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> A cashier should be able to pay rent, transport, utilities and a decent life.

Unfortunately there's a huge group of people who will vehemently oppose this as they don't see that job as deserving of basic human dignity (rent, transport, utilities, medical). Not just the ruling class, but normal every day folks poop on these people...?!

The older I get the more I'm disgusted at how many people can selectively turn off their empathy for stuff like this. In an equitable society we should take care of each other... I don't understand why a Wally World cashier making a base living wage offends so many people.

Today, it seems cashiers mostly exist to fix the self checkout machine when it decides it doesn’t like me anymore.

Perhaps we’re in a transition period between the legacy system - cashiers a handling one customer at a time, which is not providing much value to the company - and “cashiers” who are self-checkout-sitters handling 8+ customers at a time, which provides much more value and could bargain for a living wage.

> could bargain for a living wage

That's called collective bargaining and the only way we'll end up there is strong unions. Otherwise, I promise you - most companies will not altruistically ensure their employees are taken care of; exceptions exist like Costco. Someone's going to need to bend their arm, be it a union or the government through regulation.

Also I'm not sure I understand your comment. The first sentence feels like you're devaluing the service employee that helps resolve your self-checkout issues? Then, the next paragraph you posit that we're in a transitionary period from a "legacy system" - this just isn't how I see it.

From convenience stores, to grocery, etc. there will always be the need for traditional cashiers, along side of self-checkout folks. And, personally - I believe they both deserve a dignified wage that covers their base needs (rent, car, medical, etc) without necessarily having to "bargain for a living wage."

IMO - even the most entry-level and lowly of jobs at 40hrs/week should be able to get someone by.

> devaluing the service employee that helps resolve your self-checkout issues?

Certainly I don’t devalue the employee, but I don’t value the work they do. This is mostly irritation at not being allowed to just fix my own issues.

> there will always be the need for traditional cashiers, along side of self-checkout folks.

Counterexample, a large convenience store near me just last month tore out all (all!) of the legacy checkout systems and replaced them with about five bays of 4-8x self-checkouts, of different sizes. There’s no option to have a human check you out anymore.

I think it’s glorious.

> IMO - even the most entry-level and lowly of jobs at 40hrs/week should be able to get someone by.

I agree, but I think we’re moving into a world where cashiers (1-to-1) are like elevator operators of old… extinct.

Seeing that local store go all-self, and a few others looking like they’re following suit slowly, has really opened my eyes on how far companies will go to eliminate jobs if paying a true living wage isn’t reflected in the value they provide.

Traditional cashiers are basically automatons which drag items across a barcode scanner, and count change. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that those things can be more cheaply performed by a machine, or foisted onto the customer.

And maybe it’s good that those jobs are going away? I’d rather society have to answer some hard questions about UBI than keep humans working in jobs that aren’t necessary. (See: Oregon gas pumps)

Gotcha. I just find the self-checkout/cashier bit moot to my original point. I could have easily said "retail employees," or "the guy who makes my subs." Swap out "cashier" with any entry-level/lower-skilled position and that's my core point.

> And maybe it’s good that those jobs are going away? I’d rather society have to answer some hard questions about UBI than keep humans working in jobs that aren’t necessary.

Seeing the backlash for just $10k worth of student debt forgiveness I do not think that we're even close to conversations like that. The notion of people's base needs being met regardless of working is even less palatable to the general riffraff because we've been sold such a zero-sum game here. We're crabs in a bucket. People go to lengths to make sure someone they perceive as less-than doesn't get a "handout."

I have grown very, very pessimistic about people's empathy in regards to the ever-growing economic divide. What I've experienced in America is "I've got mine, f u" - I'm a millennial maybe that gives some context.

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> Certainly I don’t devalue the employee, but I don’t value the work they do.

Also, I wasn't going to address this, but... to me that is 100% saying that you devalue the employee. If I devalue someone's labor output, I'm devaluing them as an employee - simple. I find this sentence to be a outright contradiction.

> > Certainly I don’t devalue the employee, but I don’t value the work they do.

> Also, I wasn't going to address this, but... to me that is 100% saying that you devalue the employee. If I devalue someone's labor output, I'm devaluing them as an employee - simple. I find this sentence to be a outright contradiction.

Not the person replied to (And I know you said it was a moot point), but in this case I would say I don't value most cashier positions then. I say most, because not all grocery stores are equal. Specifically, I've always had good experiences at Wegmans, but my local grocery store is now a Shoprite. At Wegmans, cashiers quickly and efficiently scanned and bagged the things I purchased. The Shoprite cashiers, on the hand, don't even bag my goods. All they do is take an item off the conveyer, scan it, and slide it down to the end so I can bag it myself. This is less efficient than just doing everything myself.

The disagreement on the “devalue” thing is probably one of semantics: I value the employee as a fellow human, but I don’t think the job of cashier is providing any value to me.

The existence of “cashier” as a job is an impediment to my goal: paying and walking out of a store with the goods I want. Any alternative system which involves fewer cashiers works quicker for me, observationally.

