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388 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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austin-cheney ◴[] No.43491201[source]
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.

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yawgmoth ◴[] No.43492210[source]
> 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.

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scandox ◴[] No.43493095[source]
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?
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1. yawgmoth ◴[] No.43495963[source]
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.