Software Is Eating the Job Market
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But to get to the higher-quality jobs, you generally need experience. Not many employers are willing to hire someone and put him in a responsible position based off their potential alone. It follows, then, that we need substantial number of entry level positions to, so to speak, open the door for future potent workers.
But those doors are closing at an alarming rate.
Consider law firms. Discovery work(going through past records to find cases of relevance, law clauses of relevance) that used to be the "first year" work, is almost exclusively done by software. It's cheaper and more accurate. We may still need more quality lawyers, but as we remove the uses for inexperienced lawyers, we are decreasing the number of future experienced lawyers.
Translation used to be a very non-trivial work. Not just for heavy-publishing prose or fiction, but even for simple phrases, if the need was great enough, we would hire an entry level translator. Now we would generally use Google translate for a phrase or two because it was "good enough" at a marginal price.
The problem for prospect high-earning society isn't that software is eating jobs. As long as we are vain and greedy to aspire for higher quality, we will have those sophisticated jobs. The problem is that we are eating entry-level jobs, and in turn, creating an artificial scarce supply of "experienced" workers.
And those "experienced" workers, now that they have put their foot into the door, and with the huge demand for work to be done, will enjoy the job market(aren't we all, as developers?), but what of those that are left, for no fault of their own?
Also, this is a perspective I've not considered or heard of before. Thanks for that.
> The problem is that we are eating entry-level jobs, and in turn, creating an artificial scarce supply of "experienced" workers.
On the other hand, it is easier than ever to get cheap, basic education in a variety of things, with the Internet and MOOCs making information widely available. So entry-level jobs may be less necessary these days. On the other hand, it means the people who can afford to spend time acquiring this knowledge without receiving pay will have a bigger advantage than ever. Yet another argument for basic income, I guess.
Also, would edit my original reply if I could to say that things seem to be heading this direction, not that they definitely or inevitably are.
Entry-level jobs are absolutely necessary, first for learning to get to work on time daily, then for the job-specific education needed to work up to something actually productive and which cannot be simply taught by an independent "expert".
Those advocating "basic income" need to go look up the phrase "going Galt" (upshot: given enough unproductive leeching off the productive, the latter are apt to say "screw this" and disappear from society).
"Going Galt" appears to primarily be a fantasy scenario. People largely tend to consumption rates which are smoothed and that factor in long-term expectations of income as opposed to marginally increasing rates that follow short-term signals like a linear input-output device. So it seems that tax burdens alone are not enough to cause massive "dropping out of society", as rational actors have determined that participation in consumer society in light of regulations and other externalities is still preferable to the costs of off-the-grid living. Not that taxation can't cause disincentive, but it's more complicated than just that.
When employers use education as a minimum bar, it may often be the case that the actual bar is the history as qualification, rather than the actual content of the information. It's similar to how a degree in theory would prove the employer that the person has some discipline to finish a degree.
Are unpaid internships a symptom of this flow perhaps? They read a lot like apprenticeships (but with a significant burden of responsibility missing).
I'm not sure I agree, but it's interesting that very young people and their families are beginning to question the established educational model in such a bold fashion.
Was I excited to get an analyst job right out of school for $28K/year (many years ago), after earning a math degree from a prestigious school? Uh, not really. But...
- Only about 50% of my job was actually excel nerf-herding
- The other 50% was a mix of research projects and building the department budget...this allowed me to meet everyone in the building and learn a little bit about how their area worked (and how the company made money)
- Better yet, I was one of three analysts in a 50 person marketing unit...so it was expected my next role would be outside of analytics and I was trained/coached accordingly. The company put less focus on my excel wrangling skills (low value) and more on me as a future program manager or senior tech (high value).
- Ah yes...and we were sufficiently small, I had to learn how to pull my own data (SQL and some light SAS scripting)
The net result? Pretty much everyone in my 10 person class of recruits amounted to something, professionally. Most are manager/director level, about half technical, half business.
The same company today splits the same work into a couple of specialist teams, consolidated across the company, with minimal cross training. You don't join as talent, you join as an Excel monkey. And dang it, we're gonna make you a very productive Excel Monkey. No need to learn the other stuff.
The results have been disappointing...
