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The Brave New World of Work
Beck has written a surprising and provocative book about how working is changing radically under our very noses with little serious discussion in our media or political communities. We see stories all the time about employment rates, but most people have little or no sense of the radical changes affecting the nature of work.
Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich. Skills can be suddenly devalued, jobs obliterated, social and welfare safety nets eroded. Companies merge, collapse, form and reform, often at the expense of their workers.
Fear and economic insecurity prevail among the middle-class majority as well as the underclass, writes Beck. "The United States is the only advanced country where productivity has constantly risen over the past twenty years, while the income of most of its citizens (eight out of ten) has either stagnated or declined. The average weekly earnings of 80 per cent of Americans in gainful employment dropped by roughly 18 per cent between l973 and l995, he reports, from $315 to $258 a week. At the same time, the real income of top managers soared by 19 per cent in just ten years between 1979 and 1989.
As entire industries rise or fall, as firms expand, shrink, separate, "downsize" and restructure, employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day without knowing whether they will have their jobs or for how long. The newly unstable work society leads to the erosion of the middle-class and in our collective interest in civics. According to Beck, decline in civic participation and voting is directly tied to the decline of work society, which he says is closely linked to worker attitudes about democracy.
Is this all bleak? No, according to Beck. Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before. He foresees a more inclusive kind of transnational society, with less nationalism and provincialism. The alternative facing the world is either collapse or political self-renewal, and he foresees the latter.
It's an interesting look at a subject that will affect almost every single American whose lives are being shaped by powerful technological forces they sense but don't quite understand. Work is a critical subject, and technology is changing it. In Brave New World of Work Beck helps us understand how and gives us some sense of how the new workplace might affect our futures.
You can purchase Brave New World of Work at Fatbrain.
I think that if our schools trained people in how to work for themselves in the world of information, the new tech would support more people than it limits.
If it was "natural" for people to use self-published informational websites for much of their research, and to pay those people, then there would be lots more useful information on the Net and many more knowledgeable people supported by the Net.
It is our culture that trains us to use technologies in conservative ways -- as consumers or in support of traditional workplace methods-- rather than to create completely new information-centered industries.
Goat sex free since 2001
People are making less money today than they were before, and that will turn out to be a good thing. Is that what the author means?
Anyway, props to Jon Katz for the review. Maybe I will buy the book.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=285
I was one of the 75,000 or so laid of by Lucent Technologies. I have witnessed first hand the processes described above, and let me tell you, it isn't pretty at all. I consider it a slap in the face the way things are occuring in this economy. Gone forever (it seems) are the days when people were respected for the work that was done, as opposed to the bottom line, cut-throat corporate world we are living in now. Looking out for number 1 used to not be my highest priority, being able to go home at night knowing I did a damned good job was. Boy how that has changed. I work for myself now, as an independant contractor, and life is much better. I have been burned once, and you will never see me burned again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
Sent from your iPad.
Get ready to see your programming job get exported to India and China. Drop your mythical notions that all people in these countries know how to do is customer support.
On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss.
That said, middle class tech jobs will pay the bills nicely through 2010, after that I wouldn't get into programming for all of the tea in China, it will be a sucker's racket akin to the auto industry.
More and more people are ousted from their jobs by smart technologies.
Although I am no longer the fan of Robert Anton Wilson that I once was (despite the fact that I killed him), he spoke about this phenomenon in (IIRC) "Prometheus Rising". He felt that the increased automization of menial tasks would lead to a more educated society. Since all the "dumb jobs" would be taken over by computers, robots, etc., in order to survive people would have to educate themselves on tasks that cannot be performed by automatons.
This seems to be happening, at least to a degree, although there is another factor at work as well: cheap (nonunionized) international labor. There seems to be a point at which exploiting overseas workers is about as cheap as building a robot, sometimes cheaper.
This just goes to show the overwhelming importance of intelligence - people with low IQs can't compete in a high-tech economy. While this is a tragedy in our lifetime, in the near future, all children will be genetically engineered to be what we would consider to be geniuses [although, to their peers, the will be simply average], and the playing field will be level again.
Much like the automation efforts of the past, I don't think work will go "away" per se. It will change. The jobs will be different.
.25 an hour on an assembly line setting screws into mounts so the next guy at .40 an hour can screw them in. We do need someone to do routine maintenance and programming at 20 an hour on the machines that do the job.
We no longer need some guy to stand around for
I don't think we have in the past, or will in the future, see a dramatic decrease in jobs. What we will see is some jobs going away and some magically appearing.
Who had a job programming 50 years ago?
The fact is (just as with Lake Woebegon), the vast majority of humans are average. They prefer stability and order to chaos and "opportunity". And the other fact is that in North America these orderly, stable, average people have built the civil society that we have today (Kabul anyone? Bagota? Jo'burg?) So now the cultural and economic elite is going to destroy any hope of economic stability to "improve opportunity".
Isn't there an old proverb that goes, "Be careful of what you wish for - you may receive it"?
sPh
The dirty little secret here is that people with low IQs can't compete in a high tech economy. While this is a tragedy in our lifetimes, in the near future, all children will be genetically engineered to be what we would consider geniuses [although, to their peers, they will be simply average], and the playing field will be level again.
Down the road, he argues, this new kind of work society may actually be good for the world, creating a new kind of civil transnationalism, and enhancing our freedom and our civic lives.
Well, this looks very promising, but statistics and experience in Europe show people actually do less back to society in the form of volunteer work, societies and non profit organisations. My guess is the free work base we have laid out actually means we like our work better, but have less time and enthousiasm to do something back.
More and more people need day care for their children, health care jobs (the typical jobs-for-life) are very unattractive at the moment in the netherlands and shortages of personell are high, and costs for non-profit organisations are rising with prices so they cannot keep up with it anymore.
My point is there is also a down-side. We haven't explored the effects of this since we are in the middle of it (at least, in Europe and the US). The good thing is the typical work-80h-a-week-til-death stereotype in the US is fading, just as it has done in Europe, although it was less present there IMO. The down side of all this future will certainly surprise us.
This is nothing new. It has been apparent for years that many companies could care less about their employees. People who are quite good at their jobs (and well qualified) are casually fired as a matter of routine in the average workplace, while the hiring process has become the grandest production since Cecil B. DeMille.
Now, if only we employees could walk away from our mortgages and car payments the same way employers walk away from their employees. That would make things fair.
Then Katz says the author claims that this mobile, insecure worker will become politically aware at a world level, and we'll have a whole new class of involved citizens.
I don't see how you get there from here. Where's step B?
It seems that workers may become more familiar with the global sources of their labor problems, but without the avenue of local solutions, then I don't see these people becoming political agents. More likely, they will complain about global and national problems, but be unable to think of a way to solve those problems.
In other words, a bunch of complainers, rather than folks who take action. Remind you of any online communities you know?
This sounds just like Rifkin's "The End of Work" in which he lamented the decline of ordinary labor and the rise of the "symbolic analyst" class amidst predictions of economic doom and gloom. His book was written in, wait for it... 1995. Just a few years later the tech boom put us on cloud 9. Now the business cycle has turned so doom books are becoming popular again. In fact, the publication of doom books may signal the bottom of the business cycle, just as articles featuring "the bull" or "the bear" in Time Magazine signal a turn in the stock market.
So, if you have a copy of Rifkin's book, you could probably save yourself some money on this one. Dust it off and read it again.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"We're fighting our own terrorist war," said Mr. Valenti, whose lawyers sent 54,000 letters to Internet service providers last year requesting the removal of copyrighted material from customers' Web sites. The association also regularly refers cases to law enforcement officials and assisted the Customs Service in an antipiracy campaign that included raids on college campuses last month. "The great moat that protects us, and it is only temporary, is lack of broadband access," Mr. Valenti said.
Ha! The technology that Beck so cheerfully says will create a 'global citizen' is being increasingly (and has always been used) to further, not erode oppression.
Instant communication?
Witness the WTO meetings: All Joe and Jane Average ever saw were images of raging anarchists bent on destruction of all that is good, followed by 15 minutes of commercials for gas-guzzling SUV's they don't need, hamburgers they shouldn't be eating and diet schemes they wouldn't need if they didn't eat those hamburgers and actually got their lazy asses out of the SUV's once in a while and got some excercize.
This technology has been advancing at a dizzying rate, as has the dehumanization of the lower and middle classes has accellerated.
But so long as the tevee drones on soothing crap about Rachel and Raymond, they don't care that things are really going to hell around them.
Not 'till it knocks on _their_ front doors, and it's too late then.
Don't tell people this! What the heck you trying to do?
Really though, I think programmer jobs will change. The world will need less and less highly skilled programmers, and more and more "tech helpers" - people to walk their manager through making a presentation or sharing data with a client.
There will be sophisticated, easy to use tools to do these sort of tasks. Thankfully, many will still be too stupid to use them. Logical thinking combined with technical competence will always be a commodity.
.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Whether the real problem may be capitalism. Things are getting even worse for the worker -- he is no longer given steady work, but yet must still pay his own way because all resources are owned by the capitalist class, who will still sell to him, oddly enough. So, the worker is forced to work for even fewer benefits and guarantees than ever before, just to survive, while the big iron at Enron (just to name one example) walk away with millions, at the expense of the rank-and-file's very lives.
But of course we can't discuss that. "Socialism is discredited." (And no way do countries like Argentina discredit capitalism, no, no, no!)
What unionized gov't workers have done is outsourced all unionized manufacturing jobs through their hero Bill Clinton, NAFTA and GATT, anyone. That's why total union membership has stabilized, gov't workers are now the primary union members.
But gov't is being downsized, one level will be wiped out. The federal level will always be with us, but in each state, the local levels are being squeezed. In Michigan, even property taxes are collected at the state level, the county road repair is being taken over by the state, and the local elected school boards no longer decide any policy, they just implement state policy. You're not even allowed to run for the school board unless you're state certified.
