@danilo That requires being honest about the fact that most software devs are paid for either:
a) Giving a mature company an absurd revenue multiplier by automating other people out of jobs
b) Faffing about making a privately held company look like it might someday obtain that revenue multiplier, so that its owners can obtain private equity investment on that basis.
Which is a bit of an identity threat, especially for leftist SWE.
I think of things like GitHub that automate workflows, or Reddit that create novel substrate, or Figma that allow more efficient expression, and that doesn't strike me as job eating at all
but am I just not seeing the software iceberg’s main surface area?
@danilo I mean I'm stating it strongly on purpose. But a few things...
A) Are "workflow automation" and "automating people out of a job" truly different? The style of SWE workflow GitHub & similar tools enable/encourage has basically eliminated QA and sysadmin as job categories, especially at the entry level.
B) What's the business model of the novel substrates and the tools that enable more efficient expression? AFAICT, (generally) data sales & ad-tech for the former, and B2B to other software companies for the latter....
C) idk, man, one of my partners is job hunting right now and 80% of the places biting are some flavor of fintech. Some are sketchy and some are less sketchy. He doesn't have any fintech background.
I suppose as I introspect I generally view “job automation" as one of the ways we get to higher orders of impact and productive effort. Like, I don’t think society is worse off because we lost elevator operators
and so for me the issue isn't the automation so much as it's the social contract that punishes you for losing Capitalist Musical Chairs
this may explain why I end up at different conclusions from others in this chapter, actually
D) I don't actually think of job eating as inherently bad. Another partner works for a company that is increasing efficiency for patients and doctors in dealing with [obtaining treatment] -- or in other words, automating many medical billing and coding people out of jobs. I think that if those jobs are eliminated, it will be locally sad and societally good. Many such cases.
(So the question is how you give those folks soft landings instead.)
@danilo I suspect many people's actual answer here is "it's case by case," and that this creates a strong incentive to see one's personal job as one of the good cases, whether this is true or not. Easier to see the harms done by companies not paying one's rent.
this is where all the AI discourse ends up: the AI companies are all evil, planet destroying fuckers feeding children into an incinerator they use to power THEIR datacenters
but the datacenter power consumption that MY career depends is already priced in, and morally pure, and should not be calculated in any sort of assessment of harm
Regardless of the individual utility of any given software job, revenue multiples in software are (after being filtered through several economic/marketing laundries) pulling smart people away from fields that the world needs more than it needs software.
I think there are a number of ethically integrated responses to that conclusion -- leaving software is the one I took.
@danilo However, I do NOT think that "MY datacenter usage is fine and YOURS is evil, for reasons that I cannot name but are totally unconnected to my kids' college fund" rises to the level of an ethically integrated response....
@danilo but as you also know, my basic position is "You hate software that much? Wow, I do too! That's why I stopped making it for a living. Consider your options!"
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