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> Software developers are well compensated despite the extremely high degree of automation in their jobs. I don't see how that's meaningful. If it takes skille

> Software developers are well compensated despite the extremely high degree of automation in their jobs. I don't see how that's meaningful. If it takes skilled human effort, we expect it to be well compensated. What does it matter whether that skill makes use of much existing technology? A racing driver relies on an impressive stack of technology. Should we consider their job to be under a high degree of automation? > humans consume a fixed amount of resources This could not be more wrong. [0][1] > Those burger flippers are compensated poorly because you need a lot of them to run a restaurant that serves cheap food This doesn't explain why they're poorly compensated. It implicitly assumes the competitive survival of the restaurant, and treats employee compensation as a function of the employer's needs. That doesn't work. The employees are poorly compensated because people will do that job for that level of compensation. Employers don't tend to pay more than the market requires them to. > If you had a way of increasing their productivity 2 fold you can afford to pay them twice as much. I said afford. What does it matter what the employer could afford to do, if we're talking about the actual compensation of the employee? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_%3D_PAT

lotsofpulp 6y ago
This is a bad expectation to have > If it takes skilled human effort, we expect it to be well compensated. Because this is true > The employees are poorly compensated because people will do that job for that level of compensation. I would rephrase to: “If the supply of labor is low relative to demand, and the purchaser has the ability to pay, we expect it to be well compensated.”
ameister14 6y ago
>I don't see how that's meaningful. If it takes skilled human effort, we expect it to be well compensated. What does it matter whether that skill makes use of much existing technology? We don't actually pay people based on skill. Take the example of an old man making phyllo dough by hand - he gets paid based on the weight of the dough produced, not based on the work he puts in or the skill to produce the dough. This was really prevalent in the Industrial revolution, where expert artisans were replaced by factories.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

This is a bad expectation to have > If it takes skilled human effort, we expect it to be well compensated. Because this is true > The employees are poorly compensated because people will do that job for that level of compensation. I would rephrase to: “If the supply of labor is low relative to demand, and the purchaser has the ability to pay, we expect it to be well compensated.”

ameister14 6y ago

>I don't see how that's meaningful. If it takes skilled human effort, we expect it to be well compensated. What does it matter whether that skill makes use of much existing technology? We don't actually pay people based on skill. Take the example of an old man making phyllo dough by hand - he gets paid based on the weight of the dough produced, not based on the work he puts in or the skill to produce the dough. This was really prevalent in the Industrial revolution, where expert artisans were replaced by factories.