Compared to the prospect of there being no job at all because software ate the whole thing, at the societal level this is barely interesting at all. Yeah, it sucks if you get caught in that moment where the problem hasn't quite become acute enough for the field to realize it needs to do apprenticeships instead of expecting experience, but, well, there isn't necessarily a better solution than waiting for the field to figure it out.
(Modulo one's faith in the (in)competence of government interventions and its degree. obLibertarian objection noted -- so please expand and not just repeat if you are commenting in that direction.)
Well, yes. Nutters are louder everywhere. Not sure if it's worse over here. Not sure if there's as much pandering to the nutters all across the political here as elsewhere. On trips abroad, I did detect that many Europeans were aghast at our politics in the early 2000s and were still (but for different reasons) as of 2014.
Yes, hire a temporary worker with an H-1B visa or outsource it outright.
No one is entitled to be the only person that gets to do a job that many other people can do.
I didn't say anything that disagrees with this statement, I simply said that for the last decade the way to increase profits has been to bring in migrant workers from overseas, and lay off skilled domestic workers, and there's no reason wh the approach won't continue to be the same in the face of a hypothetical domestic skills shortage.
In fact, the idea that there are "other countries with people [...] that can program" is a strong disincentive to have an apprenticship/training program, and reinforces that the primary solution to expanding hiring is going to continue to be H-1B visas and not education.
I've been wondering about a similar (far more narrow) dynamic around the C programming language. There are still a number of places C is the best fit, but those are increasingly in places where expert knowledge of C is required.
There are presently enough legacy projects where people can cut their teeth usefully that this isn't soon a major issue, but if we continue to displace more but not all uses of C, this could get interesting in the long term (maybe).
The shortage of software developers is well-documented and increasingly discussed.
It's certainly discussed, though its ostensible documentation is a subject of dispute [1]. The role of poor hiring practices is also often omitted.
Far more than just a fad or buzzword, references to analytical and data-oriented skills appeared in 4 million postings over the last year – and data analysis is one of the most demanded skills by U.S. employers, according to Burning Glass data.
That it is commonly cited as a term doesn't necessarily contradict that it's a buzzword.
The aforementioned in-demand skills areas represent more of a structural shift than an issue du jour or passing trend. It is precisely the rapid, near daily change in software- and technology-related skills needs that necessitates new approaches to human capital development. While traditional long-term programs such as college degrees remain meaningful, new software platforms, languages, apps and tools rise annually.
This is the classic equivocation of tools and techniques in action. New platforms and tools indeed do arise annually, but our techniques have remained in stasis, and are only being painfully reinvented in a rat race. See David A. Wheeler's essay "The Most Important Software Innovations" [2], and perhaps mentally add in CRDTs, I suppose.
Who in the mainstream a few years ago had heard of Hadoop or Ruby?
Many.
Finally, it's curious to note given the assertion of software eating the job market or world, that many of the examples listed are media companies or companies whose business models are augmented by software (often via data entry, really), rather than engulfed by it. Fintech's an exception. But I didn't find any examples of technical infrastructure or CS and software research.
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...
Point is, every technological innovation will be absorbed in the long term. It's been historically this way for millennia, at least. People are very good at reinventing themselves as long as they have an incentive (food, money) to do so.
That is a pretty big assumption right there. There is no absolute amount of jobs being created, right? I mean, wouldn't you pay $1 per hour to have your shirts ironed? Then is it a problem of jobs count or jobs pay? It's pay, isn't it? If it's pay, then you are asking the wrong question. The question would be: is software making jobs cheaper? That is a very tough question. Implications are not that clear: from one end you cut jobs, from the other you are improving the productivity of your economy. With more productivity you get... you guessed it: more wealth. Then what's the problem? It's a problem of wealth distribution isn't it? It's wealth concentration in few segments of the population. That is a completely different problem then what you just said. Wealth distribution has nothing to do with value created and it's a topic in its own way.
Bottom line: it's not about how many jobs you have, but how spread is the wealth your economy is creating and how spread it's going to be in the future.
Now you can disagree with the notion that jobs are being replaced faster than created and even take the stance that such a thing will never happen. But assuming you don't disagree that this will eventually happen (eventually here meaning in our lifetime or maybe our children's; not counting thousands of years down the road), then it is going to be a problem. Yes, it is only a problem because of how our economic situation is set up, but all of that isn't the bit that changed that created our problem. And yes, changing the economic set up can resolve the problem. But the problem itself remains the same (unless you disagree with it ever happening).
