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I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "object

I have a copy of the book too. It carefully discussed the tradeoffs of both record-playback and CNC technologies. A dry, scholarly read. No such book is "objective" (those claiming to be objective generally don't analyze the dominant ideologies they promote), but at least Noble is clear about his perspective. I think you can see some of the struggles even in programming. I've spoken with managers who are honest about wanting replaceable coders, and won't willingly choose a technology which swings the balance of power away from them. (Which means they'll likely prefer Java over certain other contenders, even if they actually happen to believe this replaceable-cog strategy costs them more time and money, thereby lowering profits.) (That's why many are attracted to startups; some of these counterproductive constraints are relaxed, due to the sheer difficulty of success.)

nickpinkston 14y ago
Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle. I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code. In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.
gruseom 14y ago
Great comment. The connections you make to software management and to the liberation of startups (if I may put it that way) strike me as spot-on.

nickpinkston 14y ago

Yea, it's easy to see he's into Marx (there are quotes from him and other Marxists throughout), but I think it made the technology choice seem based purely on management's anti-labor strategy. Unless greater productively, less errors, etc. can be called anti-labor, it's pretty clear that the playback method lost the technical battle - which was the dominant, not a class struggle. I think all things equal, you do want to be able to be worker independent: you'd like to have everything written in, say, Python not a mix of languages each developer happens to like. This doesn't mean that devs are actually plug-n-play, but on a spectrum is does make them more so. From a pragmatic point of view, I'm sure subjected to blatant commodification, a lot of people will react by quitting or creating systems that are hard for new people to pick-up: i.e. obscure / spaghetti code. In reality, most engineering jobs are pretty far from commodity - especially if you'd like to keep your team cohesion, tacit knowledge, experience, etc. It generally doesn't pay to do this in creative jobs.

gruseom 14y ago

Great comment. The connections you make to software management and to the liberation of startups (if I may put it that way) strike me as spot-on.