9 ms·

Sure, it's good news, just not for the people you're thinking of. Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. Why do they do that

Sure, it's good news, just not for the people you're thinking of. Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. Why do they do that? Because the alternatives are worse. This just removes these jobs and leaves them to face those alternatives.

asdfman123 7y ago
I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. Not quite so many people would be saying, "This is great! I for one look forward to technological advancement." I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.
- xxs 7y ago
  "eliminated half of all programming jobs" Tools to improve speed of development have existed for ages, twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way. (that includes even programming languages) Personally I'd consider it an improvement - if I job can be automated, it should be.
  - CodeMage 7y ago
    > twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way Except that's not how that works. Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. A job is eliminated when it's no longer necessary. Unless you live in a parallel dimension, we're both in the world where there's more and more software development being done every day. Twice the speed results in twice the output, not half the developers.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      > Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.
      - netcan 7y ago
        It depends on the demand "function." We only need so many socks. If sockmakers get more efficient, there'll be fewer sockmakers and prices will come down shrinking the industry. In some cases, if productivity increases, and the price performance follows, we will consume far more of a thing, growing the market and employing more people.
        evandijk70 7y ago
        One might argue that the money saved on sock purchases will be spend on other things, thus creating jobs in different industries.
      - ryandrake 7y ago
        If suddenly one developer can do the job of 3, then the other two will be assigned to some of the other unstaffed things they could be doing to also make the company money. Most places I’ve worked have a huge backlog of unstaffed work just waiting to be picked up.
      - CodeMage 7y ago
        That's just a disingenuous distortion of semantics. You're deliberately ignoring the key difference between skill-based, white-collar jobs and unskilled, blue-collar jobs. The former are not "destroyed" by productivity, as you put it. They change what the workers have to do, but the workers are, for the most part, able to adapt. None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.
        bin0 7y ago
        He may not have phrased it perfectly, but his point is good. Picture this: you are hired to do a contract job. The tooling today is arguably better than 20 years ago. You bill by the hour, and take fewer hours. Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time). This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual. A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.
    - netcan 7y ago
      There are two types of products in this world, lawyers and cigarettes. If manufacturing cigarettes gets more/less expensive, people will pay more/less for their cigarettes. If it takes fewer people to make cigarettes, fewer people will have jobs making cigarettes. The number of cigarettes smoked stays constant. If you have more lawyers, you'll have more lawsuits, contracts and legal letters. If it gets easier to do contracts or lawsuits lawyers will take longer lunches. Lawyer fees stay constant.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way I think you mean half fewer developers, not “twice less”, but... No, twice the speed means twice the value produced per unit labor, which means at the same labor price level, more, not fewer, programmers will be hired (or, at constant employment level, pay should increase); the actual result is some increase in pay and some increase in employment. Technology that provides output multipliers on a job are different than technology that replaces the function of workers at lower cost.
  - petra 7y ago
    Doubling productivity isn't a big deal when an industry is "eating the world". But what if it's not ?
- amedvednikov 7y ago
  UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    People need to feel useful to others. Right now, in the US, we fulfill that need through work. Work is an integral part of our culture. If you make a whole swath of the population feel redundant, especially practical, no-nonsense people who are used to having work define who they are, they are not going to adjust well. They are quite different than college-educated hippies who would rather get more education and go surfing for a few years while they write bad poetry. I mean imagine living in a rural, middle-of-nowhere US town where everyone pretty much lives on $800/mo from the government. What would you do out there? Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything. I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty. Others would escape through drugs. It is possible to change our culture and attitudes to work, but that's a really big change.
    - androidrebel 7y ago
      UBI encourages parasitic drag on the economy.
      - jodrellblank 7y ago
