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.