A lot of them were killed by agricultural invaders, since you can feed a much larger army with agriculture.
> All those people in agriculture would still be jobless
Agricultural countries like India got invaded by industrial countries like Britain.
Even now, increasingly autonomous drones are killing people in the middle east.
It's often not good to be on the sharp, pointy end of new technology.
Increasingly? No, they're the same amount autonomous as they've ever been.
>It works until you run out of consumers with cash, at which point it no longer works.
edit: spelling
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/060815-756320-domin...
What did you think Tesla would do after they finished "destroying the major auto manufacturers"?
Absent force, a person is free to either accept or reject a given deal.
That's what has always been labeled capitalism, starting with the socialist critiques of the dominant system (filled, as it was, with coercive force and cronyism) in the developed world in the mid-to-late 19th century who invented the term "capitalism" as a label for that system.
Outside of incoherent, fantasies the neither exist in the real world or stand up to much examination even in theory -- fantasies constructed largely as a propaganda to defend that coercive, cronyistic system from its critics -- nothing else but coercive, cronyism-dominated systems has ever been referred to with the label "capitalism".
The #1 method for creating a strong economy has been to try reaching maximum labor participation - everyone has a job, and government does what it can to move people into a position to meet labor demand.
Once we move into a post-labor economy, we will just have to adjust how we make capitialism work through things like Universal Basic Income.
Everything is still based on the same capitalism we have now, and the ~20% of people who work will still be able to make income (meaning there will still be incentive for enterprise).
When Ronald Reagan was a top-billed Hollywood actor, he faced a ~90% tax bracket. Rather than work hard only to see most of his earnings confiscated, he'd make just a few movies and then enjoy those profits instead of spending time on diminishing returns. Same for plenty of us motivated ones: if 80% are living off the 20%, that will require taking so much from the 20% that most of those will opt for doing something interesting and untaxable. The "seriously productive" ones you're expecting to leech off MUST have lots of less-but-still-productive people working for them - and you're tearing out the incentive to do so. Raise my taxes enough (only to "redistribute" to those opting to not work) and I'll switch to untaxable yet satisfying "off the grid" living.
That's actually not a harm, and its exactly why you aren't tearing out the incentive for productive activity; when you devote more of your time to that because you've hit a high-enough marginal tax rate that the marginal benefit post-tax from additional gain through taxable activity is not sufficient to meet your marginal opportunity cost from that activity, simple supply and demand increases the incentive for others for whom that balance works out differently -- perhaps because they are lower on the progressive tax scale so that the marginal realized net monetary return is greater, or perhaps because they are at a similar place to where you are but weigh the costs differently -- to engage in the activity you are forgoing. In fact, a net upward (on the wealth/income) scale shift in tax burden increases the incentive for productive activity at the lower end of the scale.
I'm a little skeptical of basic income as well, just like I'd be skeptical of any untested widespread social policy, but the orthodox reasons why it doesn't work are based on a model of reality that's ~3 generations and 70+ years old. I suspect that if it doesn't work, it'll be because of some problem we haven't thought of yet, not the old "tax on the productive". The top candidate, IMHO, is that we're outcompeted by some other society that doesn't have basic income.
Sounds good to me. More actors, more variety. Maybe we wouldn't see every single sci-fi/action movie star Tom Cruise.
You're assuming what you do can't be automated. I want to automate what you do so you can live "off the grid" if you want.
Capitalism only entitles you to profits on your labor capital until it has no value.
The situation UBI applies to is in a more post-labor world. One where a McDonald's only needs 2 people working instead of 16. At this point it's not going to be taxing those 2 workers but the company itself.
If you want to earn more money than your UBI check (which you would still get if you work), you will still have an incentive to earn more money.
I think the idea of 80% leeches living off the 20% productive is just wrong headed. What we will see is the general quality of life improved for everyone. Sure there will some that need to be entirely supported by the rest of us: the homeless, the mentally ill, the infirm, the elderly. The real danger is that the increases in productivity are being siphoned off by the rich and not being equitably distributed. Capitalism is inherently an unstable system tending towards monopoly and the destruction of the commons (pollution and the like) and must be reasonably constrained.
