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More commoditization for the profession. You can't blame the capitalist for trying to make a buck here. According to them, pricing might be a bit imbalanced i

More commoditization for the profession. You can't blame the capitalist for trying to make a buck here. According to them, pricing might be a bit imbalanced in favor of the programmers and then they would love to see a bigger piece of the pie taken from us and transferred to them the brokers and a small chunk back to clients.

nmyk 12y ago
Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. The ability to code is a commodity. By working class, I mean "not the capitalist class." There is still a big difference between programming and say, boilermaking. But in 2015, tech companies are the factories of last century. (We even call them software shops!) There is a spectrum of quality of course, and a lot of people take a lot of pride in their craft, especially when they do it well, noting the beauty of good code, etc. but at the end of the day, most people who make chairs, for example, are not the highly-paid turtlenecked Danish guy whose work is basically art that you can sit on...most people who make chairs work in factories and churn them out on an assembly line. So it is with programming. To your point, it certainly is in the interest of those who hire programmers to pay them as little as possible, given the nature of the economic system we find ourselves in. Consider also the trend of startups paying sub-market salaries and compensating with equity. The startup route certainly looks like a way to do programming while freeing yourself from the will of The Man (I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but you understand the vibe, I hope), but when you get right down to it, it's more of the same. Instead of corporate execs, you have investors. Instead of middle management, you have founders. The programmer is still just the programmer.
- timepiece 12y ago
  Yeah, programmers/coders/hackers/developers are "proletarians" and not bourgeoisie since they trade their labor for monetary compensation. I don't know from where in my reply did you get this notion that I was implying that we developers are/should be classified as capitalists. Anyway, what's important is for you to distinguish between the concepts of labor as a commodity and the commoditization of labor. These marketplaces start out as facilitators in the market to bring more efficiency and vibrancy, increase overall transaction volume and value but over time they tend to get parasitical and feed off every "host" they could infect. So, basically my comment was a protest and critique of this specific business model of marketplaces and not to debate whether programmers have to join ranks with the bourgeoisie or not. But if you wanna debate capitalist societies, technological unemployment and the alarmingly increasing income inequality and the overhoarding behavior of resources by and with the aid of the bankers worldwide, that's a whole new thread to engage in.
  - nmyk 12y ago
    You're right, I misunderstood. Could you explain what you mean when you say these marketplaces tend to get parasitical? I'm not sure I understand what that process entails.
    - timepiece 12y ago
      What I mean by "marketplaces" is the likes of TaskRabbit, Fiverr, 99designs, Freelancer, Uber, Airbnb, ..etc. I think you get the picture by now.
      - nmyk 12y ago
        Ah. Yeah, I agree with you that the more efficiently people can be hired for grunt work and nothing more, the less valuable the work will be. If you need something difficult, you still hire a full time person, but now if you need something easy you can get it much more cheaply, which shifts the overall distribution of the value of X-type-of-work lower. But one might make the point that all this means is we were paying too much for grunt work before these marketplaces showed up...
        timepiece 12y ago
        Yeah, you could argue that competition is good for the end consumer and I must concede but you have to look at the bigger picture that we keep exchanging labor for more and more shrinking "real" wages and these recent technological developments would accelerate this trend even further and make their implications more pronounced in society. Wage slavery, the illusion of labor and career derived self worthiness, the quasi monopoly of labor and the pursuit of monetary gain as the principal ideals providing meaning to life in this age, and finally holding our whole lives hostage to increasingly harsh labor conditions just for the capitalists to increase their wealth and consolidate their power over us, all of these notions must be re-opened to discussion in society given that capitalism is entering a new soul-crushing phase that is gonna leave many victims in the world that sadly would have been saved if not for our complicity in one way or another to demand and fight for our rights and our fair share in resources on this planet.
- Alex3917 12y ago
  > Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. That's like saying 'phone user' is a working class profession, and the ability to talk on the phone is a commodity. Knowing how to code is an abstract skillset, and being a programmer doesn't define your social class, it's what you do with that ability.

nmyk 12y ago

Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. The ability to code is a commodity. By working class, I mean "not the capitalist class." There is still a big difference between programming and say, boilermaking. But in 2015, tech companies are the factories of last century. (We even call them software shops!) There is a spectrum of quality of course, and a lot of people take a lot of pride in their craft, especially when they do it well, noting the beauty of good code, etc. but at the end of the day, most people who make chairs, for example, are not the highly-paid turtlenecked Danish guy whose work is basically art that you can sit on...most people who make chairs work in factories and churn them out on an assembly line. So it is with programming. To your point, it certainly is in the interest of those who hire programmers to pay them as little as possible, given the nature of the economic system we find ourselves in. Consider also the trend of startups paying sub-market salaries and compensating with equity. The startup route certainly looks like a way to do programming while freeing yourself from the will of The Man (I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but you understand the vibe, I hope), but when you get right down to it, it's more of the same. Instead of corporate execs, you have investors. Instead of middle management, you have founders. The programmer is still just the programmer.

timepiece 12y ago
Yeah, programmers/coders/hackers/developers are "proletarians" and not bourgeoisie since they trade their labor for monetary compensation. I don't know from where in my reply did you get this notion that I was implying that we developers are/should be classified as capitalists. Anyway, what's important is for you to distinguish between the concepts of labor as a commodity and the commoditization of labor. These marketplaces start out as facilitators in the market to bring more efficiency and vibrancy, increase overall transaction volume and value but over time they tend to get parasitical and feed off every "host" they could infect. So, basically my comment was a protest and critique of this specific business model of marketplaces and not to debate whether programmers have to join ranks with the bourgeoisie or not. But if you wanna debate capitalist societies, technological unemployment and the alarmingly increasing income inequality and the overhoarding behavior of resources by and with the aid of the bankers worldwide, that's a whole new thread to engage in.
- nmyk 12y ago
  You're right, I misunderstood. Could you explain what you mean when you say these marketplaces tend to get parasitical? I'm not sure I understand what that process entails.
  - timepiece 12y ago
    What I mean by "marketplaces" is the likes of TaskRabbit, Fiverr, 99designs, Freelancer, Uber, Airbnb, ..etc. I think you get the picture by now.
    - nmyk 12y ago
      Ah. Yeah, I agree with you that the more efficiently people can be hired for grunt work and nothing more, the less valuable the work will be. If you need something difficult, you still hire a full time person, but now if you need something easy you can get it much more cheaply, which shifts the overall distribution of the value of X-type-of-work lower. But one might make the point that all this means is we were paying too much for grunt work before these marketplaces showed up...
      - timepiece 12y ago
        Yeah, you could argue that competition is good for the end consumer and I must concede but you have to look at the bigger picture that we keep exchanging labor for more and more shrinking "real" wages and these recent technological developments would accelerate this trend even further and make their implications more pronounced in society. Wage slavery, the illusion of labor and career derived self worthiness, the quasi monopoly of labor and the pursuit of monetary gain as the principal ideals providing meaning to life in this age, and finally holding our whole lives hostage to increasingly harsh labor conditions just for the capitalists to increase their wealth and consolidate their power over us, all of these notions must be re-opened to discussion in society given that capitalism is entering a new soul-crushing phase that is gonna leave many victims in the world that sadly would have been saved if not for our complicity in one way or another to demand and fight for our rights and our fair share in resources on this planet.
Alex3917 12y ago
> Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. That's like saying 'phone user' is a working class profession, and the ability to talk on the phone is a commodity. Knowing how to code is an abstract skillset, and being a programmer doesn't define your social class, it's what you do with that ability.