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The Implications Of Knowledge Work
dsplat writes: "Business 2.0 has an article titled Mind Over Matter concerning the implications of "knowledge work" and its potential effects on the relationships between corporations, their employees and their customers. In many ways, it reads like a less strident version of the Cluetrain Manifesto. One telling quote is: 'Traditional capital was stuck in a company's bank account or investments. It could not walk away in disgust. Human capital has free will. It can walk out the door; traditional capital cannot.' This article is part of a larger series titled The 10 Driving Principles of the New Economy.
"
It may be true that human capital can walk, but nondisclosure agreements, incremental vesting and health benefits -- not to mention car payments, mortgages and diapers -- mean that walking often isn't simple. Smart businesses, ironically, may make themselves attractive to potential employees by ensuring that they're easy to leave, not just to start at. And even though this article is about "knowledge work," it bears repeating that only a small fraction of jobs fit that category.
Being a "knowledge worker" (I just consider myself a smart individual who doesn't mind being paid for thinking) is really the best part about being a geek.
:P
I had a real job (ie. not behind a register) while I was in high school - and that was because I knew computers really well (and was a fledgling programmer). I remember at one point, a lot of the people at the company got pink slips, and all interns would have to go. The coolest part was when my manager quickly called up HR and basically said "I NEED HIM, IDIOTS!" (referring to me).
Wouldn't that just make you feel GOOD? The best thing about being a knowledge worker is that you are needed for more than your typing ability. It is your ability to think analytically about a problem, and come up with a solution faster than the other guy.
However, job security is a big thing among young programmers these days. Why pay some guy $70k a year, when we can pay the next college grad $50k for the same thing? This is where being a good knowledge worker comes in (and it's why I would suggest to anyone thinking about not going to college to cash in on all the tech stuff now to think twice). Your job security is much better when you're the guy behind the desk who isn't just hammering out the code for some guy's design, but you're actually making the design decisions.
Being a knowledge worker should make everyone here feel better. And the better you are at thinking, the even better you should feel.
Imagine what might happen if we all just threatened to leave our employers? I think we'd easily get some pay raises
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
When I was growing up, my family had no medical insurance for quite some time. Eventually my mother recieved a promotion to supervisor at her job, and medical insurance was one of the perks she started recieving.
Not even a month after the medical insurance started, my sister was brought into the hospital for some tests. Turns out she had Lukemia.
2 years later she was finally done with the chemo, but still had to do regular (monthly) tests with her doctor.
Grand total of all of this... Most likely several hundred thousand dollars. We paid probably a couple thousand at the most.
You're right, medical insurance really is a gamble on if you're going to need it, but the money you're gambling with is nothing compared to what you could have to pay.
One of the commoner cliches in articles like this is "Hire the young geeks, they've been using computers all their lives, and they really understand what's going on." Guess what? That's also true of many old geeks. Granted, it used to be a lot harder to get computer access -- which means that anybody who spent time geeking was extremely motivated.
I don't buy that software is like languages, learning it young changes your brain. I'm the daughter of a computer-science professor, and I was exposed to computers very young. When I went to college, my doors were blown off by some people who'd first encountered computers at college; they did datasuck faster than I did. What matters is speed of knowledge acquisition, not the age at which it was acquired.
I'm not advocating that young geeks are any less valuable than old geeks; just pointing out that we have different virtues to offer. The old geeks can say "Yes, we tried that back in 1981, and here's what went wrong then"; the young geeks can say "Let's try it this way in 2001, and see if we can do it now."
And, yes, old dogs can learn new tricks. I do it every day.
The Digital Age is not just an age of smart machines but of humans who, through networks, can combine their intelligence, knowledge, and creativity for breakthroughs in the creation of wealth and social development. Just as networking distributes and integrates computer processing - the network becomes the computer - so inter-networking should be able to distribute and integrate human intelligence to achieve a new form of organizational consciousness. The N-Gen may be the first generation to network intellect for problem solving and innovation...
