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<i>The second part of what you said -- about ownership of the "engines of production" -- is straight out of Marxism, which is, by the way, broken. More and more

by redwood 16y ago

<i>The second part of what you said -- about ownership of the "engines of production" -- is straight out of Marxism, which is, by the way, broken. More and more we live in an information economy; it's not about what you own, but what you know and what you can make.</i> I don't agree: while it's important to know a lot to be valuable today, the people who are in this extreme high echelon of wealth are accumulating wealth through corporate ownership and they seem to be owning a larger and larger percent of those corporations. Perhaps what you mean is that corporations, while dominant when it comes to dollars, are not necessarily continuing to be dominant wrt. the human experience. And this I agree with: the internet has opened the wealth of human knowledge to all of us. This freedom and the fact that so many of us spend our days doing what are effectively leisure of artistic pursuits means, even if we're not making money, we're contributing to man kind. And this is true: and not reflected in the wealth distribution, I agree.

Daishiman 16y ago
I disagree completely about 'what you can make'. This only applies to a few extremely qualified positions in the workforce. The large majority of jobs, while they do require a level of intellect, which may be at times large, are nowadays less dependent on individual thought and more about being able to follow processes and procedures, to the point where the skills themselves are mere commodities and original thought is not needed unless we're talking about the higher echelons of a company. I can't find the NYT article on the matter, but I can describe my experience as a systems administrator: While in theory Unix sysadmins are highly qualified people who should be thinking independently, I left the line of work largely because of the extreme tediousness and lack of independence. - 90% of the tasks that had to be done were extremely trivial but their automation had already been maximized (adding users in heterogenous systems, altering filesystems, touching files and installing software) - Most nontrivial errors were deferred to support lines. Decisions on how to proceed with most "important" issues were left up to project executives and people with no technical qualifications. - Most change issues were managed through tickets which had a list of steps to follow to the implementer. Most of the work there consisted of chasing the proper approvers so that I could do the work for them on time. What was left was a highly predictable, boring system where all the originality and intelligence was made at the procedure level, and we were expected to follow procedure at all times, even when it was not necessarily the best choice. Corporations do not generally want an inspired rank-and-file. Intelligent individuals want to question and are willing to make mistakes, and this clashes with organizations that want to automate what cannot be automated at a fundamental level. My skill set was reduced to just knowing the commands and locations to do stuff; creative problem determination was discarding as being dangerous and disrupting, and even though there were a hundred different ways to improve processes, the bureaucracy to do that made it an incovenience that I was not willing to put up with. Thankfully I left that position for places that did require much deeper through and rewarded creativity, but the reality is that a large chunk of work simply doesn't require that; some jobs have a ceiling as to how productive one can be, and IMO, the current trend of making everything dependent on processes doesn't help in bringing the best out of people. Think about this on retail jobs and food services: interaction with the customers is scripted at incredibly deep levels with little margin for the person to make his or her best judgement. The problem is that not everyone is in a condition to leave and operate their own establishment or find better positions, so we have a large mass of people whose skills are being purposely underutilized.

by redwood 16y ago

Daishiman 16y ago

I disagree completely about 'what you can make'. This only applies to a few extremely qualified positions in the workforce. The large majority of jobs, while they do require a level of intellect, which may be at times large, are nowadays less dependent on individual thought and more about being able to follow processes and procedures, to the point where the skills themselves are mere commodities and original thought is not needed unless we're talking about the higher echelons of a company. I can't find the NYT article on the matter, but I can describe my experience as a systems administrator: While in theory Unix sysadmins are highly qualified people who should be thinking independently, I left the line of work largely because of the extreme tediousness and lack of independence. - 90% of the tasks that had to be done were extremely trivial but their automation had already been maximized (adding users in heterogenous systems, altering filesystems, touching files and installing software) - Most nontrivial errors were deferred to support lines. Decisions on how to proceed with most "important" issues were left up to project executives and people with no technical qualifications. - Most change issues were managed through tickets which had a list of steps to follow to the implementer. Most of the work there consisted of chasing the proper approvers so that I could do the work for them on time. What was left was a highly predictable, boring system where all the originality and intelligence was made at the procedure level, and we were expected to follow procedure at all times, even when it was not necessarily the best choice. Corporations do not generally want an inspired rank-and-file. Intelligent individuals want to question and are willing to make mistakes, and this clashes with organizations that want to automate what cannot be automated at a fundamental level. My skill set was reduced to just knowing the commands and locations to do stuff; creative problem determination was discarding as being dangerous and disrupting, and even though there were a hundred different ways to improve processes, the bureaucracy to do that made it an incovenience that I was not willing to put up with. Thankfully I left that position for places that did require much deeper through and rewarded creativity, but the reality is that a large chunk of work simply doesn't require that; some jobs have a ceiling as to how productive one can be, and IMO, the current trend of making everything dependent on processes doesn't help in bringing the best out of people. Think about this on retail jobs and food services: interaction with the customers is scripted at incredibly deep levels with little margin for the person to make his or her best judgement. The problem is that not everyone is in a condition to leave and operate their own establishment or find better positions, so we have a large mass of people whose skills are being purposely underutilized.