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Sure they have. Look at banks and other major enterprises, it's exactly the same. My point isn't about engineers; the same can be said of architects or designe

Sure they have. Look at banks and other major enterprises, it's exactly the same. My point isn't about engineers; the same can be said of architects or designers or even middle managers. If you have a team that you trust, having any number and grouping of them able to come together around a problem will produce results. A team being "flexible" does not make them "cogs".

jiggy2011 13y ago
It's the difference between a person being flexible and an organisation or process being flexible. Many organisations don't want to rely on a handful of supermen who solve all of their problems as such people may become indispensable and then demand higher wages or go to a competitor. They would rather break their processes down into a bunch of specialized tasks that require few skills so that new workers can be popped in and out quickly.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  In much the same way, most devops guys want to spin up identical commodity EC2 instances deployed via a script, with hostnames like hypst-streamer-m00237. Like it or not, that's how you scale. The wage level is somewhat orthogonal to this - doctors are generally interchangeable cogs, but they get paid well. The key point is avoiding single points of failure.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Doctors are not as interchangeable as say assembly line workers, doctors have different levels of experience and different specializations as well as relationships with patients in cases of more general doctors. Besides there is a relatively small pool of people compared to the general population who are even capable of becoming doctors, not to mention the very long spin up time. An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers.
    - yummyfajitas 13y ago
      Two doctors are not interchangeable, but two radiologists are. The fact that they both make $300k/year doesn't change this.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        I imagine radiologists are interchangeable in the same way that Python programmers are; kind of but not really. Skilled professionals become more experienced at their jobs over time, they also have differing experiences and may have graduated from different schools etc. This means that they will perform their jobs differently in ways that way be subtle and not easily quantifiable. So if you swap them out, things will change in ways that may not be easy to predict. On the other hand a minimum wage worker is more likely to perform a job that requires a total training of 1 hour or less and they are likely to hit a ceiling in terms of productivity within a week. There may be minor differences in output, but these are easily quantifiable and if you have a large enough labour pool to draw from can be solved by saying "fire anybody who does like than X per hour".
        jbooth 13y ago
        It seems to me (corrections welcome), that medical specialists are way, way more interchangeable than programmers. Each patient has a chart that follows them around through the hospital and each specialist reads the chart, makes their decisions and documents what they're doing. There are problems with that, but it's the system. That very much makes the medical practitioners cogs in the system, compared to programmers who have a much longer ramp up time for a given codebase/patient.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        Sure and every codebase has documentation , specs and tests that follow it all over the internet.. I think the main difference probably comes down to medicine having more procedures and redundancy built in because you can't let a patient die when a particular doctor is not available. OTOH my older relatives definitely complain about/praise individual doctors for bedside manor , professionalism and misdiagnosis etc.
smacktoward 13y ago
"Flexibility" in the way the term is usually used in CEO-speak doesn't mean having employees that you can trust. It means not having to have to trust your employees because their work has been broken down into such generic chunks that it requires no independent thought or initiative. You're looking at this from the perspective of a skilled professional, which is fine -- most of the HN audience probably does as well. But it's not the perspective I'm talking about. I'm talking about the perspective of the people who see skilled professionals as a problem, because their skills mean they can demand things like money and respect as a condition of employment. That reduces the CEO's flexibility to do things like take that money and put it instead into his own golden parachute.
- Hovertruck 13y ago
  The only point I'm trying to make is that your original post positioned it as unavoidable. It can happen in any industry, but it doesn't mean it will.

jiggy2011 13y ago

It's the difference between a person being flexible and an organisation or process being flexible. Many organisations don't want to rely on a handful of supermen who solve all of their problems as such people may become indispensable and then demand higher wages or go to a competitor. They would rather break their processes down into a bunch of specialized tasks that require few skills so that new workers can be popped in and out quickly.

yummyfajitas 13y ago
In much the same way, most devops guys want to spin up identical commodity EC2 instances deployed via a script, with hostnames like hypst-streamer-m00237. Like it or not, that's how you scale. The wage level is somewhat orthogonal to this - doctors are generally interchangeable cogs, but they get paid well. The key point is avoiding single points of failure.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Doctors are not as interchangeable as say assembly line workers, doctors have different levels of experience and different specializations as well as relationships with patients in cases of more general doctors. Besides there is a relatively small pool of people compared to the general population who are even capable of becoming doctors, not to mention the very long spin up time. An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    Two doctors are not interchangeable, but two radiologists are. The fact that they both make $300k/year doesn't change this.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      I imagine radiologists are interchangeable in the same way that Python programmers are; kind of but not really. Skilled professionals become more experienced at their jobs over time, they also have differing experiences and may have graduated from different schools etc. This means that they will perform their jobs differently in ways that way be subtle and not easily quantifiable. So if you swap them out, things will change in ways that may not be easy to predict. On the other hand a minimum wage worker is more likely to perform a job that requires a total training of 1 hour or less and they are likely to hit a ceiling in terms of productivity within a week. There may be minor differences in output, but these are easily quantifiable and if you have a large enough labour pool to draw from can be solved by saying "fire anybody who does like than X per hour".
      - jbooth 13y ago
        It seems to me (corrections welcome), that medical specialists are way, way more interchangeable than programmers. Each patient has a chart that follows them around through the hospital and each specialist reads the chart, makes their decisions and documents what they're doing. There are problems with that, but it's the system. That very much makes the medical practitioners cogs in the system, compared to programmers who have a much longer ramp up time for a given codebase/patient.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        Sure and every codebase has documentation , specs and tests that follow it all over the internet.. I think the main difference probably comes down to medicine having more procedures and redundancy built in because you can't let a patient die when a particular doctor is not available. OTOH my older relatives definitely complain about/praise individual doctors for bedside manor , professionalism and misdiagnosis etc.

smacktoward 13y ago

"Flexibility" in the way the term is usually used in CEO-speak doesn't mean having employees that you can trust. It means not having to have to trust your employees because their work has been broken down into such generic chunks that it requires no independent thought or initiative. You're looking at this from the perspective of a skilled professional, which is fine -- most of the HN audience probably does as well. But it's not the perspective I'm talking about. I'm talking about the perspective of the people who see skilled professionals as a problem, because their skills mean they can demand things like money and respect as a condition of employment. That reduces the CEO's flexibility to do things like take that money and put it instead into his own golden parachute.

Hovertruck 13y ago
The only point I'm trying to make is that your original post positioned it as unavoidable. It can happen in any industry, but it doesn't mean it will.