This is something that I have been anticipating since I saw the Internet first begin to expand beyond the academic world and into the mainstream in the early 1990's. The early Internet created a networking of knowledge among researchers that spurred a rapid increase in the pace of technological development throughout the 70's and 80's and continues today. Now the same knowledge sharing enabled by the Internet has spread to the rest of the world.
For the kids growing up today, the Internet is not a novelty, it is their environment. Being immersed in this environment, they accept its inherent properties as natural and subconsciously apply them in their view of the rest of the world. Just as a webpage without hyperlinks is only of limited use, so too is unshared knowledge. In the view of the "N-Generation", everything is connected, and it is this interconnectedness that magnifies the power of any given thing.
This phenomenon of power through knowledge sharing should be quite recognizable to most readers of Slashdot. After all, where would Linux be today if Linus had not shared his ideas with other programmers, and other programmer had not in turn shared their ideas? The entire Open Source movement and its rise to prominence these days is directly attributable to same principle.
It should not come as any surprise then that knowledge sharing will have the same profound effect in changing the nature of business enterprises. As this new generation matures, you can expect to see the same forces being applied to solving social problems.
Knowlege networking has the same synergistic properties as computer networking. Watch over the next decade as people all around the world become part of an enormous Human Beowulf Cluster. It will be quite interesting.
Ideology is for ideots.
But the Net Generation has something far more ominous to face:
With the US prison population growing at phenomenal rates and more of the US population incarcerated than any other leading democracy, privatization of incarceration is increasingly attractive both as a cost-containment measure, and as political porkbarrel. With privatization comes the incentive to work the prisoners to pay for the costs of their incarceration. This comes at a time when we see a major shift in emphasis on "knowledge" as the source of productivity. Therefore after we see prisoners working to pay for the costs of their incarceration, we will next see a natural transition to forms of incarceration that may, increasingly, seem less like incarceration and more like slavery.
This will provide an environment in which employers can make investments in training and then recover those investments.
What? This is utterly outrageous dystopian fantasy?
Think again teenage ubergeek.
There are plenty of incentives to put your sweet young ass permanently in the corrections system.
Seastead this.
This is a new thing in history. Since the dawn of civilization, there have been mass jobs, where many people did similar work under close supervision. That's over. Almost any mass job can today be done better by machinery.
This trend started around 1950, when the first automated auto engine production lines were built. But it was another 25 years before the real squeeze started. In the '70s the auto companies started requiring a high school diploma for new hires. The printing trades (and their unions) were totally destroyed by computer typesetting. Today, manufacturing has only about 16% of the workforce. (Agriculture, over half the workforce a century ago, is below 3%).
Mass work is almost over. Even blue-collar work isn't mass work ay more. Watch a road crew or a building job. You'll see a large number of people, each doing something different. You might see one or two guys with shovels, but you'll very seldom see five; if the job is too big for a few guys, the heavy equipment moves in. Nobody wants bozos on those jobs, least of all the people working them. They're dangerous; the tools are too powerful.
This is the real reason we have homelessness. There's no role left for marginal people. The guy who gets drunk every payday and shows up with a hangover every Monday was tolerated in 1960 auto plants. Today, they're canned, and even the union doesn't object much.
It's a better world for smart people, yes. And there isn't going to be a revolution started by the losers, because they really are losers, not merely oppressed. But it has real problems.
We're gradually pushing up the minimum IQ needed to make a decent living. In 1950, someone with an 80 IQ but a decent work ethic could have a steady job, own a home, and raise a family. That's harder now. Entry level to the good life today is probably around 110 IQ. Here in Silicon Valley, it's probably around 130. Minimum.
That's the real problem with an economy based on "knowledge work". It's out of sync with human biology. Either we rework the economy, rework human biology (quite likely to be an option in a few decades) or see a big class divide. Those are the options.