I'm 30. I was one of the first people I know among my cohort to embrace the idea of becoming a mercenary for work. But over the last two years, more and more people my age, and younger are also taking that attitude: if the work doesn't suit me, I don't do it, ... and ... I decide the value of my work and my attitude and work ethic reflect that. Basically, salaried employees are slacking in response to perceived slights or injustices, or even based on what they think they are worth. Many of these things have existed among the "lazy" for many years, but they are becoming acceptable among the rank and file.
That said, I am very sad about this. To me, ideally work should be a way of serving humanity, not serving myself. I think that any job, position, industry, etc. can be looked at and done with an attitude of serving humanity. The problem seems to be that corporations are going in the exact opposite direction and the response is therefore mercenary. Corporations (stockholders) always, always end up winning as compared to their employees. The stockholders are perfect mercenaries of capital, and to me it was only a matter of time before that attitude was learned and reflected in the employees.
I haven't read this book, but I have read other similar works (e.g. Jeremy Rifkin has some stuff about this). It seems inevitable to me that in a capitalist environment this would happen. It also seems inevitable in a communist envionrment tho for different reasons. I personally think that we have to change the nature of our approach to education so that children grow up learning to serve humanity. Mind you, I'm sure lots of other people think that everyone becoming mercenary is a great thing...
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
This just goes to show the overwhelming importance of intelligence - people with low IQs can't compete in a high-tech economy. While this is a tragedy in our lifetime, in the near future, all children will be genetically engineered to be what we would consider to be geniuses [although, to their peers, the will be simply average], and the playing field will be level again.
Absolutely not in my opinion. The emphasis once more is being geared on education - good education, that you pay for. In my country they just introduced study-taxes which apply to attendees of universities.
The result of that is that people from the lower class not seldom can not afford to attend an university anymore. Hence they will be suffering from a lesser education in the future. In turn, this means that their kids will not be able to attend an university.. *draws a circle*
&& aemula C. ab stirpe interiit
As someone who has purchased 20 acres out in the sticks, and plans on being damned near self-sufficient in the near future, I always wonder why our society is so screwed up in this respect. The only people who seem to benefit in our current system is (you guessed it) big business and the wealthy. The rest will be purpetual wage slaves
I plan to give up a confortable middle-class income for the peace of mind that comes from providing for one's self, far before retirement age. I will work when I feel like it -- I don't think I'll ever want to totally leave the computer field -- and I'll barter as much as I can.
I will not be a wage slave until I'm 65!
Method of processing duck feet
It's a well known concept in economics that increasing free trade ("globalization") while raising the standard of living for the world overall, will result in lower average wages in the US. The other side of the coin is that it is also supposed to make things less expensive, so the lower wages don't hurt so much. I guess we'll see.
The job upheaval is a direct result of the information economy and the fluid nature of modern business. Will people in power screw someone else to make themselves better off? Duh... Get over it. It's been that way since the beginning and isn't going to change. Whining about it won't help.
The discussion is about the nature of work not the predictability of long term macroeconomic trends. Whether the world's economies become more 'global' or not and how much does not materially effect the nature of non subsistence work. That is, if you work in exchange for at least as much money as it takes to live above a subsistence level in a semi industrialized county or better.
The nature of work however IS changing. Think of it this way; all technologies tend toward less skill and more standardization. As factories have become automated now the 'art' of doing programming is becoming automated from the bottom up so that menial tasks can be handled by machines and processes. It used to be that simply re IPLing a mainframe was a big deal. Now that kind of task is handled by schedulers and error correcting code that allows for the smooth reinsertion of a machine back into the network. Eventually basic development programming such as device driver development will be done w/o humans. This will leave the creative work for only the most highly skilled and creative people to do while most of the old school programmers will be dedicated to the maintenance of automated tool building machines just like the guy who's job it is to maintain industrial robots. The skills will be very finite and the processes will consist of: alert, travel, diagnose, replace, restart, test, close ticket, next call.
What's interesting to me is that the idea of a free-flowing, free-lance, self-employed method of working is both a) all that I've ever known, and b) all that interests me. I'm only 30, but even with an unemployed spouse and a child, I have no interest in a "secure" job-for-life at a big company.
I'm not sure how much technology has to do with it though: The whole notion of a job-for-life scares me to death -- I saw my parents' generation do that, and it didn't look fun at all.
I don't see any reason why the unwashed masses who sit and drool in front of the TV now won't be sitting and drooling in front of the web.
The newly unstable work society leads to the erosion of the middle-class and in our collective interest in civics. [snip]... will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before.
I'd buy the book just to see how he manages this acrobatic leap of logic. I always thought that erosion of participation in civics lead to governmental corruption and that the erosion of the middle class leads to a capitalism-based aristocracy - both of which, IMO, would tend to make joe my-wealth-does-not-grow-exponentially less interested in being a good global citizen, and more interested in kicking the crap out of those that have usurped his freedom.
I think a good percentage of people aren't going to be able to make the transition. Not to mention the problems Americans and others will have, not being able to have as good a standard of living as their parents. Good for the world in the long run? Maybe, but for most of the industrial world it may mean political and social instability. I know I'm ready to go postal myself, and I know I'm not alone.
"The idea of middle-class security is eroding" and "fluid, part-time, entrepeneurial, free-lance, self-directed"
Let me see now, wasn't this how work used to be before the era of big corporation and manufacturing -- i.e.: The Industry Revolution?
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
It seems to me that this type of material appears in cycles, from the industrial revolution on for sure, and probaly previous to that some chicken little decides to write a book about how changing technology is going to destroy our way of life, or dehumanize us or whatever. Not that they aren't an interesting read sometimes but this sort of babble really gets tiresome after a while. Am I the only one who feels this way?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Your statement is sort of confusing, but if I userstand you right, what you mean to say in so many words is "The internet allows for more people to create and acces information than before." And of course, to plug your website ;)
However, this is as much a bad thing as a good thing. When anyone can post info on the 'net, lots and lots of innacurate, sometimes dangerously inaccurate, can become "common knowledge." If everybody, every day posted their thoughts/information on the 'net, there would be such a glut of information that no one would know what to read or trust.
What we need are a few highly reliable information sources, not thousands of unrealiable ones.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Atone point it was decided that the business world needed a business language, something that managers and any moderately-trained exec could understand. This was supposed to make trained programmers unnecessary.
Didn't really happen did it?
Even in COBOL you need someone who knows what mergesort is and when it is better or worse to use than bubblesort. It is true that more people can program now and so the elitism is gone or going. Nevertheless this doesn't mean that the sky is falling just that the idyl is over.
Keep learning and diversify as much as you can. Be interested in the type of business you work for, even if it doesn't seem to apply to your job.
My employer (an insurance company) would rather have competent programmers who have a deep understanding of the insurance industry than brilliant programmers who aren't interested in the business.
There's no particular need for programmers here to have insurance certifications but the bosses take notice when you do.
... but until recently the majority of people doing IT jobs were insulated from them; I distinctly remeber a ./ discussion about the need for unions in the IT field. Most ppl seemed to think that since chances were good that the demand was higher that the workforce available unions didn't made any sense... after all, we were all part of the 'New Economy', we laught at principles made in the XIX century my a bearded german! Most ppl couldn't even graps the principle of conflict between workers and bosses... after all, if ppl want best conditions, why, the Company is going to suffer, and then they will be out of job! Crazy fools!.
Now the same thing that gave birth to this kind of distinctive thinking is coming back for revenge. With the demand/workforce balance changing, and since most ppl in IT were oh-so-damn-liberal in what regards to workers rights - after all, they didn't need to - they are suffering the *same thing* that most other workers in traditional fields have suffered for *centuries*.
It's all so new.... but only to the ones that had illusions about the true nature of the relations between a worker and the guys in charge.
It's so pitifull to see - and I know them first-hand - ppl that during the 90's laughed at other ppls problems and said that they were badly-paid, unemployed, etc, because they were lazy and unfit now being in the damn some situation they joked about then.
Transnacional society, better opportunities? You bet. Capital has no nacionality, never had, so it already know how to play that game. The mantra of "being able to work in what country I want" is not so great when there are thousands of ppl doing the exact thing you do for less money.
(oh, and yes, I'm marxist, just in case someone misses the point and 'acuses me' of such).
fsm
But what happens to a society in which no individual NEEDS to work anymore in order to ensure his survival?
(and what will we do with the landlords? :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
these ideas shouldn't surprise anyone, especially since they've already been discussed in a much more profound fashion by Jeremy Rifkin in his seminal book The End of Work , published almost seven years ago.
..and most literate non-amerikans have been aware of these facts for a long time so a big DUH to Katz & co. for discovering the wheel again.
-p
What workers are realizing is that they are not part of the middle class. The fact is there is no more middle class. True, there are middle income families, but they have no more control over that income then a minimum wage worker. Because the company they work for owns their means of income, they are just as dependant upon another as unemployed citizens are on welfare. (Luckily, middle income workers have money saved up) As the gap between the upper and lower classes grows, we will see more and more layoffs of this nature.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Machines would do all the work, and we'd lead pampered lives of luxury with a standard of living unimagined by previous generations.
Then, someone realized that if people aren't needed to do the work, rather than taking care of them and letting them live comfortable, fulfilling lives, we can just leave them out of the equation entirely. More profits to the few who are still needed to keep the machines running, and to those who actually own the machines.
The result? Mass unemployment, mass poverty, mass misery.
Human beings are becoming obsolete parts of that machine we call The Economy. Those who are still useful only serve to keep fueling the Economy to further render homo sapiens obsolete.
Once the obsolescence process is complete, there will be an extinction. But don't be too sad about it. The machines which will have replaced us will be a far superior race than we.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Work has become unstable throughout the modern world, writes Beck, a professor of sociology at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich"
...and then states that this may not be such a bad thing.
I wonder if he has tenure?
I don't want to be 'locked' into a 'job for life'.
:)
I also don't think being middle class is an 'entitlement'.
