay to work in factories. Towards the end of the 19th century, Henry Ford was about to invent the car and less than a decade later, the Wright brothers would take their first flight. There was another significant person during that period, one that may not have invented the car or plane, but gave the world something equally significant for the time. Something that we still see in our work and school lives day to day.
The man’s name was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a Quaker and an industrialist and a man from a rich background, being born into one of the only families that took servants on the Mayflower. He spent his life as a mechanical engineer trying to solve problems in factories to make them work more efficiently. He is credited with inventing scientific management that also goes by the name Taylorism, and is considered one of the first people to study work efficiency and introduce ways to increase efficiency. His ideas were radical for his time and he was the first to recognise that employees should be trained for well defined roles rather than be left to train themselves. He would obsess over the smallest of details, such as how much was the optimal coal to load onto a spade, how many times a screw needs to be tight, how long does it take to assemble a box, and he would feed these metrics back into his system and improve them. This was known as time and motion studies.
His ideas were to take the “thinking” out of work and reduce workers to doing one repetitive task, over and over, very well. Taylor also had a low opinion of workers and thought the best way to work was to have a strict hierarchy in place. His ideas spread around the world and feed into larger debates around labour, capital, communism and capitalism.
The spread and legacy of Taylorism
Taylorism requires no need for one worker to know the tasks of the next worker in line, much like a production line still works today, they work on their task and pass it to the next person. Sound familiar? These groundbreaking ideas helped accelerate the improvement of many lives for the next 75 years. These kinds of improvements in efficiency helped arm both sides during two world wars and create the Industrialized world that we know today. Taylorism also found its way into the education system. The modern schooling system was built around finding workers for factories, not creating critical thinkers. The eugenicist, Ellwood Patterson Cubberley used the influence of the scientific method to treat school children as “raw goods” that can be improved (this style of teaching was criticized in one of the greatest TED speeches by Sir Ken Robinson). Factory schooling has been bashed into us from a toddler and Taylorism is just its adult form, a comfortable place that we lean into when something difficult comes along.
Taylorism in the modern world
The real issue with Taylorism is that in the modern world, when solving complicated problems, it simply doesn’t work. It was never meant to solve complicated or technical problems at a project or product level, so why does developing software in 2025 still feel like Taylorism? Why is it that when we say we’re doing scrum, we still manage to feel like we’re doing Taylorism?
Part of the problem from my perspective is that we are often surrounded with people that think the work we’re doing is somehow simple. Becoming truly self-organized or working in the open requires a level of vulnerability and psychological safety that many aren’t comfortable with - so we just go back to what feels comfortable. We find safety in being competent at something, so we choose not to look outside of that thing.
We are also managed in this way too. The expectations from management are often low and uninspiring as are the proposed solutions for escaping the Taylorist nightmare. Meetings turn into status gatherings where outputs are discussed and few managers can actually coach their mentees away from this line of thinking into an outcome driven approach.
Taylorism’s hangovers in software development
QA “handover”, Testing “phases”, “I tested 4 user stories this week” are all Taylorism hangovers. Having your own column on a JIRA board is the equivalent to being told to screw the same bolt. The fact that each day you have something different you are expected to test is just extra complexity. The fact you haven’t been given any context beforehand also plays part of why working in a Taylorist fashion is actually awful from a mental health point of view, career progression, self-esteem.
The longer you spend in this environment, the more you feel absolute isolation as a tester. The reality is that although you are treated like a workstation on a production line screwing in a bolt, you’re actually handed something much more complicated. You’re given “whatever” needs testing, because “how hard can it be?”. You are seen as both a generalist in terms of being able to test whatever is thrown over the fence and simultaneously expected to test it to an expert level. You are painting by numbers and being asked to produce a Monet. The worst part; you are expected to do this alone in your silo. The more complicated the issue, the more the walls close in. The sheer misery of being a tester in Taylorism.