        UBI encourages the disinterested to leave the workforce, instead of taking a job they hate because they must have a job, and doing as little as possible, resisting change, lowering coworker's morale, and being a drag. It frees companies to only hire people who are interested in what the company is doing and enthusiastic about it. It frees people to do constructive, contributing things they might want to do, but which wouldn't pay enough, or which they wouldn't be able to do full time but can do part time.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        No, UBI discourages “parasitic drag” on the aggregate economy compared to conventional means-tested welfare, while more effectively addressing the distributional issues which create the problems means-tested welfare is instituted to address.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. We could easily eliminate half of all programming jobs if we just stopped creating work for ourselves. As it stands, we're the gatekeepers, our work is so opaque that no outsider could accurately estimate how much time we are wasting. Luckily for us, markets aren't very good at eliminating this kind of inefficiency, see "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  Let's be honest, this is really just a matter of time.
- swalsh 7y ago
  "technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs" Technology changes so much that half of all programming jobs that exist today will be gone in 10 years. Some new ones will be created though. The scary thing to me though, is if industry truely embraces open source/block chain. We could get into a state where most software is open... and fixing it is a bounty system, then 20% of programmers would make 80% of the money as they build AI to indentify opportunities, and solutions.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  Another angle to what you're describing is that a huge percentage of programmers' jobs serve to eliminate other jobs. That's been the case for newer technologies since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. That said, the long term effect hasn't been to reduce jobs. Ultimately, not paying someone to do X ends up also creating jobs by freeing up money to pay someone to do Y. Obviously that's small solace for someone who lost their job and isn't finding a new one. But we can frame the story in different ways that allow us to find different places to place the blame, and different ways to find alternative solutions. I personally don't like blaming technology because that implies that the best solution is to slow or halt the development of any technology that automates or eliminates the need for things that could be done by humans. As a human who enjoys eating out at restaurants and having access to high-quality medical care, and does not enjoy mowing wheat with a scythe and re-thatching his own roof, I'm not fond of that framing. As someone who dislikes memes that assume that learning is something that ends in your 20s, or that the world is teeming with people who have 6 years' experience in 3 year old technologies, I'm much more interested in looking for framings that look to improve everyone's access to new jobs instead of trying to preserve the old ones.
  - androidrebel 7y ago
    Why the downvotes? Progress and competition are good.
- throwaway55554 7y ago
  Empathy isn't tech's strong suit.
- protomyth 7y ago
  We are about due for a new generation of CASE tools to make just that promise.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  I pretty frequently see people answer these things with studies showing automation isn't (yet) causing structural unemployment. And, ok, it's good to have those studies, but they're not a final word on the topic. We also know that people who are displaced into other industries mid-career generally see permanent setbacks in wages, are frequently forced to move, and take long-term hits to their emotional wellbeing comparable to other major life crises. If automation is 'just' accelerating the sort of turnover that's always existed, that still implies we should be deeply concerned and start finding better ways to support the people it affects.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Working with better programming languages and frameworks is great!
- hrktb 7y ago
  I’d bet half of the programming jobs continually disappear in a cyclic way. What proportion of bare metal system administrators is there left now that AWS/GCP/Azure has taken the world ? What proportion of people still work in C ? etc. Programming is perhaps different because people expect from the start the floor to move under their feet, and try to stay ahead and keep learning new stuff constantly.
ekianjo 7y ago
> Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. I thought everyone wanted these jobs to disappear because Amazon was like a sweatshop or something? Now that Amazon is getting rid of such tedious jobs people are complaining? You can't have it both ways.
- CodeMage 7y ago
  First of all, if you think the worst thing about these jobs is that they're tedious, you really should take a better look at the reports about the working conditions involved. As for "having it both ways", you're presenting a false dichotomy. You're implying that the society must: either 1) preserve the status quo that makes those people work in those conditions, or 2) eliminate those jobs in a fashion that makes it worse for those people. Those are not the only options. This is not really a completely new situation that humanity has never faced before. Throughout our history, there have been numerous examples of undesirable jobs being so tightly entangled with the economy that getting rid of them is problematic. A few examples that come to mind are cocaleros in places like Bolivia, sex tourism for pedophiles in places like Sri Lanka, or child labor just about everywhere. I think that -- despite the horrific lack of empathy present in some other comments -- we can assume most people would agree that these are things we need to get rid of. If you study the history of the efforts to do so, you will find that going about it in a ham-fisted way only makes things worse. Despite that, nobody will argue that the only alternative is to just preserve status quo.
umvi 7y ago
I mean, it's like the people automated toll booths displaced. I'm sure sitting in a small box all day doing a menial task is not good for you, yet people still lament when those "jobs" go away. Unemployment is still pretty low, so hopefully they were able to find something a little more fulfilling.