I think people - including cashiers - are inherently valuable. But having someone do a 1-1 cashier job is both wasting their time and costing the company (and me) unnecessary time and money. Their (valuable) labor would be better spent elsewhere.

> as a fellow human

That's not what we were discussing - we were discussing you valuing them as an employee. Which if you devalue their labor output then, yes, you certainly devalue them as an employee. Saying "I value them as a human" is an entirely different concern/conversation IMO.

Sorry about the semantics, but I fully believe you devalue self-checkout cashiers as employees after this conversation.

Regardless - we're off in the weeds. I don't think we're in a productive conversation. Respectfully, I'm bowing out.

unfortunately, developers will keep fight for building better machine. finally, company can just talk everyone go home, then starve and die. I hope something will but I'm hopeless.

It’s a war among poor people, that the ruling class love to maintain power.

Your opposition is often seeing things from a logic-based economic lens. You might not have much success making an emotional argument.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you but you need to logically argue why "rent, transport, utilities, medical" are "basic human dignity" and what a "base living wage" is. The fact that you believe everyone should have housing, transport, utilities, or adequate medical care doesn't change the underlying realities of economic scarcity.

A political figure was recently assassinated in a country known to be peaceful.

There's your logic: at some point, people are done taking the bare minimum and will sow chaos, rebel, retaliate or even just lie flat and (legally) do anything to sour the lives of those they deem enemies. And confronting an ever increasing number of delinquents is far more expensive than preventing the root cause

It is true, and I’d guess that most of those who put the economy front and center in their view of society have empathy, they just differ on the ways society should provide to its members. While socalism focuses on existing wealth and how best they can redistribute it, economic-minded folks are concerned about wealth creation and how not to be overburdened by bloated budgets, which is very risky.

I don't think 'socialism' and making economically efficient decision is necessarily opposed to each other.

I would say that our current lifestyle is both inefficient and inequitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige

Housing in the West due to insufficient development is effectively a zero-sum game. So once people have their share, they do everything they can to maintain it's value.

Great HN comment on a recent thread with regards to land and rent-seeking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961554

Shelter as an investment vehicle leads to consolidation. And, no one in the capital class is going to address the scarcity as it's a conflict of their interests. Rent in my city has been going insane.

At the end of the day this is all just capitalism and voting for your own interests. We optimize for this.

Housing and land as a store of value needs to be done away with.

While Japan don't get everything right, I think this is one area in which their attitudes/policies are more aligned with the wellbeing of the masses. There, houses are more like cars in that they start deprecating the moment they're moved into and if anything are seen as a value subtract past a certain age, because it's expected that when you buy a plot of land the house on it will be demolished and a new one will be built in its place. Houses are more tied to families that live in them than they are the land they're built on.

This might seem wasteful, but it's kept living costs in the residential outskirts of Japan's urban areas a lot more affordable than they would've been otherwise and also means that housing on average is more up to code, and it drives costs of building down since building is routine instead of something unusual.

I would love to see this come to the US, and I say this despite standing to gain from the present system.

Sounds good, doesn’t work. Never will. Life is cruel, brutal competition. Ideal utopia like that is a fragile, forced state. Violence, hardships, is like energy and complexity. Can’t be eliminated. It can be suppressed only to find it pops out somewhere else.

If a cashier finds out they can make a decent living more will want to be cashier and the cashiers will have less leverage, less salary because they are dime a dozen. This is the reality of this treacherous world.

First worlders offload their less desirable work to poorer 2nd class immigrants, poorer countries. Like it or not, all well intentioned Tesla owning, apartment owning, software engineers are there because someone else in society do the dirty work for them with low pay, indirectly.

I so heavily agree. 'above this misery line for now' is the key. I came from a poor background like OP. I have friends that can't afford homes, constantly getting laid off, and not many members of my family have any retirement plans. And this is in 'the worlds richest country'

We can all pretend we will earn enough money for our families to survive, but the reality is those richer than us will try and find away to extract it somewhere down the line. Whether it's inflation, medical bills, or a financial crash that brings your life savings down to zero.

Without large-scale changes to society the hyper-concentration of wealth will continue and millions will continue to live butchered lives.

The thing about housing is that it happens everywhere in the west (I presume other places too, IDK).

In Spain at least, it wasn't always the case that people with low skilled jobs couldn't afford basic stuff. My old brothern could afford an appartment and going out every weekend working in a pizza place when he was in his teens.

Same in the US, an old teacher of mine said she put herself through college on a job waiting tables in the 70s. There's very small chance of that now

> a sentiment in the ruling class that, for them to have a decent place to live and not being forced to live inside their palaces and houses, social stability was needed.

Unfortunately, that sentiment was created with a large and long lasting usage of violence by the people.

It would be much better if we get some different way to create it.

Unsolicited book recommendation but I saw someone mention "Rethinking the economics of land and housing" recently which serves as a good general primer of the history of and problems with housing. Mainly UK focused but I think it's increasingly the cause of immiseration globally.

