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Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

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Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#41

Post by scientistem »

hkmurakami wrote: post #20
indubitable wrote: post #18

This article made me curious about something, statistic wise, with inequality. Imagine we have a kingdom of a million workers and one king. Inequality would be mostly invisible. Unless you compare yourself to the king (and who would dare do such a thing..), you're doing pretty well - or at least as well as average. But now let's imagine the king wants to modernize his land. So he starts developing and training people…

I have thought something similar as well. If you have one Bill Gates and everyone else making $80k, then Bill Gates has a pretty low upper limit on consumption of scarce assets, and thus goods and services are not bid up. But when a larger and larger number of people make more than their peers, then you start to have a bidding war for scarce goods (ex: housing, education, etc). Hats what you have in the Bay Area. Mor…

Well, average pay in SF is only high if you ignore the homeless person sleeping on your stoop. In that sense the job would be extremely rewarding compared to other parts of the country. If you only compare yourself to people in like jobs, that reward vanishes almost entirely for the average worker.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#42

Post by brailsafe »

maxxxxx wrote: post #32
bigmario wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people make this claim with no evidence. It's understandable to feel insecure about future career prospects in our fast-changing industry, but honestly I'll believe it when I see it.

I bet a lot of the frontend guys will have problems when someone comes out with something like Visual Basic for the web. It's harder now to develop a LOB app than when it was twenty years ago and I think this will change at some point. Same for a lot of "data scientists". Unless you are on the forefront of development there will be more and more tools that make the data accessible to regular people instead of having…

As someone who got into frontend as a more specific discipline from more generalized design/dev, I can say that my experience does comport. I don't know if I'd call it "blue collar" necessarily, but I'm looking for a job and it's tough to find the inspiration.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#43

Post by nostrademons »

thewarrior wrote: post #36
WalterBright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the compiler business. Compilers handle an increasing amount of routine programming tasks, but programmers respond to that by making more complex programs, so the creative input needed by programmers is about the same.

What do you think about the API ification of things because of AWS or Google Spanner database . Everything is abstracted away so you're just gluing things together. Its not AI but it turns even complex projects into things that anyone can learn to do in months . I can't imagine this remaining so well paying in such circumstances.

The complex design work goes into creatively gluing these APIs together to form new product categories. If you don't need to spend time worrying how to fit bits on disk, you can spend that mental energy searching for and solving problems that would've been too complex without the APIs.

Smart programmers move up the value chain as needed so that they're still doing work that can't be done easily with an existing product.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#44

Post by thewarrior »

nostrademons wrote: post #43
thewarrior wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about the API ification of things because of AWS or Google Spanner database . Everything is abstracted away so you're just gluing things together. Its not AI but it turns even complex projects into things that anyone can learn to do in months . I can't imagine this remaining so well paying in such circumstances.

The complex design work goes into creatively gluing these APIs together to form new product categories. If you don't need to spend time worrying how to fit bits on disk, you can spend that mental energy searching for and solving problems that would've been too complex without the APIs. Smart programmers move up the value chain as needed so that they're still doing work that can't be done easily with an existing produ…

Good point .

So that begs the question , what are some of the things that are right now higher up the value chain ?

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#46

Post by ericmcer »

Animats wrote: post #6

Don't worry. Programming is becoming a blue collar job. Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.

Electricians sort of transitioned from design/implementation roles into maintenance/installation roles. This does not really map well with programming because many times doing maintenance on an established project can be as or more difficult than the initial implementation. Having a large number of basically trained programmers maintaining systems that better programmers have built won't really work.

Programming has not gotten easier really, I don't think it will ever be blue collar. Even though development will get easier as technology and tools improve, the bar for what good is is set by our peers. Knowing some html/css/Js was a totally acceptable skillset in 2000, but now you need to have some backend and networking or design/ui/ux skills to be relevant.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#47

Post by geebee »

thewarrior wrote: post #26
WalterBright wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An electrician in 1880 did a lot of design work. One of 1920 (and today) does it by rote - they just follow canned rules and procedures already worked out. It's all coded into regulations, too, so there's little flexibility. An electrical engineer, on the other hand, does design work.

Could nt that happen to programming as well ?

I've been programming for about 16 years. Started with C++, doing my own memory management for routine tasks. Later, started abstractions like garbage collection, jdbc, and servlets.

Of course, the day comes when the high level abstractions of your youth are referred to as "low level". And while that may seem silly to people who write machine code, there is something low level-ish about managing your own database connections and/or writing your own resource pool.

Almost everything we do is routinely turned into, well, routine work. Rails automated a lot, but not all, of what I did. I'm tiptoeing close to a "no true scotsman" argument here, but I'd almost define "programming" as writing code that hasn't been automated yet - which is why the job of being a programmer won't be automated.

Here's why I think my argument is almost, but not quite, a "no true scotsman" fallacy. I have a lot of trouble seeing how anything could replace human programmers, but that's the rub - the way it happens, should it happen, will surprise me. The analogy I have in my head is someone who is trying to create a mechanical turk to replace a symphony orchestra. A wind up doll to play a violin, trumpet, piano. There are a few successes, with self playing pianos, but overall, it appears to be distant.

And then... an unanticipated concept, one that blows your mind: it turns out that you can actually capture music, exactly as it was played, with a device that will project that sound back just as it was made the first time. You can play the symphony once, and listen to it an unlimited number of times. And just like that, live music played by a human goes from 99% of all music heard to well below 1%.

We could very well be replaced, but not as we are. I think it'll be something different, that provides what we provided, in a way that makes us largely unnecessary.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#48

Post by michaelchisari »

scientistem wrote: post #39
francisofascii wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is a quite a bit of jobs that require PHP considering the plethora of sites built on Drupal and WordPress. I guess it depends where you live.

I actually intepreted that as the jobs require a very low level of skill and provide low compensation—exactly what you’d expect from making a job “blue collar”.

You can make very good money as a consultant in the PHP/Joomla/Drupal world if you are professional, reliable, and write solid, bug free code.

Nothing you make will be particularly interesting, but you will make an excellent living for yourself.

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#49

Post by psadri »

indubitable wrote: post #18

This article made me curious about something, statistic wise, with inequality. Imagine we have a kingdom of a million workers and one king. Inequality would be mostly invisible. Unless you compare yourself to the king (and who would dare do such a thing..), you're doing pretty well - or at least as well as average. But now let's imagine the king wants to modernize his land. So he starts developing and training people…

Happiness is relative.

Humans (and animals) value "fairness" even if they are objectively better off. There is a famous experiment where two monkeys are given a cucumber every day. They are both happy. Then one of them starts getting grapes (sweeter than cucumber). The monkey that doesn't get the grapes rejects the cucumber in protest.

https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg

Re: Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

#50

Post by thesagan »

scientistem wrote: post #39
francisofascii wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is a quite a bit of jobs that require PHP considering the plethora of sites built on Drupal and WordPress. I guess it depends where you live.

I actually intepreted that as the jobs require a very low level of skill and provide low compensation—exactly what you’d expect from making a job “blue collar”.

Most of the skill in that area is not working with the CMS but doing the crazy complex integrations that clients ask of them. (And of saving the work of not-as-skilled/too-skilled-for-their-own-good crowd.)

Maybe more of a light blue collar.

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