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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

> The wage and hours were terrible, but it was the absolute dehumanization that stuck with me. No body knew your name or particularly cared. You would walk in during the morning, flash your badge and get assigned to a particular stand. Every day it was brand new people who you've never met before with a brand new manager.

It's worth remembering that when CEOs talk about flexibility, this is what they are talking about: interchangeable workers, who can be swapped in and out (and thrown in the bin) like interchangeable parts.

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That might be true sometimes, but it depends on the expectation. If I have a team of great developers, I'd expect to be able to put any of them on anything and walk away with something great in the end knowing that they brought their expertise and best ideas.

The only difference between those "great developers" and those replaceable workers is that corporate America hasn't figured out how to make software developers into interchangeable cogs yet. But don't fret, people are working on it. There is an entire industry whose job it is to figure out how to extract the necessary labor for any particular function from a workforce that isn't skilled or happy or otherwise invested in their work.

Sure they have. Look at banks and other major enterprises, it's exactly the same.

My point isn't about engineers; the same can be said of architects or designers or even middle managers. If you have a team that you trust, having any number and grouping of them able to come together around a problem will produce results. A team being "flexible" does not make them "cogs".

"Flexibility" in the way the term is usually used in CEO-speak doesn't mean having employees that you can trust. It means not having to have to trust your employees because their work has been broken down into such generic chunks that it requires no independent thought or initiative.

You're looking at this from the perspective of a skilled professional, which is fine -- most of the HN audience probably does as well. But it's not the perspective I'm talking about. I'm talking about the perspective of the people who see skilled professionals as a problem, because their skills mean they can demand things like money and respect as a condition of employment. That reduces the CEO's flexibility to do things like take that money and put it instead into his own golden parachute.

The only point I'm trying to make is that your original post positioned it as unavoidable. It can happen in any industry, but it doesn't mean it will.

It's the difference between a person being flexible and an organisation or process being flexible.

Many organisations don't want to rely on a handful of supermen who solve all of their problems as such people may become indispensable and then demand higher wages or go to a competitor. They would rather break their processes down into a bunch of specialized tasks that require few skills so that new workers can be popped in and out quickly.

In much the same way, most devops guys want to spin up identical commodity EC2 instances deployed via a script, with hostnames like hypst-streamer-m00237. Like it or not, that's how you scale.

The wage level is somewhat orthogonal to this - doctors are generally interchangeable cogs, but they get paid well. The key point is avoiding single points of failure.

Doctors are not as interchangeable as say assembly line workers, doctors have different levels of experience and different specializations as well as relationships with patients in cases of more general doctors.

Besides there is a relatively small pool of people compared to the general population who are even capable of becoming doctors, not to mention the very long spin up time.

An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers.

Two doctors are not interchangeable, but two radiologists are. The fact that they both make $300k/year doesn't change this.

I imagine radiologists are interchangeable in the same way that Python programmers are; kind of but not really.

Skilled professionals become more experienced at their jobs over time, they also have differing experiences and may have graduated from different schools etc.

This means that they will perform their jobs differently in ways that way be subtle and not easily quantifiable. So if you swap them out, things will change in ways that may not be easy to predict.

On the other hand a minimum wage worker is more likely to perform a job that requires a total training of 1 hour or less and they are likely to hit a ceiling in terms of productivity within a week. There may be minor differences in output, but these are easily quantifiable and if you have a large enough labour pool to draw from can be solved by saying "fire anybody who does like than X per hour".

I'd actually expect radiologists to be considerably more interchangeable. The goal of a radiologist is to compute a function - `isCancer(mri)` or `isBrokenBone(xray)`. As a thought experiment, consider two radiologists who are as accurate as physics allows - they will always return the same answer for `isHerniatedDisk(mri)`.

Medicine is high skill, but the outputs are fairly homogeneous. Homogeneous output is what makes workers interchangeable cogs, not skill level.

It seems to me (corrections welcome), that medical specialists are way, way more interchangeable than programmers. Each patient has a chart that follows them around through the hospital and each specialist reads the chart, makes their decisions and documents what they're doing. There are problems with that, but it's the system. That very much makes the medical practitioners cogs in the system, compared to programmers who have a much longer ramp up time for a given codebase/patient.

Sure and every codebase has documentation , specs and tests that follow it all over the internet..

I think the main difference probably comes down to medicine having more procedures and redundancy built in because you can't let a patient die when a particular doctor is not available.

OTOH my older relatives definitely complain about/praise individual doctors for bedside manor , professionalism and misdiagnosis etc.

> An analogy would be breaking down the tasks performed by a doctor into chunks that could be done in isolation by minimum wage workers.

Which would be amazingly hard for all the same reasons writing a program to replace a doctor would be amazingly hard.

In a company like Walmart, which is entirely predicated on the existence of interchangeable minimum-wage workers, the main component they can't replace is the process all those workers follow which results in a working store. That's the software run by all the human hardware.

You apparently subscribe to the "film crew"/"theory Y" school of management thought:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y#Theory_Y

There's no small number of managers that subscribe to the "widget factory"/theory X school, however; my impression is that it's the decided majority.

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