4 ms·

If you can't beat them, join them. Figure out what technologies are destroying jobs and be one of the job destroyers.

cousin_it 15y ago
If all but 20% of programming jobs will become redundant, what advice would you give to the remaining 80% of programmers? "Starve because there's too many of you to fit in the 20%"?
- myhf 15y ago
  Work at a higher efficiency for someone who was unable to afford paying you to work at a lower efficiency.
Mvandenbergh 15y ago
There's two different ways of looking at this sort of issue though. One is from the perspective of a participant in the job market, from that point of view it isn't such a huge problem. Predicting where efficiency improvements will shift factor intensity from labour to capital is something that most people here are able to do for their own field. I'm sure, for instance, that every system administrator reading this has already taken into account the effect of cloud services on their career. Smart people will build their expertise in managing cloud systems, move into a tighter integration with developers (DevOps), or specialise in an area that is more resistant to being moved into the cloud for performance and security reasons. That's great, but it's a little like developing an optimal musical chairs strategy, if there are 10 such jobs today and 9 tomorrow then one person isn't going to have a job. Even if he has also tried to adopt an optimal strategy. That brings me to the second view, which is viewing the entire system from the outside. That can be in the role of an economist, a citizen, whatever. From that macro point of view, what is important is only the following: Will the net job losses in this particular job eventually be outweighed by countervailing job gains in other parts of the economy? Historically, that has always been the case. Ever since this became a topic of discussion in the early industrial revolution it has happened time and time again that new jobs pop up that no-one could have imagined a generation ago. The question is though, is that inevitable? Will there come a point where job losses from efficiency will outpace the gain in new jobs? I have no idea what the answer to this is. If it were to come to pass that huge swathes of the population simply don't have any valuable labour to exchange, then the basis of an economy and society based on the exchange of labour for resources would unravel.

If all but 20% of programming jobs will become redundant, what advice would you give to the remaining 80% of programmers? "Starve because there's too many of you to fit in the 20%"?

myhf 15y ago
Work at a higher efficiency for someone who was unable to afford paying you to work at a lower efficiency.

Mvandenbergh 15y ago

There's two different ways of looking at this sort of issue though. One is from the perspective of a participant in the job market, from that point of view it isn't such a huge problem. Predicting where efficiency improvements will shift factor intensity from labour to capital is something that most people here are able to do for their own field. I'm sure, for instance, that every system administrator reading this has already taken into account the effect of cloud services on their career. Smart people will build their expertise in managing cloud systems, move into a tighter integration with developers (DevOps), or specialise in an area that is more resistant to being moved into the cloud for performance and security reasons. That's great, but it's a little like developing an optimal musical chairs strategy, if there are 10 such jobs today and 9 tomorrow then one person isn't going to have a job. Even if he has also tried to adopt an optimal strategy. That brings me to the second view, which is viewing the entire system from the outside. That can be in the role of an economist, a citizen, whatever. From that macro point of view, what is important is only the following: Will the net job losses in this particular job eventually be outweighed by countervailing job gains in other parts of the economy? Historically, that has always been the case. Ever since this became a topic of discussion in the early industrial revolution it has happened time and time again that new jobs pop up that no-one could have imagined a generation ago. The question is though, is that inevitable? Will there come a point where job losses from efficiency will outpace the gain in new jobs? I have no idea what the answer to this is. If it were to come to pass that huge swathes of the population simply don't have any valuable labour to exchange, then the basis of an economy and society based on the exchange of labour for resources would unravel.