asdfman123 7y ago

I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. Not quite so many people would be saying, "This is great! I for one look forward to technological advancement." I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.

xxs 7y ago
"eliminated half of all programming jobs" Tools to improve speed of development have existed for ages, twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way. (that includes even programming languages) Personally I'd consider it an improvement - if I job can be automated, it should be.
- CodeMage 7y ago
  > twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way Except that's not how that works. Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. A job is eliminated when it's no longer necessary. Unless you live in a parallel dimension, we're both in the world where there's more and more software development being done every day. Twice the speed results in twice the output, not half the developers.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.
    - netcan 7y ago
      It depends on the demand "function." We only need so many socks. If sockmakers get more efficient, there'll be fewer sockmakers and prices will come down shrinking the industry. In some cases, if productivity increases, and the price performance follows, we will consume far more of a thing, growing the market and employing more people.
      - evandijk70 7y ago
        One might argue that the money saved on sock purchases will be spend on other things, thus creating jobs in different industries.
    - ryandrake 7y ago
      If suddenly one developer can do the job of 3, then the other two will be assigned to some of the other unstaffed things they could be doing to also make the company money. Most places I’ve worked have a huge backlog of unstaffed work just waiting to be picked up.
    - CodeMage 7y ago
      That's just a disingenuous distortion of semantics. You're deliberately ignoring the key difference between skill-based, white-collar jobs and unskilled, blue-collar jobs. The former are not "destroyed" by productivity, as you put it. They change what the workers have to do, but the workers are, for the most part, able to adapt. None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.
      - bin0 7y ago
        He may not have phrased it perfectly, but his point is good. Picture this: you are hired to do a contract job. The tooling today is arguably better than 20 years ago. You bill by the hour, and take fewer hours. Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time). This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual. A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.
  - netcan 7y ago
    There are two types of products in this world, lawyers and cigarettes. If manufacturing cigarettes gets more/less expensive, people will pay more/less for their cigarettes. If it takes fewer people to make cigarettes, fewer people will have jobs making cigarettes. The number of cigarettes smoked stays constant. If you have more lawyers, you'll have more lawsuits, contracts and legal letters. If it gets easier to do contracts or lawsuits lawyers will take longer lunches. Lawyer fees stay constant.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way I think you mean half fewer developers, not “twice less”, but... No, twice the speed means twice the value produced per unit labor, which means at the same labor price level, more, not fewer, programmers will be hired (or, at constant employment level, pay should increase); the actual result is some increase in pay and some increase in employment. Technology that provides output multipliers on a job are different than technology that replaces the function of workers at lower cost.
- petra 7y ago
  Doubling productivity isn't a big deal when an industry is "eating the world". But what if it's not ?
amedvednikov 7y ago
UBI. Then we can be gleeful about more automation.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  People need to feel useful to others. Right now, in the US, we fulfill that need through work. Work is an integral part of our culture. If you make a whole swath of the population feel redundant, especially practical, no-nonsense people who are used to having work define who they are, they are not going to adjust well. They are quite different than college-educated hippies who would rather get more education and go surfing for a few years while they write bad poetry. I mean imagine living in a rural, middle-of-nowhere US town where everyone pretty much lives on $800/mo from the government. What would you do out there? Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything. I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty. Others would escape through drugs. It is possible to change our culture and attitudes to work, but that's a really big change.
  - androidrebel 7y ago
    UBI encourages parasitic drag on the economy.
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      UBI encourages the disinterested to leave the workforce, instead of taking a job they hate because they must have a job, and doing as little as possible, resisting change, lowering coworker's morale, and being a drag. It frees companies to only hire people who are interested in what the company is doing and enthusiastic about it. It frees people to do constructive, contributing things they might want to do, but which wouldn't pay enough, or which they wouldn't be able to do full time but can do part time.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      No, UBI discourages “parasitic drag” on the aggregate economy compared to conventional means-tested welfare, while more effectively addressing the distributional issues which create the problems means-tested welfare is instituted to address.
gridlockd 7y ago
> I think HN's tune would be quite different if someone came up with a technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs. We could easily eliminate half of all programming jobs if we just stopped creating work for ourselves. As it stands, we're the gatekeepers, our work is so opaque that no outsider could accurately estimate how much time we are wasting. Luckily for us, markets aren't very good at eliminating this kind of inefficiency, see "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.
bamboozled 7y ago
Let's be honest, this is really just a matter of time.
swalsh 7y ago
"technology that eliminated half of all programming jobs" Technology changes so much that half of all programming jobs that exist today will be gone in 10 years. Some new ones will be created though. The scary thing to me though, is if industry truely embraces open source/block chain. We could get into a state where most software is open... and fixing it is a bounty system, then 20% of programmers would make 80% of the money as they build AI to indentify opportunities, and solutions.
bunderbunder 7y ago
Another angle to what you're describing is that a huge percentage of programmers' jobs serve to eliminate other jobs. That's been the case for newer technologies since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. That said, the long term effect hasn't been to reduce jobs. Ultimately, not paying someone to do X ends up also creating jobs by freeing up money to pay someone to do Y. Obviously that's small solace for someone who lost their job and isn't finding a new one. But we can frame the story in different ways that allow us to find different places to place the blame, and different ways to find alternative solutions. I personally don't like blaming technology because that implies that the best solution is to slow or halt the development of any technology that automates or eliminates the need for things that could be done by humans. As a human who enjoys eating out at restaurants and having access to high-quality medical care, and does not enjoy mowing wheat with a scythe and re-thatching his own roof, I'm not fond of that framing. As someone who dislikes memes that assume that learning is something that ends in your 20s, or that the world is teeming with people who have 6 years' experience in 3 year old technologies, I'm much more interested in looking for framings that look to improve everyone's access to new jobs instead of trying to preserve the old ones.
- androidrebel 7y ago
  Why the downvotes? Progress and competition are good.
throwaway55554 7y ago
Empathy isn't tech's strong suit.
protomyth 7y ago
We are about due for a new generation of CASE tools to make just that promise.
Bartweiss 7y ago
I pretty frequently see people answer these things with studies showing automation isn't (yet) causing structural unemployment. And, ok, it's good to have those studies, but they're not a final word on the topic. We also know that people who are displaced into other industries mid-career generally see permanent setbacks in wages, are frequently forced to move, and take long-term hits to their emotional wellbeing comparable to other major life crises. If automation is 'just' accelerating the sort of turnover that's always existed, that still implies we should be deeply concerned and start finding better ways to support the people it affects.
imtringued 7y ago
Working with better programming languages and frameworks is great!
hrktb 7y ago
I’d bet half of the programming jobs continually disappear in a cyclic way. What proportion of bare metal system administrators is there left now that AWS/GCP/Azure has taken the world ? What proportion of people still work in C ? etc. Programming is perhaps different because people expect from the start the floor to move under their feet, and try to stay ahead and keep learning new stuff constantly.