To truly make a living, I need to provide services and products other people want to pay for. *Everyone* has to live with that constraint.
Up until this decade, products could only be made laboriously, by hand, by individuals, or by factories, cheaply. You get the expensive one offs and the mass produced cheapos.
This is changing. Printers and print technology makes anyone a publisher. Websites and computers makes anyone an information and entertainment provider. Power tools and other equipment makes anyone a cabinetmaker or artisan.
It used to be that being skilled was available to only those who found a master to teach them. Today *everyone* can be skilled. Everyone can fiberglass, woodwork, paint, sew, cook, write, and carve. In a few years you can add to that list: Everyone can program, model, and make movies.
I don't know about anyone else, but standards of living has raised. I don't *have* to be an accountant for 40 years. I don't *want* to be an accountant for 40 years. I'm a QA person right now, but I look forward to a time when I'm not. I can go get a certification in architecture and I can go back to school and become an architect, and with my own hands and my own resources, build my own house. I can grow my own food. I can do *everything*
This is of course very inefficient
The point being is that being comfortable and being happy is not something that is being taken away by the eroding of the middle class. It should be as simple as maximizing yourself and figuring out in any situation, what can I offer to people as a service to get money? Information technology is helping to make that kind of search even easier than ever, too.
Of course I'll be called optimistic and unrealistic, but how else can you be? If you face the future with thoughts of doom and gloom, what's motivating you to keep walking, instead of layiing down to die?
GPL Deconstructed
Snowboarder te years ago?
Job coach ten years ago?
You do. And then they fire you and hire someone to use your "point-and-drool" tools for half your pay.
Your reference to Moore's Law, I don't see this being applicable to software at all--the density (perhaps rated as complexity?) of code has not doubled every 18 months. In fact, I could postulate that the sophistication of software hasn't doubled since the 1970s, depending on what metric you'd use. The kinds of tools you're talking about, smart, extreme-CASE tools, 4+GLs, etc., are years and years away, and will still have to be conceptualized, created, and maintained by good software guys, most of which (no matter the nationality) are here. Keep in mind we still have more SEI CMM Level 5 companies here than anywhere else in the world.
If you haven't read them already, I would recommend Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. The first was penned in the early nineties, and is a pessimistic portrait much like what you describe, outsourced coding jobs much like the automotive industry has done with blue-collar jobs. The second was written a couple of years ago, and asserts that innovation and openness to change will keep the American programmer on top for years.
BTW, this isn't a slam on our overseas bretheren, I'm not saying "US software guys are _always_ tops." (Think Torvalds and Cox!) I'm speaking in generalities: with a majority of the good engineering schools and big software companies being here, the US is a magnet for good software guys.
I believe that progress is being made towards ideal societies, but every step has it's own growing pains. If this is truly the second revolution of work/society patterns, I would expect the majority to cling to any group claiming to be for traditional values and to protect the common man, with the added risk of supporting repressive regimes.
I react to only the most volatile substances.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
but i think to fully appreciate the effect of this you must put it into its true context. Consider indeed the US southern "rust belt" phenomenon of preceding decades, or if it is more familiar to you the departure of the garment industry in the mid to late 80's. read the parent of this post for interesting info. after such a big boom it's easy to forget how things were. hide messages in paragraphs like this from the eds. it seemed that the industry was about to fall off a cliff, and you know what, it did! people lost jobs, and those particular jobs never did come back. but people retrained and managed to get newer, and usually better work. and in the end perhaps it was all in the interests of efficiency, and may even have promoted the good times that followed.
Think about how Moore's law works - by 2015 computers will be easily, effortlessly capable of running languages dumber than VB far faster than the fastest assembler is run on today's fastest machines. Of course the programs themselves will become more complex, but I suspect that the performance of dumb languages will be good enough for businesses who want to drastically reduce programmer wage costs.
Sure hand-made code will always have its panache, just like hand-made cars do. How many manufacturers still make cars by hand?
The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared, temporarily creating a political economy of insecurity
The dynamic nature of business also presents opportunities to those willing to embrace change. I never thought I'd be doing any one thing for more than ten years. As I learn new skills I move into new jobs and learn other skills. Keep moving. I feel sorry for those who want to sit and do the same thing until death's cold hand summons them to the grave. Variety is life.
Expecting to go through life without changing jobs is like expecting to drive on the expressway without changing lanes.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I've been through this more than a few times. What I've discovered during the process is that as an employee, I have power too.
I DO NOT expect anyone to keep me on as soon as my "lift-to-drag" ratio goes less than one!
I've just started really SHOPPING for employeers now. I charge more based upon what I have to give up. It's the turnabout on the republican ideal that got us here, and turnabout is fair play!
It's just this simple, don't like what you are getting from an employeer, leave! Give them the same 20min. "layoff" notice that I got last time! Delete everything from your box and walk out!
When the boss can't find qualified people to sit in that seat, they will either change their way's or go out of business......"that's the genius of capitalism" as quoted by our govt. officials. I say screw-em all!
It's cut-throat now, so look after yourself first!
wasn't someone predicting not too long ago that, because jobs are getting scarcer and automation is becoming more prevalent, companies would start hiring people for 20-30 hour-a-week jobs at the pay scale of 40 hour-a-week jobs? and that all those people with nothing to do in their increased spare time would wind up increasing volunteerism?
maybe the two ideas will be merged. with increased automation, there's less of a need for manual labor, but the one thing machines can't do is socialize. customers always want to talk to a live person.
of course, how well you socialize varies wildly, depending on what's happening in your life these days and on your general mood. this means that you will be moving from job to job more frequently, losing more of that job security mentioned in the review.
I think there's a flaw or two in the theory, however. the book apparently tells us that we will all become more like workers in the third world, but that the internet will help democratize us more and make us more astute on world happenings. we will all magically become citizens of the world; international boundaries will fade in importance.
and yet:
here's my vision of the future: more and more people will be paid less and less. the currently privileged jobs will disappear; if you aren't an executive, you are a low-class worker. the multinationals will consolidate power, while national governments will become administrators of local infrastructure like roads, law enforcement and sewage. the insecure masses will flee into various revolutionary or religious factions. a state of perpetual conflict will break out between factions; the wealthy will tend to isolate themselves from the masses, hiring more security guards while retreating to secluded homes to create a buffer between themselves and the world they have created. the internet will become heavily censored, but there will be underground channels for each of the factions.
not very original, I realize, but hey, we've been headed that way for a very long time, and we all know it.
America leads the world in yearly work hours (1940 hours), with the except of Japan and Korea. Northern European countries have fallen from near 3000 at the beginning of the 20th century to 1500 or less now. This includes leaves and long vacations. In fact the number of American work hours have increased in the past couple decades due to more women working full time, and the overtime work ethic.
Why is this? One explanation is the Puritan morality that "work is good". This reappears in cycles- the 50s/60s Corporation Man, 80s Yuppie, 90s Dot.commer.
Another explanation is the tax and benefits structure. You dont get decent benefits until you work fulltime. To the employer, high employee overhead mans working existing employees more rather than hiring several to do the total work.
And what Joe/Jane above average saw on sites like IndyMedia.Org were images of raging anarchists bent on destruction of all that they consider evil, followed by dozens of posts/stories on how it wasn't wrong to damage those stores because they where company owned...
"but standards of living has raised" besides being ungrammatical, this statement just isn't true. I bet your wife works, right? After WWII, A single wage earner could keep a family fed well, buy a house and a car (or two). Try doing that nowadays.
What motivates me? Pure hatred, baby! Not to mention inertia, people keep walking cause there's nothing else to do.
Where does this come from? How about the other option, the dot.com bust was just the beginning of a severe economic downturn, heightened by Enron (as the nation's 7th largest company) collapse. That, coupled with the increasingly nomadic and unstable work force, ends up eroding the major economic foundations, plunging us into a global depression. It seems to me that this is just as likely as the conclusion this book supposedly makes.
You're exactly right, IMHO. Work fields change, and as humans, we have the innate ability to go out and learn to do new things. I've run into too many people whom are scared of change. But I can understand it too, if you're used to putting screws in holes for 10 years in your life, that screwing motion of securing the screws may seem like a large step, albeit they probably screwed over a fellow co-worker for a job or two (pardon the pun.).
The mainframe computers throught 1960s had ten or more programmers per computer. 1970s minicomputers require a couple. Then came the personal computer and the mass software industry. There are now 100 million personal computers (home and business) now in the US at least, plus ten billion embedded computers in cars, appliances, traffic lights, etc. Maybe a million programmers now at the most. So we've seen a steady a drop of programmers per computer from 10 to .0001 in the past 40 years, a factor of 100,000 or a bit slower than moores law.
Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.
I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Just couple of years back workers, especially IT workers were paid exorbitant salaries. Though I was not part of those fortunate millions, I could not help wonder and feel jealous when people in the IT industry and its ancillary were enjoying life as it came their way. Good pay, relaxed life, big plans and what not. Then reality hits everybody and there is chaos all around.
Employers had realised that they were not making profits and there were a lot of loose threads lying around. A part of this process was the layoffs and those close to the higher levels - people responsible for taking decisions got to keep their jobs. Sometimes even they had to take the brunt of it. Most of the times the decisions were taken in haste and scapegoats were always found.
A lot of prunning was done. Redundant jobs were done away with. Salaries were looked at with a questionable brow. Some lost their salaries altogether, a few of them had theirs cut. Maybe what we see today is the true picture. Though time will only be the judge of it, I think we should look at things around us with caution. Prepare for the bad times.
try being smarter and i'll be nicer!
I think the basic idea is correct but not by 2015.
It will happen whenever we have truly intellegent machines that can beat people at -lots- of things.
>:]
you're so full of shit i can see it squidgin' outta your ear. :)
btw i voted. but uh, i wasn't serious. stay where you are.
-txr
After WWII, A single wage earner could keep a family fed well, buy a house and a car (or two).
You must mean, a wealthy single wage earner.
