I remember in college when we got taught that early economists thought capitalism and increasing productivity from innovation would lead to less work and effort needed from people and not more.
It must have been nice to be that optimistic and not having to see how it’s actually playing out.
Economists typically point to this phenomenon when people talk about the relatively stable working hours over the last 50-60 years. I've seen some of them argue it's an issue of supply/demand, and that if people truly wanted to work less we'd see more of demand for such careers. I think this ignores that retirement/medical benefits are almost exclusively tied to jobs expecting you to work 40 hours a week.
> we got taught that early economists thought capitalism and increasing productivity from innovation would lead to less work and effort needed from people and not more
Keynes wasn't wrong. The issue is macro-level productivity is orthogonal to personal effort and productivity. And what Keynes was talking about was macroeconomics, not individuals.
For example, it takes 10% the workforce it took in early 20th century to produce the same amount of agricultural output in the US in the 21st century.
Similarly, end-to-end automotive manufacturing via industrial robots has reduced the need for a line worker who's job was to screw in a door on an assembly line.
The economy is much more productive and efficent today than it was a century ago, but automation leads to a subset of workers specializing and a larger set of workers deskilled or unemployed because they didn't upskill when they had the chance.
It's interesting to watch the same class of people who told coal miners "they should learn to code" back in the early 2010s now getting the same comeuppance.
Frankly, American SWEs got lazy and lost their competitive edge especially during the early 2020s.
> It's interesting to watch the same class of people who told coal miners "they should learn to code" back in the early 2010s now getting the same comeuppance.
When I told people to learn to code in that situation it was with pity and I would talk to them about how I felt forced to do so after I graduated with a useless degree during the Great Recession.
It was more of a “here’s one of the few growth areas left that are feasible to self teach”, rather than contempt for people not being on the same class as me.
> Frankly, American SWEs got lazy and lost their competitive edge especially during the early 2020s.
If “competitive” edge at this point means needing to get a masters on top of needing to train unpaid on your free time I think it’s more that corporations in America have gotten to the point of wanting increasingly rare or expensive to acquire skills in their labor force, while simultaneously deciding that they will be paying approximately $0 in any and all training costs.
AI is only accelerating that as every manager and exec is drooling at the mouth at the idea of never hiring juniors again. It’ll be some other assholes problem like their future self who has to deal with what happens after the lack of people in training finally catches up to the industry.
> It was more of a “here’s one of the few growth areas left that are feasible to self teach”, rather than contempt for people not being on the same class as me
> If “competitive” edge at this point means needing to get a masters on top of needing to train unpaid on your free time...
Doesn't it suck when being asked to completely retool and reskill in the middle of your career.
I never said it didn’t. I also wanted tech workers to unionize while we had the power because I expected this the second it was feasible, but alas we have no more leverage.
> I also wanted tech workers to unionize while we had the power
You could, but that does nothing to prevent job losses, as can be seen with Hollywood completely offshoring to the United Kingdom [0][1] despite SAG-AFTRA and WGA dominating the entertainment industry.
Or even the loss of the entirely unionized coal industry.
The economics of IP-driven industries require an entirely different approach from manufacturing industries.
You can't ignore economics. This is what globalization looks like.
Yea, I remember hearing corporations say that threat and then everytime they tried to outsource overseas they got trash that they had to live with or throw out and redo.
It is global, which means that talent that was good enough already was able to command high prices. If we had unionized we could have at least extracted some worker protections or stop shit like the Jobs anti poaching cabal.
The coal industry was lost because the technology has been nearly obsoleted, but if you're going to cast tech work as being part of an IP-driven industry then please don't mix in resource extraction to the conversation.
I'm not opposed to unionizing - in fact I think cooperative models are underutilized in the tech industry.
What I am saying is unionizing wouldn't stop offshoring. The reality is the world in 2026 is much more developed than the world when you graduated (I'm guessing 2009).
As such, skills that were worth a premium in 2011-16 aren't viewed as differentiators and more as table stakes knowledge.
Essentially, Unionization doesn't help if it doesn't also increase barriers to entry.
I have no incentive to hire someone in NC or IL for a premium who isn't actually a top performer, when I can gladly hire someone of better caliber for less in the UK or Switzerland even with supposed workers benefits (though in action, they're largely comparable for SWEs across North America and Western Europe).
Frankly, I would much rather hire a CS new grad from TU Munich over a CS new grad from Random State University even if this means I have to deal with German labor laws, because the calibre I am getting from the TUM student is on par with what I'd get out of Stanford or MIT for a fraction of the cost.
Additionally, most countries are expanding their subsidizes to incentivize companies to build R&D centers and bring IP-driven industries there. American state and local governments have largely quit that game in order to concentrate on culture war politicking (my experiences with NC's state government left a really bad taste in my mouth after attempting domestic inshoring in the late 2010s and early 2020s).
So in this kind of world where companies are perfectly fine decamping to other jurisdictions who give the red carpet, what is the solution? It isn't unionization (it isn't a blocker from a hiring perspective for IP-driven industries but it also doesn't stop offshoring), but it's about stable governance and risk management at the state and local level, which is where companies interface the most.
It will also require accepting that developer salaries have to reduce significantly - I can't justify training someone from scratch at US$100K TC, but I can at US$75K TC.
>It's interesting to watch the same class of people who told coal miners "they should learn to code" back in the early 2010s now getting the same comeuppance.
There are millions of software engineers in the US alone. Don't put all of them into a single bucket.
It must have been nice to be that optimistic and not having to see how it’s actually playing out.