Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

It’s a natural reckoning that industries are still figuring out. For a long time software has seen vast over employment. Even with all the layoffs there is still a lot of fat left to trim.

Look, the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination. This used to be common knowledge when software jobs were far fewer and still has not realistically sunk in with the modern work force. People that don’t fully embrace this as a value consensus are ripe for elimination.

A lot of software employment has also seen rising wages inversely proportional to return on investment until so many of the layoffs started. There are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training. For years employers have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth. Now they are doubling down with AI. You still have a population of people unqualified and insufficiently to perform the work assigned.

All of these things mean software employment is a liability of declining worth that employers are still not willing to accept.

> here are many people employed to write software that aren’t very good and cannot independently qualify a return on investment without considerable help. That is a problem of poor candidate selection and improper/insufficient training.

Every time there's a downturn in labor field, common courtesy goes out the window (I might say more nasty things, but the truth is I don't know you so it might very well be unwarranted for in this case, but I do know many callous people who spew/project similar things). Sort of like what Buffet said about the tide -- you see people's true colors.

The company I'm working for fired people because of financial issues and the new CEO instead of being humble and just saying what it is, indirectly called those fired or about to be fired "lazy". I know those people, none were lazy.

I've worked in this field for 20 years and very few people are actually incompetent or lazy (mainly banks) -- and those are not the people to get fired in a downturn, because those people usually move into management (because why would you get rid of a good sd, qa ? or if you're a good senior sd or qa, why would you move to a junior manager position?). It's usually the environment and management problem, not a incompetency or laziness problem for why things go wrong when they do.

And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?

> have attempted to short circuit this problem with open source helpers like Spring Boot, jQuery, React and so forth.

It's not a short circuit at all, just common sense. Every time I see a long running java project that uses some obscure bullshit frameworks ("spring is overrated") I KNOW there's huge cost in the future for the re-invention of features spring boot has out of the box and solving many many issues and quirks with library integrations, lifecycle management, hours upon hours of people learning the quirks of the spring-less project idioms, that spring users will never encounter.

There are several logic violations with your comment:

* I never described anyone as lazy.

* Incompetence and laziness are completely orthogonal. A lazy person can still achieve higher than average productivity while an extremely hard working person can under deliver.

* People are not generally protected from layoffs by moving into management. Furthermore, movement into management is sometimes not voluntary.

* The excuse mentioned by one employer does not describe or qualify conditions in the industry either on average or as a whole.

* A person’s common sense personal opinion is not an objective qualifier.

Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.

> And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?

If your comment were limited to just that one quote it would have been much better as it alludes a deeper cultural failure.

> Look, the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination

I use software to design algorithms to make capital decisions, where distribution centers and warehouses are built. I am not automating a human job.

> And finally, who and why hired those bad people in the first place? Or did they become bad after they were hired?

Often good people become bad for common corporate reasons:

1. They are hired with 100% benefits and slowly benefits are taken away, effectively a paycut (e.g., higher health insurance premiums, higher co-pays, no more educational reimbursements promised on offer letters)

2. They are not given pay increases in line with cost of living (sometimes given no pay increases) despite company products costing more with inflation and despite growth (employees arent dumb and notice this)

3. Promotions are popularity contests, not based on merit, and ambitious engineers realize merit doesnt matter and clock in/out w/o care

I'm confused. If the software didn't exist then many humans would be needed to figure out on paper (or excel) how to make these decisions, wouldn't they?

> * I never described anyone as lazy.

I never said you did, I just added another bogus reason CEOs use to justify why layoffs are necessary, when really, the only reason is the market is bad and we want to have more profits and we thought we needed more people but really we don't. Or we just like to keep people in line with a 5% culling like facebook (?) now does -- things we could not do in the market conditions before but we can now do with impunity.

But all that shines a negative light on management, and people are generally empathetic to other people losing their livelihoods and why do that when it's so much easier to scapegoat.

>Your comment completely lacks an objective perspective.

But you feel your original perspective is objective?

> But you feel your original perspective is objective?

This is what I call first person problem. I have had two separate careers spanning decades each: software and military. Then because of community connections and decades spent talking with military members who themselves have other primary professions it seems clear software has a problem of self orientation that I don't see in any other profession except education. Entertainment may have this too, but I don't have any exposure to that industry.

Extreme self orientation is the inability to perceive the world outside of what is immediately limiting or gratifying to the person in question. This impacts perceptions of risk, statistics, measures, power distance, empathy, social intelligence, and much more. Convicted criminals acting in their own interests convicted of white collar crimes in industries like law and finance demonstrate this first person problem less than the average participant in education and software, which could be horrifying except many of those guys are sociapaths with high social intelligence and learned masking behaviors.

Outside of employment extreme self orientation is typically associated with a variety of anti-social behaviors like: autism, narcissism, sociopathy, and more. These are mental health concerns because they are limiting to the person in question and/or harmful persons around them.

The difference between our comments is that your comment was littered with first person pronouns. It was all about what you witnessed in limited contexts and what affects you. My comment was about the industry at large absent any participation from myself.

That's true. But, to the point of eliminating labor -- there's still a human in the loop here.

In fact I would argue that while people were still making capital decisions, the idea of optimizing them is only practical WITH some kind of software / calculator / computer. The tooling I write has added jobs, not eliminated them.

> the only purpose of software is automation and the only purpose of automation is labor elimination

This point is so wrong.

Software/information machines also eliminate errors and reduce latency. There are other benefits. Sometimes they eliminate unnecessary labor as a side effect.

My observation is that software that attempts to replace people dies and the software that persists elevates people. It helps them concentrate. Good software helps people focus even better on the problems they are solving by eliminating or dissolving the noise into the background.

All software attempts to replace people. I recommend you research daily office life before the photo copy was invented.

> The difference between our comments is that your comment was littered with first person pronouns. It was all about what you witnessed in limited contexts and what affects you. My comment was about the industry at large absent any participation from myself.

But we are both humans, limited by our own experiences. I have no problem admiting these are my own deductions about the world and my own perspective.

Unless I had scientific data to back the generality of my statements, I see no reason to use such a third person view.