Also remember no TV, no cable TV, no computer, no air conditioning, houses were smaller, no bottled water, no dryer, usu. no refrigerator, no CDs (and in the 40s, very few records), no DVDs...
I would have to agree with the young 25 year old, standards of living has raised indeed.
I graduated a few years ago with three degrees and settled on a job as a programmer. Frankly, I'm bored, and could use a change of pace. Do you think that you could speed things up a bit, so I'll have a good excuse to start a different career?
Our public school system was developed during the agrarian era (e.g., summers off to work the farm). And it seems to have adjusted itself to the industrial era of jobs for life. However, the schools have not caught up with the information era because that would mean fundamental change.
School involves getting up and going to the classroom (the factory), punching in, and doing the proscribed work until age 18. Then in college you have more freedom. High school is absolete. It should be replaced with a variety of choices: community colleges and universities, trade schools, practical experience, etc.
The first few years of school should be spent learning the basics of reading, writing, and math. After that, kids should be presented with a menu of options based on their interests and apptitudes. With such a system you would get way more learning going on in the teenage years -- and less boredom and even less violence. I think that things like Columbine are partially the result of the agrarian/factory high school system that crams thousands of kids into an confined space and an obsolete learning environment.
The result of such a flexible system would be that many more students would leave school prepared for college and the real world.
About a year ago I began work on a novel about a newspaper reporter exiled into the Obit Department after inadvertantly tampering with evidence for a murder in a story he is following. The columnist decides to follow leads on an "accidental death" which he suspects is actually a botched murder of a rock star.
At one point, he begins reflecting on the possibility that someday his job will be eliminated by soul-less AI agents to write obits for his employer.
Feel free to read the unfinished manuscript here (someday I'll get around to finishing this)
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
There is no such thing as 'third world'. Countries are in different stages of development. But still most of the countries have similar ethos such as ethics, living etc.
Compartmentalising them as advanced nations (read West) and third world countries (read rest of us) is a western concept which is degrading and contrived. Mass media uses them to blame every thing wrong (in this case - job insecurity) on third world countries and attribute every thing good (technological advancement etc) on advanced nations.
It's a mind game.
The idea that everybody should work is a fairly modern one. It's become tangled up with our lives and economy in various ways that made sense at the time but are now a hindrance.
Increasing automation should make us all better off, but doesn't. The problems boil down to the concept "if I can't get a job, I won't have any money". To properly fix this we need to overhaul the way money works. The real problem is that we have a debt based economy which *forces* us to perpetually invest efficiency gains rather than enjoying them.
You're probably thinking: what the fuck am I talking about. Sorry - it's not easy to convey how this works or what's wrong with it in a few sentences and it's extremely difficult to find decent information about this online. You won't find it in most economic texts, but these are so full of holes it's a wonder that economics as a discipline has more respect than astrology.
The problem boils down to the fact that almost all money today is created in the form of debt. Extra stuff gets created constantly. As more stuff is created, either more money needs to be created or prices need to fall otherwise nobody could afford to buy it an afford to buy it. Currently money is created faster than stuff which is why we have positive inflation rates. However this money is all created in the form of debt. Governments don't make money [cash is only about 4% of money in system] - private banks *invent* money by lending out more than they borrow. When you write a check, you are effectively using a currency printed by your bank. Since interest must be paid on loans money is only loaned to those who will invest it, ie almost all the created money is targeted for investment. The monetary system keeps society on a technological conveyor belt.
So, we live in a system where the humans are being automated out of the system, but none of these advancements *can* go towards making life more pleasant or free. In fact, people must work more and more. It doesn't have to be like this, and there is a simple solution, but it'll never happen while humanity is asleep. People spend their entire adult lives trying to aquire something that they don't understand to even the slightest degree. It's funny how people can be so obsessed with money, but if you ask them where it comes from all you get is a blank stare or some irrelevent crap about the mint.
Understanding this stuff is not difficult but it does require thinking clearly about things that we normally don't think about at all, and there are lots of aspects to it - pollution, poverty, ever decreasing quality of consumer goods. An intelligent and informative book that explains this stuff and related ideas quite thoroughly is "Confronting Tyranny - The case for monetary reform" by Mike Rowbotham, but this is hard to get hold of.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Famous last words...
I'd like to make two points here.
First of all, don't believe everything you read. People who write books like this (i.e. business subjects) are in the business of selling books. Ever notice how when the economy is tanking, a bunch of gloomy books predicting further demise come out, and when the economy is cresting, a bunch of books talking about the "Dawn of a New, Glorious Age" come out? The publishers are just printing what they think people want to read at that time. So take it with a grain of salt.
That said, as for the merits of the argument itself, I find them lacking. All you need to do is look back at history to realize that many such cycles of change have happened before and the country didn't collapse. The bottom line is that people and business find new ways to co-exist. After all, people can't survive without gainful employment, and businesses can't survive without gainfully employed consumers with money to buy their products.
Many of the same arguments could be raised about earlier revolutions in our economy. The advent of factories, which was made possible by mechanized machines powered by steam and later electricity, meant that the previous model of skilled artisans self-employed producing small quantities of goods was no longer economically viable. Furthermore, the advent of the railroad and easier cross-country shipping meant that goods made from one part of the country could be easily shipped to other parts of the country. Now, the local cobbler had to compete not just with the local cobblers within a couple mile radius, but with giant shoe companies who set up factories wherever the conditions most suited them. I'm sure back then there were protests in Atantla, for example, about how factories in Boston were putting the local producers out of business with their manufacturing processes that relied on low-skilled labor from the urban slums that no skilled artisan could compete with. Sound familiar?
Now that we are undergoing a new revolution of no less profound dimensions, it's inevitable that there will be upheaval and some turmoil until we settle into a new pattern that will carry us through until the next Big Thing. But to think that this is the end of world is nonsense.
Nevertheless, the pain experienced by those people who are being displaced by the changes in our economy is very real. And we should try to mitigate that as much as possible. But inevitably, I believe the economy will once again settle down into something more predictable and stable, both for business and their employees.
There are certain sectors that will NOT shrink entirely or threaten jobs. Notably education at the primary and lower secondary levels. If anything, demand for re-training and continued education will create long term jobs and more of them if you follow the logic in the book.
Additionally, I think that the days of mid-sized companies are numbered. Why? They are stuck in between the thinking that makes small and large companies work. They can't exactly compete in raw monetary and economic power as the Big Boys, and the little guys can out move them at every corner at lower cost.
Big corporations, with their changing/evolving environment that perfectly matches the authors thoughts on jobs and economy are a given.
Small companies, those that survive and are agile, provide resources to both the journeyman employee and the big companies on demand, making them successful. In small companies (under 50 people), your turnover is going to be much lower than the trend as they foster an entirely different environment. Granted, incomes for the mid to top tiers may not match up well to the experienced journeman and top echelons of big companies, but the security offsets this to a point where it is acceptable.
The mid sized companies are doomed to merger or being forced out of the market and business. Note: I define Midsized companies as those larger than 100 and smaller than 5000 employees.
The future is a trend towards large multi-national corporate entities (think Beatrice Foods for instance), with a substrata of small sized companies providing needed local or national services. The large corporations will be populated by a high ratio of contract journeyman, most likely highly paid but with no long term stability, and a few regular employees who make less.
Government is going to grow in size too, especially if you figure in the author's comments on a lack of voting and a general apathetic approach to government. This has been happening for decades, but I expect to see a sharp upturn in the size and budget of most governments as they provide services and regulation to an ever more uncaring and demanding populace.
Education sectors will grow, especially in market relevant areas (tech, physics, design, chemistry/biology, etc...). This is a more traditional sector right now, but will evolve in a microcosim version of big corporate bodies as technology and markets advance.
Medical communities and markets will change drastically too. There will be less doctors and many more researchers. Costs will go way up for basic healthcare, but medical advances in prescription drugs will offset this a bit.
Governement will provide a great many more services as a result; healthcare, certain entertainment servces, travel services, etc... Taxation will grow to levels far beyond that of even the most currently socialistic societies, but people will have need for less actual real moneies since the government all but puts the food in their mouths.
The transition from our current state to the new "end state" will be really rough. I would think that average life span drops in the coming two generations, domestic violence and terrorism will rise significantly, and crime will reach staggering proportions. Laws will change, and if anything, privacy will be even more difficult to secure (if you have any left at all). Civil liberties will erode as well in the interim.
Globalization will definately accelerate, but so will the formation of economic and political blocs such as the EU, especially in the Asian sphere. Unfortunately, this will also stratify further in the world racial boundaries, and the interim period will be a violent period of proxy wars as seen during the cold war or during the african colonizations of the 1800's. We will be more closely linked in economics, and more deeply effected by politics gone wrong.
These ideas (mine and the authors) are nothing entirely new; I read stuff like this in college and before. The realization of technology's accelerating march, and the shrinking distances to neighboring political/economic/social groups naturally can lead you to these conclusions.
There is nothing new about these ideas except the fact that their application has become transnational and cosmopolitan in scope.
...continually... revolutionises the division of labour within society, and incessantly launches masses of capital and of working people from one branch of production to another. ...(T)his absolute contradiction between the technical necessities of Modern Industry, and the social character inherent in its capitalistic form, dispels all fixity and security in the situation of the labourer...(and) constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands his means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his detail function, to make him superfluous....a social anarchy which turns every economic progress into a
Karl Marx, writing in ca. 1867 penned these words:
"Modern Industry
social calamity. This is the negative side.....Modern Industry,...compels society, under the penalty of death, to replace the detail worker of to-day, crippled by the life long repetition of
one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully
developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any changes of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."
This is from Capital, Vol 1, Chapter XV, Machinery and Modern Industry, section 9, pp 486- 488 (my edition, at least).