I don't foresee software developers being useless, but I can tell you what I have seen... The big, smart companies are able to leverage highly paid developers better than ever. For example, about 10 years ago, I was working at a company that had 100 devs. They now have 10 highly paid (FAANG+) full time devs + subcontractors and make more money than ever.

Thank you for that comment! As a grad student trying to find my groove in life, I find myself always worried about the job market and the tradeoff I've to pay for imparting meaning to my future job. We definitely need to take care of ensuring a decent life for all professions instead of only software engineers.

Software engineers are making cashiers obsolete. This too is worrisome if we want jobs to be accessible to people of below average intelligence.

> Software development is above this misery line for now.

Yeah, the dream may be over when Asia gets a high quality development machine in every home.

Is access to hardware actually the blocker?

My observation is that skill, communication and cultural alignment are what puts the West ahead of common outsourcing destinations (at least for Western projects - I would definitely pick a local developer for a local project as their cultural alignment and domain knowledge would be much better than an outsiders').

The problem I see is that access to hardware and educational resources is not enough. I don't believe software engineering as a whole can be taught, there are some things (including unwritten things nobody wants to admit) you only pick up from real-world experience, and some things that have less to do with software and more with culture and the local environment your software will be used in (since software in most cases is there to solve some kind of business problem that might be specific to a certain location or jurisdiction).

Lack of real-world experience in the target environment is what's holding the common outsourcing destinations back. Giving free computers to everyone still won't magically make them competitive in our software engineering market.

Availability of better hardware in every home (from a young age) will improve all those things.

The other problem of "better hardware" is that "better" according to us isn't the same as according to the market.

General-purpose computing devices are less and less popular and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of developing countries have better smartphone penetration than computers, partly because smartphones offer better opportunities for rent-seeking and the attention economy where as general-purpose computers hamper those things, so the former are being pushed more and potentially subsidized.

This is even a problem in Western countries - a lot of kids/teenagers today feel at home on a phone yet don't even understand the concept of a file.

A lot of people got into software engineering by learning it themselves because they had access to a general-purpose computer, since back in the day it was the only computer you could get. Nowadays, a lot of families might be satisfied with a phone, tablet and games console - those offer zero opportunities for learning programming.

> a lot of developing countries have better smartphone penetration than computers,

They definitely do, such as in many African and Asian countries, although not for the reasons you state. Phones are simply cheaper in these countries than computers. They're getting devices for 200 dollars from Chinese manufacturers mainly, not the 1k iPhones that are popular in the West.

Based on this data I found, it is an insanely large gap. US ~7/10 people have computers, in some parts of africa ~1/1000

https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Media/Person...

But what about places like India? Computer penetration must be pretty good for there to be a sizeable software engineering and outsourcing market.

The problem is the skills and communication, which stem from this situation being the status-quo and there being nowhere for new developers to learn anything better (or even know that their current skills aren't up to scratch, at least not for working on foreign, outsourced projects).

You are underestimating the ratio of the country's poor vs the number of people in technology. India has an insane amount of people who are way poorer than what we in the west would call poverty.

Yeah india was 15/1000 people have computers

There are way too many people without personal computers in India.

Yes, but I'm not talking about those. I'm refuting the point that better access to computers in cheaper countries will put Western developers out of jobs by saying that those who already have computers still aren't taking our jobs (if anything, they create jobs as we then have to fix or rebuild the mess they created).

Computer penetration in India is very less given even the upper middle class kids only get a personal laptop when they enter university. But this is slowly changing. You can expect India to dominate in IT in the coming decades. Afterall there's a reason Indian Americans are already the richest group of people in the richest country of the world. It's very difficult to stop hardworking people in the long run.

> there's a reason Indian Americans are already the richest group of people in the richest country of the world.

The real reason is that their country of origin just has a massive number of people, and the ones who are able to immigrate to the US are those who have either money or skills that will make them money here. Same goes for Chinese Americans.

There is a source country with a massive number of people, and the target country (with a fraction of the residents of the source country). The target country filters immigration for high skill and/or high income. Just through the sheer numbers game, you get the outcome you described.

Of course, it is more nuanced in terms of the overall development level of the source country (e.g., this probably wouldn't work if pretty much no one in India was able to afford a computer or if India had almost no internet connectivity). But with how high the Indian level of development is as a country (compared to the minimum required for the numbers game to start working), it shouldn't matter.

If you looked at the data, in india it's 15/1000 people.

The developer USP might become requirements extraction - language-dependent.

Language isn't enough.

Let's look at a purely western example - implementing a billing system for a company serving the US market. A developer from the UK will assume that every bank account holder can do free, easy and instant wire transfers, yet in the US that's (still!) not the case and most people use Zelle or Venmo or PayPal for those things instead, which now significantly increases complexity (both engineering and potentially regulatory).

Why would availability of high quality development machine of someone in China change anything for me, software engineer who works on-site, in Europe?

The person in China who is now educated because of the machine might move to Europe.

Because the demand for talent is global. And as supply of that talent increases, companies can pay less for that talent due to more replaceable workers competing for the same job.

In the US I believe healthcare and education far outstrip housing as increasingly unaffordable costs.