This chapter examines how debates about the (im)materiality of software
comes to inhabit the practices of software engineering work who manage
the temporality of obsolescence and its entanglement with their own
careers, language proficiencies, and expertise during the lifetimes of
systems they develop or maintain. It describes how bodies of code endure
materially in ways that exceed their formal understanding, revealing how
the hardwiring of temporality into digital systems takes place through
a moral economy of software work that devalues of code as it ages and
obsolesces. The habitus of the programmer is set within a disciplinary
regime that sustains the imaginary of software as immaterial, infinitely
flexible and malleable in spite of routine encounters with its material
recalcitrance.
An examination of software engineering work practices