Marx always thought that the positive potential of
Modern Industry to produce educated well rounded human beings would always subordinated to the necessary pursuit of short run profits inherent in the capitalistic way of doing things.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose
Bekwin
What exactly are you criticizing here? You must be pretty desperate for something to bitch about.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This is a bad analogy. Making cars is equivalent to burning CDs--it doesn't take much expertise, just follow the template, pop the rivet, answer the wizard.
The creation of a car starts and ends short of the manufacturing line with the expert manipulations of engineers and designers. Nothing has dumbed down these guys work, if anything, it's gotten more and more complex, and more in demand, as have the tools (CAD/CAM/CAE). Saying that the phase-out of assembly programming will eventually progress to 'easy' programming is like saying the phase-out of drawing boards by CAD will someday make for 'easy' car/skyscraper/cell phone design. I don't see mechanical engineers becoming paint-by-numbers morons by 2015, so how can you apply this idea to an equally complex engineering discipline?
Most of today's core public policy was developed during the industrial era, a time when people were expected to work for the same company or maybe two during the course of a career.
For example, now health care coverage is still tied to employers. That made sense when people had one or two employers for 35 years. But now many people will have 8 or 10 or more employers.
Public policy should assume that each person is kind of their own company and that most people will work for multiple employers during a career or be self-employed or work as a contractors. With that core assumption about how the world works a lot of public policy would need to be changed.
Fucking hell, it took long enough to die.
Since the cold war ended the dominate global system is Globalism. Like the information age itself, Globalism is not reversable. So we might as well make the best of it.
Globalism means that markets, industries, and individuals are unlikely to get much protection from global competition. People will get hurt by that which is the bad news.
The good news is that -- like with the information age itself -- Globalism has created massive global markets and tremendous opportunity. So, it seems, there is more opportunity and more risk.
Think about your options during the industrial revolution. Yuck. Boring. Go to work for 35 years at a extremely boring job and then get that gold watch and some applause on retirement day. Sure, this Globalism thing scares the shit out of me but I would rather be scared and insecure than bored out of my mind for 35 years. It is a tradeoff.
He talks about Real Wages declining. That's because the numbers he's siting are "After Tax". Basically, when I was a young one, my dad was paying about 5% in taxes. Now, I'm paying 50%!!!!! Ouch.
m an y_economy_1.html
Also, the numbers he's siting probably don't reflect the last couple years' economy in which wages were way up.
At least he says, "It may not be so bad.."
Damn straight. Let's institute some job security in America now! Then maybe our economic numbers would compare better to Germany's.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20020117/bs/ger
Lovely
Yeah, so the world is changing and change is accelerating. People should realize by now, most of these books recurr in cycles, and amount to "take old ideas and use contemporary language."
I have nothing against authors rehashing philosophy and putting a new contemporary spin on it. Authors have to make money too. The reviewer should take time to research the topic deeper and realize, "hey this is just a paraphrase of ...."
I'll probably get modded down, but reviewers and reporters are getting to0 lazy to research
I don't see any reason why the unwashed masses who sit and drool in front of the TV now won't be sitting and drooling in front of the web.
You mean.... like me?
Noooo...
[|]
Moore's law is driven by software's requirements on hardware. There are TONS of things that don't get done today because the present hardware can't cope ( Much AI stuff comes to mind ) Moore's law is what keeps software engineering exciting since it opens up the possiblity of solving ever wider classes of problems.
I dunno, what you're asking is the same thing I want.
:)
We'll see if it's possible. I don't think it's impossible
I do have to note, however, that your speech pattern 'provide for a family' is different than mine 'maximize myself'. I hope to provide for a family, but I plan to do so by maximizing myself. My skills, my values, my talent, etc.
GPL Deconstructed
Why is no one talking about the expanding gulf of earnings mentioned in the review? 80%(!!!) of Americans have their effective income reduced by 19% in about 20 years (about 1% per year average), yet the "top managers" have their income increased by 19 % in 10 years (about 2% per year). And we are talking about US of A, the most powerful state in the world, ever. We are not even talking about some other much sorrier places.
I find this trend very alarming, but not unexpected. The top dogs make the rules, and guess whose benefit are the rules for? This is really the same situation throughout the history of civilization, which is exploitation.
Exploitation?! How can that be? Why not? It is the trend in human history, it is what a person in power does to keep his advantage (in general). Except that in an "advanced democracy" like USA, the exploitation assumes a more advanced form. It is not done with guns to the head, it is done with more legal means, which is threat of loss of income. Wait till the high tech "globalization" hits you (and I think it will be much sooner that 10-15 years), and your job is now being done someone else in India or China (no disrespect to workers in that country at all!). Then you sit there and wonder: what the hell happened? Then you think and remember who benefits from all this, and who makes the rules, and how come the rules seem right, but the outcome feel so damn wrong?
There is no simple answer, really. Just interesting to watch the world whirl along. A few people get the carrot, a wast majority just keep chasing thinking that they can get the carrot. I think it helps to know what is going on, even though one can't realistically change the situation.
Cheers.
'cause if IT were, everybody'd be doing IT. see also:
ScaredCity(TMp) Inks Big Deal With Condition of Anonymity
Linuxville Founder's 'Secret' Email 'Leaked'
you may have meaNT: Brave GNU World.
I work 40 hours a week, sitting down, with air conditioning, and all the filtered water i can drink. I can afford a house, a car, entertainment. My kids are well fed. I have health care, dental care, life insurance, injury insurance, employment insurance. I am also average. What you call Wage Slave, I call Good Living. The difference is all in your attitude about it. If you can't stand punching the clock, fine, but it's not like i'm suffering any.
"That pompass ass"
I don't think he is. If you can stand it try and read a few pages of his book Running to the mountains A Midlife Adventure. I that book he comes accross as a very decent fellow trying to find his way in a changing world. Amazon has some Excerpts saving you a trip to the Bookstore.
Help fight continental drift.
You're telling me it's impossible for a single earner to provide for a family?
Other than the fact that I don't share this ideal in the first place, I don't think it's impossible.
It just means you have to be frugal, which has been the *norm* for thousands of years.
What do I want? What do I need? What can I afford? How do I make do?
GPL Deconstructed
http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ejr/poetry/e.e._cummings/ pity_this_busy_monster,manunkind,.html
This is the most hackneyed, cockamamie thing I've ever... what? I thought it was a slashdot tradition to automatically deride everything Jon Katz writes.
If Katz can get a job, anyone can, regardless of intelligence.
How you ask?
He's a COBOL programmer, and has for 20+ years worked at the same place writing COBOL and things as old, only more esoteric.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of workers in the U.S. were dedicated to agrarian jobs. Obviously, within a very short time period there was massive social change as the the majority of work shifted from agricultural pursuits to industrial pursuits where it peaked at over 60% in the mid 60%. During the early part of this period, there was much public grief as everyone complained how horrible it was that people were working in factories and the sort. There was much hysterionics as various alarmists talked about the disaster in the making.
By the year 2000, less than 2% of the U.S. population was dedicated to agricultural work. Agricultural producitivity expanded something like 200 fold during this period. With the wonderful, colorfully, jaundiced lens of hindsight, of course, we know this was no disaster.
Something similar is happening now. The 1960s saw the beginning of the decline of industry in the U.S., and it's been steadily decreasing ever since.
Service jobs are beginning to rule the day, and -- just like the early 1900's -- hysterionic alarmists are espousing their doomsday predictions (n.b.: I'm not accusing the author of the book of this, just a general observation).
A close examination of the tranformation, however, yields the information that the very fastest growing sections of the service sector are the professional services. We are quickly becoming a society where specialized knowledge rules the day. Lawyers, physicians, engineers, hell even the mechanics and secretaries are workers who need to understand computers and computing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, except to point out that by 2100 and most likely a lot sooner very few people will be in jobs directly attached to manufacturing. We'll be one giant service economy.
C//
"Although the loss of work security creates a temporary loss of security and social capital, he believes that down the road, this individuality and freedom -- much of it empowered by the same technology that has eroded work security -- will create a new kind of global citizen, one who is better informed, more communicative and civically-involved than before"
/because of/ that technology.
:)
That and no money to actualy say. . . eat?
Bleh;
1998: We will all have jobs thanks to the Technology sector, everybody will work and nobody will be poor!
2002: None of us will have jobs thanks to the technology sector, nobody will work and everybody will be poor!
Extremes extremes . . . .
All new technologies eventualy create MORE jobs in regards to maintaining those technologies.
Hell look at the Database specialists and what not, or the number of jobs that making new high CG enchanced movies make. Yah sure it put some rubber molders and painters out of business, but it added a whole new fleet of CG specialists, from modelers to texturers to CG enviromental designers (the background graphics, planets, trees, etc) to a bazzilion different types of animators.
Sure some people got put out of work, but the next generation had far mor opportunities opened up to them
Homework: Map it to a sine wave.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I'd agree that efficiency in the economy, the key thing that drives up productivity and enables higher growth in wages, is enhanced by introducing new technologies and requiring workers to be flexible and to change what they do.
OTOH, I think that too much change in the human environment is a source of stress, with various physiological and psychological side effects that we are only beginning to understand.
None of this is particularly new, however. I think Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (30 years old now) and follow-on books discussed this in some detail.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Anyone who believes a single word of the predictions stated in this review needs an immidiate reality check.
Please get one.
The only way things are going to get better is if we all 1) realize that all the time more of our last shreds of freedom and rights are being taken away from us, and 2) there is no one else but you and me who can or will do anything about it.
The year is 1984, and the matrix has you...
Any advanced alien civilization would look at us and find our troubles humorous. I certainly don't work for the sake of work -- I'm doing it precisely so I don't have to do it later. Life would be far grander if we could all focus on our hobbies and other true interests instead.
The US is becoming another 3rd world country. With Globalization and Free Trade companies are free to transfer operations from high paying locations (the US and western europe) to everywhere else. The US has even been the 3rd of Europe, check out the recent (a few years now) opening of a plant by Daimler-Chrysler in Alabama. The State of Alabama hands millions (free land, and built the plant) to Daimler-Chrylser to open a factory there. They outbid everyone else (of course!!).