ekianjo 7y ago

> Think about people who work in Amazon warehouses despite those conditions. I thought everyone wanted these jobs to disappear because Amazon was like a sweatshop or something? Now that Amazon is getting rid of such tedious jobs people are complaining? You can't have it both ways.

CodeMage 7y ago
First of all, if you think the worst thing about these jobs is that they're tedious, you really should take a better look at the reports about the working conditions involved. As for "having it both ways", you're presenting a false dichotomy. You're implying that the society must: either 1) preserve the status quo that makes those people work in those conditions, or 2) eliminate those jobs in a fashion that makes it worse for those people. Those are not the only options. This is not really a completely new situation that humanity has never faced before. Throughout our history, there have been numerous examples of undesirable jobs being so tightly entangled with the economy that getting rid of them is problematic. A few examples that come to mind are cocaleros in places like Bolivia, sex tourism for pedophiles in places like Sri Lanka, or child labor just about everywhere. I think that -- despite the horrific lack of empathy present in some other comments -- we can assume most people would agree that these are things we need to get rid of. If you study the history of the efforts to do so, you will find that going about it in a ham-fisted way only makes things worse. Despite that, nobody will argue that the only alternative is to just preserve status quo.

umvi 7y ago

I mean, it's like the people automated toll booths displaced. I'm sure sitting in a small box all day doing a menial task is not good for you, yet people still lament when those "jobs" go away. Unemployment is still pretty low, so hopefully they were able to find something a little more fulfilling.