Social Capital (ie influence, power)
;-)
Human Capital (ie people)
Information Capital (ie knowledge, etc)
Imaginary Capital (ie stocks, banknotes)
Real Capital (ie buildings, gold)
Your last statement, ie., "Real Capital", is what concerns me about this entire article and its thrust.
For some reason, the authors (and those who have written similar articles and books - and I've read a number of them) tend to create a fictional "[fill in the blank] generation" group, making the assumption that "[fill in the blank] generation" should "all" (in quotes) be expected to perform a certain [fill in the blank] job or forever fail to live comfortably or be a contributing member to society.   In this case, the over-emphasis (my opinion) on "Knowledge Capital" forgetting that somehow one needs to live and/or work in a house or work in an office (ie., Real Capital - eg., buildings).   Who, might I ask, will fix the plumbing in these said buildings?   Who will build more houses (or do we live in tents that we put up ourselves, drinking from the polluted rivers and disposing of our waste out in the streets?).   Who will string the CAT5 or fiber or manufacture the circuit board for your computer or even build the chair that you sit in?
It's nice to fantasize about "everyone" becoming a "knowledge worker" but lets get real folks.
True, the days of "big steel" and the so-called traditional "blue collar" worker are most likely over, at least here in the U.S.   However there is an infrastructure in place right now that MUST be maintained and the so-called "knowledge workers" wouldn't have a clue how to do it.   Voc Ed has been lambasted recently but there MUST a be layer of workers with the knowledge and skills in carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, masonary, etc., to maintain one of our primary requirements for survival - the shelter.
I have purposely left out all the other things we take for granted, like trash haulers, transportation workers, road-builders and such, figuring that those in fantasy-land might project that we "knowledge workers", our infrastructure crumbling around us (eg., no plumbing or electricity), would somehow still get by, sitting out on the street or in our yards staring at our solar-powered palmtops that are spewing our knowledged-based electrons at dying satellites (with broken navigational panels) in a decaying orbit ('cause no one knows how to fix them because remember, we're all "knowledge workers"), our end "products" going nowhere because the endpoint's wireless dish fell off the pole and no one knows how to set it back up again.
Let us all look at articles such as these as interesting information but information that will generally only apply to maybe 10% - 20% at most, of a given population.   I have read some variations of this article that were a little more realistic in that the authors projected that you'd have a good chunk of your population working as "knowledge workers" and the others as "service and support workers" for the "knowledge workers".   Keep this in mind.   Yes this view is harsh but step outside the idealism of it and think practicality.  
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
"Imagine the impact of millions of fresh-thinking, energized youth -armed with the most powerful tools ever created-hitting the work force"
This happens every generation. I don't see what's new.
However, the perception of human resources as capital assets rather than an expense is very important. Those of us with even a limited remit on the commercial side of business know that expense and capital are two very different things. I know that if I could get management to think of people as a capital resource our engineering team at least would be all the better for it.
However, the article seems to think that the entire next generation will be these media-savvy uber-workers. They won't. There will be just as many people working in light industry for minimum wages, just as many short order chefs and just as many petrol station cashiers.
It's only a revolution of the yuppies.
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The hardest part of my job is trying to explain to management what I do. They all know it has something to do with computers, I'm usually the first person they call when problems occur. But the more arcane bits of my job are inexplicable to most of them. It's like magic. Even my direct supervisor is a little hazy about how I spend most of my day (no slashdot jokes please).
And from talking with friends and others, it's the same if not worse elsewhere.
So how can management quantify your value if they don't understand your function? Whose responsiblity is it to understand your function? How can we educate management about our functions?
But what did the author actually say that matters? Here's my breakdown of the article. Consider it the Cliff's Notes (tm) version:
That's my take on it. Now, if I may add my own observations:
Some final thoughts: marketing does not equal product. Hackers do not equal time wasted. Managers are not hackers. Garfield is not Odie. And so on.
Good luck. YMMV, as ever.
--
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.