Why shouldn't the process of Enculturation extend (believe, it's nothing new) to removing the vote. The people don't vote as it is, because they're discouraged. Why are they discouraged? Shouldn't that be obvious? Who would benefit from the people not voting?
Corporations. The same corporations that push for Globalization and Free Trade (which is really just forcing the world to accept, and then owe, Foreign Investors - primarly US based). With NAFTA the economy of Mexican and US elite was the only interest, and millions of Mexicans now starve. This is the Free Trade we should love.
Who runs the corporations? Let's see, we've all heard 90% of the wealth is owned by 1% of the population. It's much worse in reality. 90% of the US media is owned by 15 families/corporations. Oh, but isn't the Mass Media one of the most important parts of Enculturation?
Yes. But we should still believe how impartial they are. Oh wait, didn't it take more than 10 years for the Media to begin mentioning the still-ongoing Genocide in Rwanda. Oh wait, no the Taliban is bad, they hate women. But then, one of the US's favorite friends (Saudi Arabia) treats women even worse, mass executions every Friday. Be there or be square.
Now we have the military everywhere. So what, a few M16's and hand grenades watching us check our luggage. That'll save us from ourselves. No, sorry I meant terrorists.
i'm sorry but they do. and anyway, who designs the next xVM that talks to the new hardware? i am defending this position because i'm an embedded developer and programmers:
1) sure as hell do need to know what's going on at least in the general case, and
2) the market for commercially developed software will change and there will still be programming jobs in the US, even if the "brainless" work is offshore.
Many see the corporatism and nuclear family values generated in the 50s as if it has always been this country's ideal. People were working for themselves long before that, choosing among occupations and selling their skills wherever they could, whether tending a farm, hunting game, building or trading. Too many today consider only corporations and large companies capable of doing these things.
Those flexible enough to fit themselves into different situations will never have a problem finding a way of supporting themselves. But there will always be those who prefer not to think too hard for themselves, who prefer not to make too many choices, who will wind up following the promises of slave labor. Slave labor where the bulk of the profits for your work go to someone else.
Who modded this to neg 1?
Just because you don't agree with him or is this a 'normal' setting?
GPL Deconstructed
After reading posts like this, I grab my "Dharma Bums" and remind myself that there are alternatives, that living in this world of technology is still a choice. A necessity, perhaps, if you want that $1M house on 20 acres and two benzs in the driveway.
But if your goals are to have enough spare change to buy two days worth of GORP and to walk the long trails, then you tend not to worry as much about what is going on back in "society".
Yeah, go ahead and troll this if you feel it necessary. I for one spend more hours outdoors than in the office, and sooner or later I'll get fed up enough to abandon it all and truly become a dharma bum.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
U.S. workers average more hours on the job per year than workers in any other industrialized country -- Greenies.
Time to destigmatize leisure time! Being particularly lazy, I've been watching the work phenomenon closely. When I worked at an investment bank, the analysts would routinely put in 80-100 hours per week. A paralegal friend of mine easily put in more. To no effect: they aren't going to retire earlier, they've experienced less life, and the money was eh.
Unless your job is your career (lifer entrepreneurs, artists), I don't see a problem with working 20hrs a week to live. In a resource-rich, modern and enlightened society, there shouldn't be a stigma attached to doing as little labor as possible, especially if that labor is nonessential to your interests. Of course, capitalism doesn't seem to be set up this way... but apparently it's possible to survive in an industrialized culture while doing less work, so long as you're not American:
France & Germany make do with shorter work weeks. Germans are much more productive than either the Japanese or the Americans. They don't spend their time off recuperating so that they can go back to work on Monday, which seems to be the case in the States. And, Not all of the industrialized world has the same balance of work and non-work time that we do in the US. Work Time, Free Time.
A hasty Google search has more info on this topic.
In his award-winning "Culture" books, scifi writer Iain M. Banks creates stories in a created a post-plenty universe where all physical needs are satisfied without cost. Difficult to envision, but he does a good job.
I'd like to see you tell that to my father-in-law, a freelance technical writer who has found it increasingly difficult to do his work as he's reached his 60's.
"If you can't spend the time to improve, screw you, those that wish to improve will survive, and you'll starve."
God. I can't believe your fucking callous arrogance.
I'm not a religious fellow, but maybe you might want to think about the response Dickens wrote to Scrooge's comment: "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
From Dickens: "Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust."
In other words, you aren't "superior" by living by "the law of the jungle" -- you're inferior. An inferior human being.
I can't wait til you get old. If there's any justice, you'll be shown the same lack of compassion you've shown today.
What if we have reached (or will be reaching) the plateau in terms of technological advancements in computing - would that cause society to settle back into some new version of the "job-for-life" paradigm, or would the contracting and freelancing continue out of habit and preference? I think that people want stability more than anything else, and that the myth of the globally-connected, civic-minded worker who is beholden to no corporation is the dream of the wealthy few with brains and education to do it themselves.
Much like the failed Chiat-Day "no office" office environment, the unfettered contract worker concept is not to most peoples' liking. The current working climate is a somewhat unfortunate result of the relentless need for updated skills, and if that ever ends things will settle down. Either that or companies will adopt the Japanese model and retrain, retrain, retrain, instead of casting off valuable organizational veterans in favor of the flavor of the month.
Was that out loud?
Funny how somebody took the time to mod this down, yet nobody can bother to answer the question.
About 8 years ago I had a philosophical split with some of my friends: We were all into computers and programming but I was the only who was planning to take it up as a career.
They told me "All programming will be automated soon, and that which isnt will be done by $5 an hour hordes of 3rd wold programmers. Plus look how many people are enrolling in CS these days, theyll be a glut of programmers anyway..."
Well, seeing how I wasnt in it for the money really anyway, I stuck to programming while they went into law, accounting, etc...
Needless to say the dreaded programmer glut never happened, while > 50% of those CS students dropped out, leaving me with little competition, and I found myself in a high paying job doing something I would do for free.
Fast forward a decade and you hear the same arguments creeping out again. Despite the dot-com bust, I see no flagging of demand for competent programmers, and none on the forseable horizon.
Conclusion: CPU speeds will never make up for people being idiots, and knowing what to solve is harder that knowing how to solve it.
Yes, maybe a hundred thousand people will be involved in this business, displacing the millions who do the custom coding today.
Economies of scale will come to programming - it doesn't surprise me that the /. audience is in denial about this, as this board tends to be rather arrogant and pleased with itself, but its going to happen.
No, not really, hence the "this post is dumb" message.
This sort of attitude towards labor -- that the demand for labor is a zero-sum game and that an increase in productivity will inevitably lead to people being thrown out of work and/or the vast majority of laborers having their wages reduced since less labor is needed -- is prevalent in a leftist fringe of economists, predominantly based in Europe (Note that Beck is based in Munich, Germany). It is widely rejected in North America, the United Kingdom, the Far East, and South Asia.
It also ignores basic equilibrium analysis from Econ 101. You can approach it from two angles:
So what actually happens? The total output of the economy rises. Workers and company owners are better off -- remember, it's consumption that counts in the end, not wages -- since there is more stuff to consume in the end. (Also remember that savings/investment/borrowing/lending is simply a transfer of consumption to or from the future.)
This is not to trivialize the pain and uncertainty that people are feeling due to the loss of jobs or job security, but the fact is that these kinds of dislocations are what make economies grow. Read up on Schumpeter's "creative destruction" in any basic macroeconomics text for a more mainstream view on the situation. Also note that any attempt at differentiating between low- and high-skilled workers or applying an international trade angle does not invalidate the basic analysis, it just hangs bells and whistles on it.
Lastly, this European-biased analysis completely ignores an important fact of life in the United States today. The unasked question is, "who owns the companies?" In Europe, stock ownership tends to be highly concentrated, with many companies controlled by a small number of people. Information disclosure requirements are also very lax compared to the U.S. or U.K. exchanges. In contrast, in the U.S. the majority of people own some common stock, either directly or via a mutual fund or retirement plan. Any increase in corporate profits directly benefits the majority of people.
SOAPBOX
The problem lies not in the U.S.-style open, flexible economic structure, but in the European-style stagnant, inflexible structure as influenced by Beck's brand of economic drivel. Note that in continental Europe, unemployment rates of 10% or more are common, and economic growth has been much lower than in the U.S. for the past two decades. The French have legislated a 35 hour workweek in an attempt to raise wages, thus shooting themselves in the foot -- how are things supposed to get better if the quantity of productive resources within the country are reduced? This whole line of left-leaning pseudo-analysis is discredited by not only theoretical analysis but also by the observed results.
/SOAPBOX
--Paul
Hocus pocus!
This is rubbish. There were very few computers in the 60's, yet they still had substantial teams working them - it required a lot of assembly programmers and card punch operators to write a programme. In the 70's we saw the era of MASSIVE computer programming teams - some as large as several thousands of programmers. The 80's saw the introduction of the IBM PC and a vast explosion in the number of computers, hence programmers. The 90's saw the introduction of the web as a means to do business and a further burgeoning of the industry. Y2K alone probably accounts for a 10% rise in programmer numbers.
Assuming that there is no more business being done, no new products being developed, and companies don't want to do further office automation, there has to be a weeding out of the programming labour pool.
The IT industry in the USA currently employs about 2.9 million people (analysts, programmers and operators).
I content that this so called decline is more likely the a reflection of the fact that there are hundreds of millions of PC's today, and in the early 1960's there were probably only a few thousand computers worldwide.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
And what, exactly, am I supposed to learn about the world of work in 2002 by looking at salary data from 1989 and 1995? The trend towards lower earnings for workers reversed in the latest economic boom (1995 onwards). Leaving out recent data that shows that workers' earnings are increasing, in order to "prove" that they are decreasing, is deceptive.
umm.. yeah. Right.
