Autoworkers of our Generation: A Repsonse

dave.cheney.net

7 pointspearkes3 comments

Programmers in USA are paid 100 000 USD a year, when in Eastern Europe best programmers available will hapily work for around 36 000 USD a year. It's still much more than almost everybody else earns here, and they don't have debts after graduating cause university education is free here.

Even if automation of software development won't happen jobs will be transfered to deveoping countries. No reason for that to not happen. Salaries will average out worldwide, and that means they will fall in USA more than rise elsewhere.

So I think the analogy is quite good.

My father was a computer programmer in the late 60s to 90s. Throughout his career he saw several of his skills automated but his approach wasn't that he was out of work, rather his tool chest was increased. With each automation there was more time to explore a new tool.

What makes us as a valuable source isn't how we use the tools today, rather our ability to understand and apply the tools to come.

Computer programming is inherently a skill that tends towards full automation like any other field of labor simply because of exponential increases in efficiencies and scale. If one programmer can do the job of 5 programmers because the level of automation and the number of available tools allows him to, then the total number of programmers able to enter the market for programming will diminish unless demand for programmers rises at the same or higher rate of automation (a trend that has never occurred in any industry). We're probably not very close to that point just yet, but it may not be too far off.

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