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There are two potential labor market realities and we still don't know, as a society, which one is right: 1. Labor finitism: there's a fairly fixed amount of l

There are two potential labor market realities and we still don't know, as a society, which one is right: 1. Labor finitism: there's a fairly fixed amount of labor that society will pay money for, and us proles are doomed to compete against each other for it, in what ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. 2. Labor progressivism: technical and scientific progress will free up resources for more interesting and higher-yield work, and make everyone richer. To quote Keynes, the rising tide will lift all boats. In a labor-finitist world, the worker's job is to extract as much payment out of capital-holders (for as little work) as possible. The labor-finitist world is almost Malthusian in its ruthless cruelty. In a labor-progressivist world, it's actually good to do the grunt work quickly, so you can graduate to more interesting stuff. Of course, reality is somewhere between these two extremes. In the very short term, it's labor finitist: people have to formally "create" jobs. In the long term, it's labor progressivist; the labor pool does expand, with its rate being an open question. The open question pertains to the 0.1-20 years range over which we actually make career decisions. It's like Efficient Market Hypothesis, whose truth comes down to "what time frame?" (Over very-short or very-long timeframes, EMH is demonstrably not true for well-known reasons. Over typical timeframes, it is.) If labor finitism is true, then we want to drive young people far away from whatever we do. Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work, just being honest about the low autonomy and shitty legacy code and arrogance of non-technical management-- also, the fact that, even though our salaries might look good on paper, we make about 1/5 of what we should given the bullshit we have to put up with-- ought to be enough. We just need to counteract the Googley propaganda about this career involving actual autonomy and respect. If labor progressivism is true, then since science and technology are the driving forces of that progress, we want as many people in those industries as have the talent, because that will bring us out of scarcity faster. It's unclear which is the case, though. Labor progressivism is true in the underlying "real world", but this society is littered with legacy power relationships that, I'm afraid, make labor finitism a lot more accurate. Just look at the terrorist attack that has been inflicted on the academic job market for the past 25 years if you don't believe that.

kyllo 13y ago
Here's to hoping that we as a society have the good sense to decide to reduce the barriers to entry for freelancing and entrepreneurship, so that anyone with skills can simply create their own job and trade their labor freely--without having to worry about "benefits" because the government actually provides those like it's supposed to.
toby 13y ago
"Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work" You say things like this a lot. I'm willing to accept that I may be naive, but do you think that those of us who have had primarily positive experiences (and I know a few, not only me) just incredibly lucky? I've been a programmer for 13 years and have worked at failing startups, moderately successful startups and big companies. I've mostly coded but have also managed small groups. There's some amount of bullshit in every job, I think, but I haven't found it to be disproportionate compared to my friends in other industries.
- bangsta 13y ago
  Maybe you just dont care. "Some amount of bullshit" does not include working a shop of 80 developers where you are the only one who speaks english in the office. "Some amount of bullshit" does not include mostly flat salaries for 10 years across the board. "Some amount of bullshit" does not mean disappearing health plans "Some amount of bullshit" does not include your new job (youre a LEAD!) of sitting on the phone trying to talk to a team in India or China who have no idea what they are doing and will get you fired when they dont deliver anything "Some amount of bullshit" does not include zero job training and the stripping of engineering culture where we train people from the ground up and theres a career path vs companies "only hiring seniors", so they can crap on them "Some amount of bullshit" does not mean a total breakdown of development discipline in the name of test driven development, scrum, lack of design, phony QA cycles and end results that not even a mother could love. This is supposed to be a profession. It is barely any longer what I would call a profession.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  I don't know what you've experienced. Maybe you've been unusually lucky. Perhaps I've been unlucky. But everything I've seen convinces me that shitty experiences are the norm in this industry. I enjoy programming and solving hard problems, but I hate this industry with a passion. I'm sick of the terrible legacy code, the bad decisions made by people dumber than a crocodile's fecal product, and the lack of respect and autonomy for the people doing the actual fucking work. Even Google turned itself into a closed-allocation shitpile at some point. What a fucking disaster. We've failed to make ourselves a real profession, and it seems like the norm is for us to suffer dearly for it. Most programmers live in an environment where they have minimal autonomy and don't even choose which projects they work on. It's fucking disgusting and if we had any collective self-respect, we'd demolish the assholes who built these horrible work environments. Personally, I won't be happy until the people who instituted calibration scores and closed allocation at Google commit seppuku. They destroyed billions of dollars worth of economic value, they ruined the lives of hundreds to thousands of highly talented people, and it's the only decent thing for them to do after that.

kyllo 13y ago

Here's to hoping that we as a society have the good sense to decide to reduce the barriers to entry for freelancing and entrepreneurship, so that anyone with skills can simply create their own job and trade their labor freely--without having to worry about "benefits" because the government actually provides those like it's supposed to.

toby 13y ago

"Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work" You say things like this a lot. I'm willing to accept that I may be naive, but do you think that those of us who have had primarily positive experiences (and I know a few, not only me) just incredibly lucky? I've been a programmer for 13 years and have worked at failing startups, moderately successful startups and big companies. I've mostly coded but have also managed small groups. There's some amount of bullshit in every job, I think, but I haven't found it to be disproportionate compared to my friends in other industries.

bangsta 13y ago
Maybe you just dont care. "Some amount of bullshit" does not include working a shop of 80 developers where you are the only one who speaks english in the office. "Some amount of bullshit" does not include mostly flat salaries for 10 years across the board. "Some amount of bullshit" does not mean disappearing health plans "Some amount of bullshit" does not include your new job (youre a LEAD!) of sitting on the phone trying to talk to a team in India or China who have no idea what they are doing and will get you fired when they dont deliver anything "Some amount of bullshit" does not include zero job training and the stripping of engineering culture where we train people from the ground up and theres a career path vs companies "only hiring seniors", so they can crap on them "Some amount of bullshit" does not mean a total breakdown of development discipline in the name of test driven development, scrum, lack of design, phony QA cycles and end results that not even a mother could love. This is supposed to be a profession. It is barely any longer what I would call a profession.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I don't know what you've experienced. Maybe you've been unusually lucky. Perhaps I've been unlucky. But everything I've seen convinces me that shitty experiences are the norm in this industry. I enjoy programming and solving hard problems, but I hate this industry with a passion. I'm sick of the terrible legacy code, the bad decisions made by people dumber than a crocodile's fecal product, and the lack of respect and autonomy for the people doing the actual fucking work. Even Google turned itself into a closed-allocation shitpile at some point. What a fucking disaster. We've failed to make ourselves a real profession, and it seems like the norm is for us to suffer dearly for it. Most programmers live in an environment where they have minimal autonomy and don't even choose which projects they work on. It's fucking disgusting and if we had any collective self-respect, we'd demolish the assholes who built these horrible work environments. Personally, I won't be happy until the people who instituted calibration scores and closed allocation at Google commit seppuku. They destroyed billions of dollars worth of economic value, they ruined the lives of hundreds to thousands of highly talented people, and it's the only decent thing for them to do after that.