posted
A few weeks ago I read this piece from CNN, and I've been chewing it over a bit in my head since then. I'd be interested in you guys' opinions on it. I get the impression that this article was attacked on a few different fronts elsewhere, but I'm more interested in discussing it here than elsewhere on the web.
As a software developer (primarily for businesses), that technology kills jobs is not news to me. A typical thought process for the business that hires my company is something like:
Client: "I've got this process that we are currently paying X number of people to do by hand. This is expensive. If your software can do this all automatically, we'll save a whole bunch of money in the long run."
So a job is created (mine) to work on the product for some amount of time. Then when I am done there are X number of people whose jobs are no longer required. I move on to some other task, so that job creation was only temporary.
Even programmers themselves are not immune to this. My first paid programming job was to develop a software suite that allows ecologists to write their own ecological models without needing to hire a programmer to do it.
Similarly, each iteration of various software development frameworks make developing business software easier (database persistence, GUIs, web pages, etc). Consequently, less programmers are now needed than before to do the same job. The contract I'm working on now had 20+ programmers just 10 years ago. Now we're doing fine with 4 of us.
So that's what I've seen in my field. It seems every other field needs fewer and fewer workers to do the same thing.
There just doesn't seem like enough work for everyone to do. Is "job creation" a lost cause? When you do create a new job, someone like me will probably end up writing software (or creating a robot) to get rid of it as a cost saving measure.
As a student in high school we were taught that during the Great Depression, men were hired with government money to do useless tasks just to get people working. I don't know if this is true, but it wouldn't surprise me if we're headed here in the long run.
Anyway, feel free to tear the article apart and tell me it's all going to work out .
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Xavier: So a job is created (mine) to work on the product for some amount of time. Then when I am done there are X number of people whose jobs are no longer required. I move on to some other task, so that job creation was only temporary.
I would argue the opposite. You still need a human somewhere in the loop, providing maintenance, fixing bugs, writing updates for changing circumstances, et cetera. I agree that you would need less people in the long run, but if there's not a developer being hired periodically to do sanity checks on processes written one or more years ago, then I would dispute the usefulness of the software in the first place.
Posts: 339 | Registered: Apr 2008
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posted
Yeah, and it is far fewer people, else it wouldn't have been cost effective. Programmers aren't cheap .
That role that you are describing (providing maintenance and such) I'm currently doing on three different software systems regularly, and a fourth when needed. This is in addition to the new features I am coding. So even if it needs to be done, its still a small fraction of the work hours that were lost by introducing the software system in the first place.
Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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On an optimistic day, my thought process goes like this. When we were all hunter-gatherers, we had to work everyday or starve. But as society progressed, we've been cutting down on the amount people need to work. With things like charity, Rome's bread ration, welfare, etc. We no longer tolerate starvation in most developed, or even the better managed developing countries. People work, not to not starve, but in order to get out of poverty. However, we all also work less. Most people get weekends off, we work roughly eight hours a day, etc.
I don't really see why this trend can't continue. If there is less work to do, why not a standard three day weekend? Why not five weeks of vacation instead of three? In response to the financial crisis, the work sharing program in Germany seems to have been a big success http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ax3kyE3bILDY
If I eyeball the OECD numbers correct, even before the recession Germans only worked on average about 80% as much as Americans.
As long as there's an efficient way of distributing the productivity of a society among its members, I don't see why we have to maintain exactly the same amount of work for everyone in the society now. (This is on an optimistic day)
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
There's always more to do. There were people saying the same things about factory manufacturing, industrial farming, and interchangeable parts assembly line manufacturing. The sectors previously with jobs, lost jobs, and new jobs were created as a larger workforce became available to do them. Heck, all three of those were far, far larger transformations -- the number of jobs lost due to software development is tiny in comparison. I doubt it'll even warrant a mention as a separate effect, far in the future.
I do think, though, that longer mandated vacations (and time off for things like parenting a child) are important and reasonable adaptations.
Of course, I'd also like to see a (low, but livable in much of the country) guaranteed minimum income for everyone. But that's a heck of a lot less likely.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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