Post-scarcity economy is a contradiction in terms, and if post-scarcity conditions existed, one wouldn't have any need to worry about economy -- which is, after all, nothing but the system by which scarce resources are allocated.
But we're not really discussing post-scarcity conditions, we're talking about managing conditions where the rewards from production are increasingly concentrated in the holders of capital and the returns to labor are mostly extremely low with a (proportionally) very small set of high-value labor positions available.
Where a 90% tax really hurts is entrepreneurship and risk taking. If that 90% tax includes taxes on capital gains, then I have no incentive to start a business or invest in a business. If it fails I lose my money and sweat equity. If it succeeds, I get taxed so much I barely make more money than if I had just worked.
One of the reasons the economy was good in the 50's despite the high taxes was that those high taxes only applied to salaries, not capital gains. Also, there were lots and lots of loopholes so a lot of people didn't end up paying that 90%.
That all said. Americans already pay a ton of taxes. There is plenty of money for UBI already. It just needs to be reallocated from failed programs and bureaucracies - such as 90% of the educational system.
Given the pay disparity, if he works less there's probably more output.
(... note that this is considering his decision to work less, in isolation - not the effect of the tax level that purportedly motivated that as a whole, which would take a much deeper analysis...)
Is that what happened? Or did he simply realize that he had enough, and he didn't need to work himself to death to have all the money? Seriously, what's wrong with people realizing they have enough, and don't need to overwork themselves just to have more?
I think you would find a lot more support among conservatives than you think (it seems like you have quite the caricature of them). It seems like there would opposition from left, and UBI would require a complete dismantling of all non-healthcare entitlement programs, a serious reduction of the tax code, and heavily clamping down on all immigration.
And that's exactly what the Tea Party types are saying.
>I think you would find a lot more support among conservatives than you think (it seems like you have quite the caricature of them).
I don't. And it's not a caricature when based on statements they've actually made. Remember Mitt Romney's 47%?
I mean we can't get single-payer healthcare going in this country, despite the numerous models of it working quite well (and at lower cost than our system) in a number of other developed countries that are glad to share their experience with us. UBI is a fine idea, but proponents are awfully short on specifics. It would be very nice if people would cite a particular scheme or gameplan they consider to be credible when they mention the topic.
Social Security and Medicare expanded to everyone, regardless of age.
No handwaving, that's the general idea. The devil is in the details, and there are many details to work out.
That's an idea, but its not the idea of UBI. Medicare is a complex health insurance system consisting both of government provided and government-subsidized-private health insurance, it isn't anything like UBI.
Social Security is, aside from age or disability test to withdraw from it, a system with benefits governed by your (or your spouse's) past contributions, as such its also (even ignoring the age/disability part) very much not like UBI.
Single-payer healthcare removes a HUGE problem with providing basic income. I don't see how providing universal healthcare interferes with UBI.
> Social Security is, aside from age or disability test to withdraw from it, a system with benefits governed by your (or your spouss) past contributions, its also (even ignoring the age/disability part) very much not like UBI.
And.....? The SSA is already extremely efficient at distributing funds. Allow them to issue no-fee debit cards they issue, remove age/disability testing, ignore contributions, and then get funding from the general fund.
I'm not saying its easy. I'm saying its how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
Whether or not that's the case, single-payer healthcare is a different idea from UBI, not a component of UBI (and, indeed, something that conservative supporters of UBI -- of which there are quite a few -- are more likely to see UBI as an alternative to rather than to see as part of UBI.)
> > Social Security is, aside from age or disability test to withdraw from it, a system with benefits governed by your (or your spouse's) past contributions, its also (even ignoring the age/disability part) very much not like UBI.
> And.....?
And so your claim that the idea of UBI is Social Security and Medicare for everyone regardless of age is simply grossly inaccurate.
What I'm complaining about is that hardly anyone seems to be making a serious effort to fill out those details, and if proponents of the idea can't even point to a detailed proposal for how to implement it over a reasonable timeframe, how do you expect to convince people to sign on to it? 'Let's elect politicians who support it and then work out the details once they're in office' has not IMHO worked out very well historically.
