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>After all, potential employees would have a better choice. And I would think employers who are looking for more motivated employees would benefit as well. And

>After all, potential employees would have a better choice. And I would think employers who are looking for more motivated employees would benefit as well. And I hope the opposite is true for employers who are just looking for bodies at a low cost as the sole factor. I'm interested to see how things will be a couple months after the program is in full bloom.

stcredzero 11y ago
employers who are just looking for bodies I think a lot of bad stuff gets done by employers when they reach such a state. It's very analogous to website owners who just want to create a volume of views, regardless of quality. Or to game companies that want to extract as much money from their players, regardless of the experience they are producing.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  Or academia where people think that just because they can get a post-doc (doesn't matter what country), research assistant, volunteer, etc to do work of marginal value (yes, most papers and "research" out there wont move respective field forward at all) just because they have the skills. I think our societies are filled with this level of rot and the more/faster ways people put a flame thrower to such, the better.
- beat 11y ago
  This touches on Taylorism ("scientific management"), one of the more horrible things that has happened to human society. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the favorite industrial theorist of both the Harvard Business School and Josef Stalin, which should set off all alarms right there. In Taylorism, "skills" are replaced with "processes". Employees are taught to do small, simple, repeatable, and thoroughly documented processes, without understanding of how the whole system works. This covers huge swaths of manual labor today - both factory labor and service jobs like fast food tend to be heavily Taylorized. The value of Taylorism isn't that it's more efficient than relying on skilled workers. It's less efficient, and unashamedly so. But it has the side effect of disempowering the worker. Employees are now replaceable cogs, to be fired on a whim and replaced by the next warm body who can be taught the steps (and punished even for improving on them). Taylorism shifts the balance of power between employer and employee strongly in the employer's favor. The only "safe" jobs in a Taylorized society are those that demand skills immune to Taylorizing, like engineering (and that's mostly because any job I do that can be replaced with a dumb human process can also be replaced with a program).

stcredzero 11y ago

employers who are just looking for bodies I think a lot of bad stuff gets done by employers when they reach such a state. It's very analogous to website owners who just want to create a volume of views, regardless of quality. Or to game companies that want to extract as much money from their players, regardless of the experience they are producing.

cinquemb 11y ago
Or academia where people think that just because they can get a post-doc (doesn't matter what country), research assistant, volunteer, etc to do work of marginal value (yes, most papers and "research" out there wont move respective field forward at all) just because they have the skills. I think our societies are filled with this level of rot and the more/faster ways people put a flame thrower to such, the better.
beat 11y ago
This touches on Taylorism ("scientific management"), one of the more horrible things that has happened to human society. Fredrick Winslow Taylor was the favorite industrial theorist of both the Harvard Business School and Josef Stalin, which should set off all alarms right there. In Taylorism, "skills" are replaced with "processes". Employees are taught to do small, simple, repeatable, and thoroughly documented processes, without understanding of how the whole system works. This covers huge swaths of manual labor today - both factory labor and service jobs like fast food tend to be heavily Taylorized. The value of Taylorism isn't that it's more efficient than relying on skilled workers. It's less efficient, and unashamedly so. But it has the side effect of disempowering the worker. Employees are now replaceable cogs, to be fired on a whim and replaced by the next warm body who can be taught the steps (and punished even for improving on them). Taylorism shifts the balance of power between employer and employee strongly in the employer's favor. The only "safe" jobs in a Taylorized society are those that demand skills immune to Taylorizing, like engineering (and that's mostly because any job I do that can be replaced with a dumb human process can also be replaced with a program).