Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calibraxis | Hacker News Reader

One problem with deskilling is loss of bargaining power. Because you become a cog in the machine, easily replaced. Good if you own/rent people, sucks if you're the "human capital".

(Companies often reject profit-improving innovations which empower skilled workers. On the flipside, unions — to the extent they exist — also have the incentive to reject improvements which damage bargaining power. That's one problem with capitalism's built in boss/worker antagonism.)

Another is mind-numbing work. Adam Smith rants about how division of labor makes people "stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become... But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." (http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN20.html#V.1.178)

Another (since the last century) is the rise of managerialism, with its bureaucracies. David Noble points out that tech can deskill workers and strengthen management, or empower workers and peel away management layers.

Do you have any examples of companies rejecting profit-improving innovations which empower skilled workers?

I was told last week not to create any macros whatsoever. Everything must be either completely manual, or outsourced to India. I work in one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

What the hell? I belive this might just be gross incompetence and not a deliberate manouver.

As a libertarian, my personal philosophy leads me to be suspicious of all large organizations, and one of the reasons why is that once you become large enough to stop being rigidly held to a standard such as the market's demand for efficiency (there are other possible standards, but that's a popular one; small local governing organizations can also be effectively held to account by their constituents, for instance), you become free to do things like start playing turf games internally without regard to whether it impacts the bottom line. Government, company, non-profit, club, union, NGO, sports organization like the MLB, doesn't matter, as soon as you are free to engage in human politics without restraint you get too many people who begin playing games that destroy societal value for their own local political gains. In this case, doing everything manually is a net loss for society, and a net loss to the company in question, but a local gain for the person making that dictate (or at least perceived to be a local gain, which is good enough), and so the trade is made.

It is a deliberate strategy. It is partly to reduce key person risk, and partly to reduce complexity.

It is also because the business is run by lawyers, accountants, underwriters, and actuaries, and they have almost zero knowledge of software.

And, yes, actuaries. I mean you. You write terrible code. Terrible, terrible code.

Surely that comes from a failure to recognize that macros would increase profit, not a rejection of profit because it would empower workers.

Have you ever tried BYOD?

Know this guy? http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Mordac%20The%20Preventer

Its probably hard to talk about without naming names and violating NDAs. However I can think of at least three areas to search:

1) Hand wavy "who will support this?" arguments. Sometimes with a prefix of "when you leave, who will..." etc.

2) Extreme top down management style "all innovation comes from above, even if that results in none at all". Often closely tied with credentialism. "we pay engineers to innovate, so shut up and do what they say". I interned at a place like that decades ago, now out of business.

3) Empire building / contractual obligation. "We paid a zillion bucks for lotus notes, you will use it, I don't care if it makes things slower than simple manual processes or your new ideas, we will use Lotus Notes anyway"

Java vs. Lisp/OCaml/etc.

It is thought that these niche languages are more productive in the hands of an expert, but then, you need an expert, which is scary for the corporate bottom line. Hence the mass adoption of Java to keep workers interchangeable.

Thankfully a few companies have realized what Jane Street did: niche languages actually make hiring easier if you are looking for top talent, and of course, the productivity is better too.

Related: http://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

"The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components."

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