Re:Not the autoworkers of our generation
by michaelochurch on Monday September 02, 2013 @09:37PM
(#6318235)
There is something that can slaughter the job security of software engineers, but it's not technological advancement.
Before I get to that, my personal forecast is: income expectancy for intelligent and hardworking people will continue to increase but so will variance. Eventually, the variance will become intolerable enough (sans regularization) that basic income will appear to be the only solution; even the smartest people will see a personal need for something like it. There will be a lot of struggling and fighting over implementation (e.g. do college graduates get more? how about families? should society incentivize or penalize reproduction?) but everyone will agree that it's necessary. That's probably about 30-50 years from now.
Okay, so what's the #1 threat to software developers' job security? Not robots. We have robots that write code (compilers) and our jobs are still challenging. Instead, it's upper-level complacency in society. An elite that would rather hold position and keep relative rank than grow society and gain absolute prosperity (but at a lesser rate than others, losing rank). Historically, this is the norm for elites. Many people, especially in positions of power (because power selects such people) would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. If they can conspire toward self-protection and social mediocrity, they will. The good news is that, in a large and heterogeneous society, it's actually very hard to hold any conspiracy together for very long. This is why conspiracy theories overstate the power of such organizations; conspiracies (lower-case 'c') exist all over the place (e.g. Davos assholes) but none have the power to run the world unilaterally. It's too chaotic and large. Societies and nations have set themselves back centuries when their elites conspired toward mediocrity, but I don't think the world elite is capable of doing so-- especially not now.
If the global business elite figures out a way to conspire toward mediocrity, the people like us are fucked, because excellence will cease to matter and being good at what one does will just get one the reputation of a troublemaker. However, the likelihood that anyone could pull this together in a world with unprecedented distribution of technical literacy is incredibly low.
As long as there are people looking to do things in this world, and the world continues to advance technologically, there will be a high level of demand for people who are technically competent. We might be applying our skills differently and changing industries, but there will be work for us, and society would have to reach an advanced (that is, certainly plausible but unlikely) state of degradation for us not to do that work on at least half-decent (e.g. middle-class) terms.
Before I get to that, my personal forecast is: income expectancy for intelligent and hardworking people will continue to increase but so will variance. Eventually, the variance will become intolerable enough (sans regularization) that basic income will appear to be the only solution; even the smartest people will see a personal need for something like it. There will be a lot of struggling and fighting over implementation (e.g. do college graduates get more? how about families? should society incentivize or penalize reproduction?) but everyone will agree that it's necessary. That's probably about 30-50 years from now.
Okay, so what's the #1 threat to software developers' job security? Not robots. We have robots that write code (compilers) and our jobs are still challenging. Instead, it's upper-level complacency in society. An elite that would rather hold position and keep relative rank than grow society and gain absolute prosperity (but at a lesser rate than others, losing rank). Historically, this is the norm for elites. Many people, especially in positions of power (because power selects such people) would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. If they can conspire toward self-protection and social mediocrity, they will. The good news is that, in a large and heterogeneous society, it's actually very hard to hold any conspiracy together for very long. This is why conspiracy theories overstate the power of such organizations; conspiracies (lower-case 'c') exist all over the place (e.g. Davos assholes) but none have the power to run the world unilaterally. It's too chaotic and large. Societies and nations have set themselves back centuries when their elites conspired toward mediocrity, but I don't think the world elite is capable of doing so-- especially not now.
If the global business elite figures out a way to conspire toward mediocrity, the people like us are fucked, because excellence will cease to matter and being good at what one does will just get one the reputation of a troublemaker. However, the likelihood that anyone could pull this together in a world with unprecedented distribution of technical literacy is incredibly low.
As long as there are people looking to do things in this world, and the world continues to advance technologically, there will be a high level of demand for people who are technically competent. We might be applying our skills differently and changing industries, but there will be work for us, and society would have to reach an advanced (that is, certainly plausible but unlikely) state of degradation for us not to do that work on at least half-decent (e.g. middle-class) terms.