I'm not saying you have to come up with the whole plan or type it out every time the subject comes up, f course! But I wish you could point me to who you think has something resembling an actionable plan.
That said, recently I've been thinking of a different approach. Concerns about scale (and migration) are smaller if we start with a smaller amount. I've been thinking an approach might be creation of a private institution tasked with designing and coordinating a basic income program for regions (probably at the city or county level, in the US) that opt in and who meet whatever necessary standards. The program would then apply to anyone who lives or works in a participating locality. The program could then be gradually rolled out and scaled up as (/if) it's found to work. National benefits can be phased out by treating BI income as income. One thing that makes this plan seem more workable is that the organization could raise money from supportive individuals to build a buffer for the program, to serve as something of a carrot for prospective localities.
Of course, past Econ 101, we also get into issues of people making trades they think will be beneficial but aren't.
It comes at a cost, but a person and the bank might both come out ahead in utility if the person has a stronger preference for money in the short term than the long term (see "Time Value of Money", "Hyperbolic Discounting") compared to the bank. There are a number of forms this can take, but one worth calling out is when the person is able to use the money to produce the thing they are going to trade for more value.
Does all of this assume growth? Not really. It assumes someone is creating something somewhere, but it doesn't assume society is creating more tomorrow than today.
That said, even that is not assumed by Economics - because nothing in Economics says banks will always be willing to make loans. If conditions are such that they do not expect to be able to be paid back (often enough to have a positive expected value), Economics says banks stop lending. There is no assumption of infinity.
thats how the economy works
And that's just looking at the numbers. Stepping away from the simulation and getting into what it represents, we realize we're looking at a situation where some people have the money to do whatever they want and many, many more starve. If the system is structured to make that happen, the system is flawed by several quite reasonable metrics.
Somehow nobody is discussing a shortage of CEOs... Maybe because they are compensated fairly?
That way we can increase our efficiency as a country by multitudes and get on with the nasty part of Universal Base Income.
It has to happen. And for America, as a competitive nation, the sooner the better.
Here's the problem: If the automation happens before UBI gets into place, you are condemning those people to incredibly poor lives, and possibly homelessness and starvation.
If businesses start automating everything, unemployment skyrockets, they're going to be pushed there. They won't have a choice. What do you predict? Half the country is unemployed, poverty is rampant, chaos in the streets, the fatcats in Washington and 1% just sit back and do nothing?
>And even if that automation happens, it's not going to change anything regarding UBI.
It has to.
>Here's the problem: If the automation happens before UBI gets into place, you are condemning those people to incredibly poor lives, and possibly homelessness and starvation.
Here's the problem: UBI won't get into place without automation. If it were up to me, I'd have it right now. But it's going to take motivation by SELF-INTEREST for people to realize that it HAS to happen. That self-interest? The generally deplorable state of their country.
I just want society to progress, that's all. If we were running this country effectively many of the inventions we are only seeing come to market today would have been here long ago. Greed holds us back, greed drives us forward. So let's stop letting it hold us back, let's push for automation, and then watch the chips fall from there.
If you don't think automation will change anything, how do you think it will change without automation? Isn't that what you're proposing?
And honestly, that America deserves a rough wake-up call more than any other group. And the sooner it happens, the better.
How are you measuring efficiency here? If it makes sense to hire someone to do something and instead you go entirely robotic, that's the less efficient way to do something.
Really, it doesn't make any sense to lump the two careers together (at least in the US), anymore.
I know I wouldn't be able stomach a 5+ year law degree and practice law for the rest of my life and be happy. I'd rather do something with numbers.
But seriously, the Luddite argument has been debunked many times. There's no reason to think this time it's any different. (for example: http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...)
That doesn't mean there aren't real issues:
1. The inflexibility of the labor market makes it harder for those who have lost their jobs to find new ones. Further, if a company does not have the option to fire someone relatively easily (and cheaply), they will be less willing to take a chance on someone who may not exactly fit all of their criteria.
2. A monolithic, Prussian-inspired state educational system has not responded well to imparting new skills to people (or even basic competency, in some cases). Math and science curricula are notoriously weak in the U.S., yet that is where the growth and the high-paying jobs are. There are also opportunities in the trades, but these have been cut from most schools.