Hey! You want fries with that?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Cheers,
--Maynard
It's always a pleasure for me whenever I hear a comment from anyone who has read, and better yet, appreciates what he wrote.
What a programmer that dude woulda been.
give me a
Some writers in the forum are getting tempestuous about this book, but it must be born in mind that Beck lives in Germany, a country known for extremely high output, stable jobs and 3 month employee vacation allowances. This does not reflect, for the most part on how things are going on in the USA. If anything, this book is a treatise about the fear Germans have of their economy becoming more like Americas!
The US has some old hold outs (The Bells, the Auto makers, old Unionized industries) but for the most part people live and work in the US in a very fluid work place. They don't have jobs for life, they don't expect to work in the same industry for ever.
This is not the way it is in Germany, or across much of Europe, either (Britain being a bit of an exception). In Europe Union power is still strong, but eroding. Employees are protected by massive EU based social treaties that establish 'basic' rights for workers, even in the face of simple economic sense. Economics will win out. These old state supported industries will wane. A new Europe will not be like the 20th Century Europe - in fact it may have more in common with 18th Century Europe when attitudes like 'A Job For Life' simply did not exist.
Everyone here should read the collection of Economist articles, collectively named "Does Inequality Matter"?
Read it critically. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it does seem to me to be saying: "What we've got is incredibly unfair. You, a rich Economist reader, are (rightly, even though wrongly) advantaged. If you want to keep that advantage, you've got to give to charities, because if you don't- well, it sounds like we've got a class war coming soon. We're talking widespread socialist ideas, the return of the Anarchists, and class war. So either the rich wealth keep the people happy, or they're going to try and take it for themselves."
You've got to love these patronizing arguments, adorning the pages: "Hey! Nobody is poor, because even the poor have toilets- something the kings of ages past never had! So, the poor don't really have it bad; They're just complainers." Or another one: "Don't feel so guilty about your riches; None are rich, because no one is content. That means you aren't rich! It's been stressful lately, those poor don't know anything about riches. If only they knew the pain of managing the people."
Look folks... the distribution of general inteillegence and "capacity" will always and forever be distributed on a bell curve.
The productivity of the economy will probably continue to grow slowly.
Those of you who have got the good in the brain will grab the cash.
The main secular trend may be the concentration of real innovation and real creativity and thus perhaps real wealth among those who are at the far end of the bell curve.
Will the merely intelligent, you know, smarter than 90% of the population, but not smarter than another 10% of the population, have the skills needed to do something genuinely valuable?
I fail to see how offering someone a job (which they are free to decline) constitutes exploitation. We in the rich world like to feel morally indignant about sweat shops, because the workers have a standard of living so far below ours. But, for the people working those jobs, they're usually better than the alternatives. They wouldn't take the job if they didn't think it made them better off than they would otherwise have been.
Now, there are exceptions: slave labor, forced labor by prisoners, child labor, etc. really are exploitation. But freely chosen jobs, however unpleasant, are not exploitation - they're often a family's best hope of being able to feed their children.
hi its billy mr cats. i happy too see you are at wrok again after are holidays what we spended in ur cabin way out in the forest.
i had fun on are holidays but my bum bum still hurts a little bit. when will my poo poo stop beeng red? my mommy said you shulda used some lubacashion on ur pee pee.
bye bye for now mr cats. i cant wait for are next time we spend togther.
billy, age 9
This is how I see it. I'm not trying to flame a debate here. Technology isn't the reason why people are losing their jobs. Politicts are. The Politics of a society is what ultimatly desides how the production surplus from a society is being used. If you use the extra production that an increase in efficiancy provides to improve the living conditions of the workers that produce all this, you could for example reduce the amount of working hours of the week. This would be the logical thing to do if the workers them self owned the means of production (i think most of you recognice what i'm talking about). But as it is today, most companys are owned and run by private interests that want to make a profit of this in the form of capital. They more and more often, and to a larger extent, don't use this profit to reinvest in the company (or society for that matter). Instead they use this to achieve even more capital through different kinds of speculation. The society as whole only gets a piece of this pie through the government taxes (wich are more and more being cut to ensure more freedom for capital, wich doesn't often lead to more investments). When the production efficiancy increases in a company with capatalist owners, the owners usually doesn't use this to increase the living standards of the workers (improved working conditions, less working hours, better salary etc.). Instead they use it to increase profits, by removing jobs that isn't any longer needed to achieve the same level of production. This is the problem. If the people, through society, had more control of how the surplus caused by increased production, either by owning the means of production or by passing laws that gave the workers and society more control and back them with the strength of the many, this, IMHO, could be remedied. I know this is an old idea (Whasen't there a dude named Marx that had a similar idea :-), but everytime this has been somewhat implemented in a DEMOCRATIC society it has worked.
(please don't call me troll and chase me into the woods, I have heard horrible stories about how some americans treats socialists)
"I will work when I feel like it"
... when your property needs it, or it will fall into ruin around you.
Whether you earn a paycheck, live off of savings, or grow your own food, you will always be hostage to your means of sustenance.
It has been my experience that with greater ownership of these means comes more obligatory work, not less. Giving up ownership means relying on others to do things on your behalf, and exchanging money for labor.
The way I see it, I have given up the security of knowing I'll be fed when society collapses in exchange for increased leisure; you propose to do the reverse.
[quote] that will affect almost every single American [unquote]
You can tell this guy's full of shit. Things change, people adapt. It's that simple. There are always jobs for people that adapt and have a solid work ethic (anyone remember that term?) And anyway - this planet holds more people that *don't* have an American passport than those that *do*.
Europe forces people to contribute to the 'social good' through ridiculously high taxes.
Otherwise we'll be left with a bunch of zombies saying "The gov't will take care of it....".
Well I'll be...
First of all in europe we feel socially connected way more than in the US. Too bad you still think we are communists, but
As a matter of fact, we believe in Europe we still have some sort of saying in Europe as "people". For instance voting incidents like a certain state in the south of the US allowed to happen will certainly be very painfull to the politicians concerned at least.
The introduction and presence of rights of referendum in Europe means we can revoke decisions of the government and direclty oppose or approve of citizens, not look at the puppets in a big building perform and feel good because we aren't involved anyway.
Fact is that Europeans do have a sense of responsability towards their fellow citizens. We will not let them die unattended and say we already do so much volunteer work. We institute ourselves into a bigger organisation and arrange for them. And so for healthcare, and so for pensions, and so on. This is what ultimately makes and authorizes the existence of a real government. (no flame intended)
Pray tell, what goods got cheaper as a result of the layoffs of the 80s? I think you're a little too optimistic about the powers of capitalism.
I actually agree with a substantial part of your premise, but here's where it falls down for me: "requires everyone to be educated enough to learn whatever trade is needed at a given time."
So who's educating the populace in this manner? There's always the upper percentile who can do this, but the vast middle and lower percentiles sure aren't getting trained this way. It may not even be possible, for all we know - after all, this is a new experiment. Lots of people, maybe even most, may only be capable of 40 years of fastening rivets. Where do they fit into this new paradigm you're talking about? Are they really going to be bootstrapped up somehow, or are they just fodder for a new populist redistribute-the-wealth movement?
And the current trend in education is exactly the opposite of giving people the kind of skills they need. The trend is to train them specifically for standardized tests and get 'em out the door as efficiently as possible. How very capitalist, really. A sufficient education in science, tech and business just isn't in the cards, especially when they currently can't even provide a sufficient education in reading, writing and math.
Seems to me the problems of capitalism as practiced in America, particularly, are only going to get worse. It's a feedback loop. If anyone in American government or business had any kind of long-term vision or a concern about anything but next quarter's bottom line, I'd feel more optimistic...
I got laid off by Lucent just before the rush. The reduncancy money was great to have (paid off all my debts and bought new hardware!) and I started work on the following Monday at a higher paying job. I felt much better about it than when (as a contractor) my project got cancelled and I lost completion bonuses etc. (and acquired those debts!). I now work for a medium sized company, and I think those offer more security than either big or small ones. They are big enough to have a financial cushion but small enough to care about employees.
The idea of the "job for life" has disappeared
Good! because the idea of 'filling a slot' or 'finding your niche' was a morbid perversion of natural, elective work which flows out of your becoming and grows as you grow.
Better to be poor and free than to be secure but owned.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I wouldn't buy any of Yourdon's trash. He was a big Y2K scare-them-all and make money jerk.
One can separate humanity into two groups: those who are capable of performing tasks that machines can't do better/faster/cheaper and those who can.
When I talk about those who can't compete with machines I'm not talking about people who have only been trained in a specific task and would have to increase their skill sets through education in order to be useful again. I'm talking about people who lack the mental aptitude to compete with machines at all. Those who, regardless of schooling and effort, will never be able to compete with machines.
Currently the portion of the population that is totally overshadowed by machines is small. Even those who are mentally retarded can perform tasks that machines are not suited for. Some simple dexterous manipulative tasks are still beyond machines in terms of flexibility and cost, loading groceries into bags for instance. A machine to perform this task could be built, but no one would use it due to cost considerations.
As machines advance and more and more people in the "can" group move to the "can't" group how will society change? Will there come a time when the majority of the population find themselves in the "can't" group?
--
I know nothing
The inevitable course of technological progress is the displacement of all workers. The internet is speeding up the rate of progress in science exponentially. HAL-like intelligent machines are just around the corner. Don't be so cocky in thinking that your expertise is indispensable for ever.
All economic systems (communism, capitalism, etc...) based on human labor and competition (read: slavery) are about to become obsolete. There is only one solution: an estate-based system. Divide the land, not for a price, but for an inheritance. Or perish! The writing is on the wall. Brave new world indeed.
True, true. There is such a strong wave of ANTI-education in the US, it's hard for much real education to go on. When you teach people not to depend on themselves but look to the govt. for all opportunity, then you are making a permanent underclass. The cynics among us would intone darkly that that is the purpose of the 'modern' education system.
