3 ms·

In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position. When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic b

In a lot of industries (including software) the "menial" is the beginning of the path to the high-value position. When outsourcing was a big hot-button topic back around THE TURN OF THE CENTURY (just realized we can say this now and get away with it, seems weird) there was a lot of talk about how the low-value "coder" jobs would go overseas while we here in the US would just do high level design and software architecture to ship to these people to implement.... That's great for one generation, but how do people become great designers and architects without being a working "coder" for a while? Doesn't happen, in my experience (or, rather happens so infrequently the exceptions aren't worth considering). By removing today's low-end industry jobs we risk eliminating the path of real-world experience that makes people qualified for the higher-end work, thereby making us (as a country/culture/whatever) unqualified to do the high-end stuff in the not-too-distant future.

douche 11y ago
That's a scary thought. Morlocks and Eloi... A lot of companies are very bad at thinking about that kind of long-term progression. My dad works in a power plant, where essentially he and the millwright are the only two who understand how all of the systems in the plant work, since they are the only members of the maintenance staff that have been there long enough to have repaired all of the equipment (longer than the current management...) Both of them are looking to retire in the next couple years, and made that known some time ago. Rather than hire full-time staff to train and learn the plant in preparation for that handoff, the company contracts out (more expensive) temporary workers...