Can you think of any constructive ways forward, short of developing a striking new range of organic lamppost ornaments?Sure, but this is several questions. In the very-long term, society will need to implement a basic income due to widespread structural unemployment. There will always be differences in social status and popularity contests, but once we get to a state where low social status means you're on a 3-month waiting list to go to Mars instead of dying of starvation or health insurance, I'll say we've won as a species...
But let's stay out of society-wide political changes none of us can hope to control.
I like to think that I'm doing my part. I'm exposing The Lie to be a lie, and that's huge. Most people are terrified to speak the truth about ex-employers, as if it would blacklist them forever. (Having done it, it's not so severe that you starve, but yes, you do lose opportunities and I recommend a different road.)
Bringing down The Lie is the first step. Evil credibility systems come down once people stop believing in them, but people still do. If you apply for a job, you often deal with reference checks where "we have to speak to a manager". That's profession of faith in a credibility system that, to be blunt, deserved to die out decades ago.
The thing is, most companies operate on the assumption that 10% of managers are horrible people and therefore if someone drew 3 or 4 duds, the problem is with the employee. But technology draws in psychopaths who want to take advantage of head-down hard-working nerds and it's more like 50% who are evil and 30% more who are decent people but just not competent (and their teams get eaten by young-wolf conflicts as evil asserts itself from non-managerial corners.)
So, it's several orders of magnitude more common for good people to end up with fucked-up career histories than we think. That's also why we have such an age discrimination problem in our industry: by 35, you've had a real career history, not this VC-istan dream where no one fucks you over and ruins your reputation. Almost no one is courageous enough to speak about this, though.
Exposure of truth is key. When I "leaked" Google's calibration scores-- secret performance reviews that enable managers to keep good engineers captive on shitty projects by giving a positive verbal review and a negative (secret) numeric one that makes them immobile-- note that I didn't think I was leaking anything; how can something known by 50,000 people be secret?-- I did a lot of damage to the company's image. That wasn't even my intent. If I had known that a leak of calibration scores could cost Google millions, I wouldn't have done it. I would have threatened to do it unless given certain considerations (transfer within the company to a better manager). Luckily, I can't be sued because calibration scores aren't a product and exposing how a company treats its employees is unambiguously legal. Unfortunately, I've had a number of powerful people come out to fuck up my career.
The first step-- and we can legally do it-- is exposure. Companies and managers that ruin smart peoples' reputations careers, or (much more commonly, because most targets of this extortion cave) threaten to do so to get something, should be exposed with such harsh light that the world loses faith in them outright.
How did I cost Google millions (potentially; I don't think anyone knows the real figure) by leaking calibration scores? The fuckers who run the world now, they need us (talent). They need talented people to have faith in what they are doing. If they didn't, no one would give a shit that I leaked calibration scores and no one would try to fuck up my career years after the fact. If we burn down the facade of this economy of lies and fear down and expose the rot within, then we can right the power relationship.
Also, I don't actually support violence against the rich or well-connected because they are such. (That's just envious malevolence, and as evil as what we need to fight.) However, I am 100% in favor of making violence legal against certain types of social violence-- especially career blacklisting. As far as I'm concerned, if you "pick up a phone" on a private, powerless, employee-level person, or if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference, and the targeted person acquires proof of what happened, it should be legal for that person to use violence, up to killing, in retaliation. It should be obvious that I don't support killing the well-connected just because they are such. If you have social connections, then fine; good for you. If you use them for bad purposes (e.g. you "pick up a phone" and make someone unfundable or unemployable) your skull gets broken, and you might die painfully because examples must be made. That is how it should be.
I support radical honesty and the most honest way to deal with passive-agressive socially violent people is to kill them.
Ok, that's an ugly topic so I'll stop there. In any conflict, I view violence as a last resort. It means that one party failed to be human. Violence is sometimes acceptable and very rarely good but it is always hideous so I generally don't like it.
We are in violent conflict with the upper class. 45,000 Americans die of health insurance (either the lack of it, or horrible coverage) every year. Also, 9/11 wasn't Arabs vs. Americans. It was an upper-class well-connected douchebag from the second-richest family in Saudi Arabia killing 3,000 middle-class office workers (who don't matter to such people, because they're middle-class schmucks) to make a political point. We are at war. It's not a war of countries. It's a war of classes and it's global. Bin Laden and the Bushite neocons are on the same side (upper class). Whether middle-class Americans die or Iraqis is irrelevant to them. They do not all like each other (I'm sure Bush was convinced that bin Laden is a mortal enemy) and Illuminati-style conspiracies do not exist; but when they compete with each other, they do it in a way that makes us lose.
However the good news is that we (at least, you and me, personally) don't necessarily need to be violent. We in the cognitive 10^-k percent for some self-flattering k, we have options. We can escape and outperform them. We don't have to live in high-COL cities and work in VC-istan companies where the founders treat us like garbage because they have connections (read: they went to MBA school with VCs, and know disgusting secrets on powerful people they can use to "call in"/extort favors) and we don't. We can get away from those assholes-- possibly moving to a low-COL city, because we'll probably have to use our own capital-- pool our resources, and start fucking building things that actually solve peoples' problems and make the world better. We (talent in general, not just programmers) are what the world needs. Money is just an accounting trick to keep it going. We have the real stuff and it's time to start acting like it.
Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their promises.
The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people can suggest examples where this has happened before.
Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical transparency part of the conditions?
You ETA'd this after I wrote my original reply and I'm not going to give it the same long-form answer, but... yes, these are very good ideas.
Here's a post I wrote about something that, if I could get the resources (unlikely, but who knows) I would want to build: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on-wha... . What I really think would be a great contribution to the world is to shine some light on which companies and managers help peoples' careers and which ones harm them.