The best thing that schools could teach to kids(something government schools are prevented from doing) is HOW to learn, how to think critically, and that their future depends totally on themselves, not anyone else or any other institution.
I admit I have only read the top level responses (don't have time for more; need to invest in a speed reading class), but every response I have seen utterly ignores the known truths of Basic Economics. (The paperback edition is to be released 2002 Mar 01.) For instance, talk about the "gap" between haves and have-nots in the U.S. is misleading if you ignore the demographics of the data. The fact is that most of the bottom 20% of income earners are under the age of 30. This should encourage the young, because it shows that your economic prospects get better as you get older. It also means you have to be smart.
-- Jim Crigler In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. -- Whittaker Chambers
First I'd like to point out that Rifkin's "The End of Work" is prior art. Anyhow, mistrust of government and internationalism are nice buffers for nationalism. Which is good and may promote peace.
You're absolutely right to point out that only a few people are going to be benefitting from the new nature of work and the new economy. Most people aren't, and the huffy attitude of "well, you should have gotten an education and done something real in your life" doesn't cut it. First, people don't magically go away when they become unemployable through lack of job skills. No, they stick around and if they feel they've been screwed by the world, they often choose to act out violently. Second, a world full of people who do nothing but program is stupid and unrealistic - who's going to grow your food? Put it on a shelf for you to buy? Who's going to fix the potholes? Who's going to pick up the garbage?
Average people, that's who. And as someone who works with them and lives among them, I can tell you that they're getting pissed and demoralized. The only thing that's kept them from making a lot of trouble is that they've managed to hang on to enough bread and circuses to keep them satisfied, if uneasy. Take this away from them and we will see all hell break loose. I don't think people have much loyalty to the system or much obedience to their "betters" left. If times should get hard, they will cause turmoil and strife and they will be heard.
One of the ideas behind a stable, working society is that it works for the majority of people. If it stops working for them, eventually they will get sick of it and forcibly change it, or tear things to pieces attempting to do so. This is not a desirable outcome.
...that we should all support MIT's "pervasive computing" ideas...
(Insert your obligatory "those who refuse to learn from the past" quote here)
This article, Jon Katz's usual clueless rhetoric and this book are all examples of "been there, done that."
So, why do "we're all going to be replaced with robots!!!!" fearmongers continue to get airtime? Two reasons -- First and foremost, the view that we are being replaced by machines is terribly myopic and one-directional. In reality, automation is a cyclical process. Human labor is replaced with mechanical labor, which in turn needs an INCREASED demand for human labor in the form of design, implementation, deployment, usage, maintenance, and other forms of engineering.
The second reason is simple. People listen to Katz, a well-documented idiot, and in doing so commit the mental equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a bucket of gasoline.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Get ready to see your programming job get exported to India and China. Drop your mythical notions that all people in these countries know how to do is customer support.
You did use mythical, Ars-Fartsica, so I figure YOU don't believe this, but I'm wondering who the hell at Slashdot would? Because from what I heard, two of the firms with the best software processes in the world are Indian. And a fair chunk of the programmers in Silicon Valley, in Australia and everywhere else are Indian or Chinese.
Or what? Did you think only AMERICANS knew how to program? I'm sure Linus would find that funny. And I'm sure that if the scenario you are predicting happens, the Indian and Chinese kids would be a bit miffed that we are bemoaning their chance to get a decent job for once.
I know bugger-all economics, but you seem to be suggesting the development of programming 'sweat-shops' in India and China. There are already plenty of programmers in these countries - and they are middle-class and educated, just like most of us. And they'll probably demand the same wages and standards of living.
Considering the current rate of growth in the software market in India, I'd say that if the movement of programming jobs to India was a problem for America, we'd already be seeing the effects. I didn't think we were.
-- This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
I'll grant you, the difference between someone making $60K and someone making $600K is often an accident of birth... but the difference between $16K and $60K is rarely more than motivation. The "peasants" won't revolt against their economic leaders for the same reason they won't revolt against their political leaders: because democracy and capitalism allow those people who are dissatisfied with their place in the system to change it peacefully. During what other "toppled regime" has that been true?
Methinks you are a karma whore. "I'll post some irrelevant links and see if someone mods me up for being 'informative' or 'interesting'!" Zzzzzzzzzzzz...
I don't agree that technology can be "overanalysed". As Hebert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Lewis Mumford and Lagdan Winner have all pointed out, technology is underanalysed as a social phenomenon.
:)
"Progress" is accepted as inevitable and positive, with very little public debate or analysis over its likely effects on social life and culture.
Sure the "specifics, standards, formats, protocols" are debated within the technological community. But whether the technology itself is desireable is rarely questioned. Usually social analysis of technology happens after it is too late!
... as for your rancher riding the fences... well I bet he goes home and does his banking via a web site, imputs his herd numbers into a spreadsheet, chats with his relatives via email and IRC, and then secretly downloads some pr0n while his wife bakes pumpkin pie. Hell he might even kernel hack for fun
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
it isn't a centrally controlled transnationalism. If transnationalism is centrally controlled by Capital (via corporations) or by an elite (via the (Marxist/Leninist)Party - then NOTHING changes for Jo/e Sixpack. (be he coder or labourer) Mr or Mrs Sixpack simply swaps one master for another.
[rant]
What we need is decentralisation of work. Worker control of factories and offices. Anarcho-syndicalism, backed up by technology!
Open Source could be considered an example of this method, perhaps p2p is an example of the future distribution system?
However, this only works with digital information. When you need physical resources, raw materials, parts, phsycial distribution things get more complex and anarcho-syndicalist methods will be strongly opposed and crushed by those who benefit by the status quo and their lackey (govt).
Open source could stand as an example that humans aren't all stupid drones that need to be controlled and 'managed' by institutional hierarchies, but can actually do clever and coordinated things if given the space and opportunity to do so.
[/rant]
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
Published a book called "The End of Work", a few years ago. I was too busy with work to read it then. Now that I am laid off, maybe I'll find the time.
Being a computer guru is also a very difficult set of skills, at least being a good one. (It's easier to hide lack of skill with computers than with music though).
But, I think you miss my whole point.
If, in the country and the world I was born in, music and art skills were highly valued, and music and art related jobs were highly paid and necessary jobs, then I would have learned as best I could any music or art skills.
If I liked computers, and there was no money in them, then I would probably take it on as a hobby at most. I sure wouldn't waste my education on computers if the skills weren't in demand.
Does this clear things up?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
All you have to do is get the appropriate sex change surgery and work really hard to please your owners and you'll survive -- as long as you don't inspire them to beat you so often that you can't adequately heal before the next beating -- at least until your too old for the plastic surgery to hold up at which point, well, you need to think about the larger happiness of those better than yourself and take that big long sleep at the end of the needle.
Seastead this.
No one seems to realize that infinite growth, the fantasy that most economic plans seem to be based upon the fantasy of infinite consumption and infinite resources. When I worked for a dot com, the thing that struck me over and over again was that there was often no real use to what we or other dot coms were producing. Think about it: clothes, housing, refrigerators, automobiles--the main products of the old economy--were things of obvious value. But do you really need an appliance that cooks only wieners? Do you really need the internet on your cel-phone? Do you really need most of the miscellaneous toys and gadgets pouring out of our factories, or most of the software that's being written? Congratulations, we're efficicient, we're productive, so damned productive that now the big challenge isn't to make it, it's to sell it once we've made it.
A few years ago the G7 committed themselves to the pursuit of the four day work week, not because everyone wanted more time off, but because we are reaching the point that we cannot consume all we make. This does not necessarily mean that we are all rich; in fact, it can mean quite the opposite. When we get to that point, competition, even in the old, reliable blue chip industries becomes so cutthroat that profit margins are miniscule and workloads are insane. Investors go scrambling wildly to put money into something that people might actually want. The gap between haves and have-nots widens, because huge surpluses drive the prices of some goods and services down to untenable levels, while the price of the few remaining goods and services considered rare becomes astronomical. Employees are laid off in droves, sales becomes more important than production, investment becomes speculative and high risk, and the economy keeps lurching up onto a cloud and falling back to earth...
Sound familiar?
And tell your mother to stop phoning me. She gives lousy head and I don't go for fat chicks who give lousy head.
Obviously even if you just count money, the excessive salaries damage the U.S. economy and productivity, and now is the wrong time for further damage. The extra money really could be better invested, for example in reducing unit cost, R&D, training and so on. (How about lower phone / cable bills?)
Social unrest is also bad economically. It's now more that 30 years since the Watts (L.A.), Detroit, Newark (NJ), and Chicago riots in the mid-60's. In 1968 far more areas in U.S cities experienced rioting and looting which required the use of the National Guard. Most of those areas still have not recovered economically.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
(* Personally, I'd rather take the risk and for reward for job instability. I manage the risk personally, instead of trusting someone else. *)
The problem is that you have to keep selling yourself as a packaged product instead of rely on the merits of your work.
Interviews are more determined by how much they like you personally and how fast you can shovel out BS.
The rewards are going to "salesy" people and not to the meritous ones when one has to keep marketing themself from *scratch* upon every biz shift, in my observation.
They should teach more BS and marketing skills to the nerds and more tech to the football-heads. They have it backward.
Table-ized A.I.
(* On top of that, get ready to be "Moore's law'd'" out of most other programming jobs you might be thinking of taking - by 2015 computers will be fast enough that point-and-drool paint-by-numbers tools will be available to rapidly and idiotically autogenerate most of the code you write today with no discernable performance loss. *)
Things like visual layouts indeed tend to eventually get automated. However, the longer-term value of programmers to an organization is maintenace of company-specific business rules. To make yourself India-proof, you need to learn and understand your company's business like no far-away Indian can (due to lack of power-lunch access, etc.)
If what you are working on can be mostly factored away into canned off-the-shelf tools, then it is time to re-adjust your posititioning in the company.
Table-ized A.I.
Cheers,
--Maynard
One of the definitions of science fiction is "extrapolation of a current trend".