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The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

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Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#21

Post by CipherThrowaway »

deadbabe wrote: post #5

This author slams React but then doesn’t have the guts to list alternatives. Standardized frameworks makes recruitment easier – but it stops there. Once you onboard an employee and they spend considerable time integrating into the company and developing specific knowledge, they are no longer easily replaceable. If they are a key component of the team it will be painful to replace them, it will take years to hire some…

Quick check of the bio reveals his alternative is Svelte. Weird since the usual Svelte argument is that it's so simple anyone can pick it up and be effective the next day - unlike bloated old React where each team needs an elite React hooks whisperer to navigate the hundreds of footguns required to correctly render a list without tearing under React Suspense.

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#23

Post by Draiken »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #14

Feels a lot like a lengthier, polemical way of saying that frameworks become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily. But this is bad because businesses benefit or something. None of the ideas here stand up to scrutiny. For example, Angular with its more opinionated design and framework approach was a much better choice for regularizing developer effort and making devs fungible. But by all…

> become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily

Nope. Because they allow people to be easily replaced. Nothing to do with how easy or good the framework is. That's the whole point of the article.

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#24

Post by erik_seaberg »

Market rates reached pretty unsustainable levels, so it's hard to justify complaining when competition (usually not arbitrage by resellers) brings them down. I would love to see a higher bar for quality, but I think that has to start with end users saying no.

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#26

Post by xboxnolifes »

Draiken wrote: post #23
CipherThrowaway wrote: post #14

Feels a lot like a lengthier, polemical way of saying that frameworks become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily. But this is bad because businesses benefit or something. None of the ideas here stand up to scrutiny. For example, Angular with its more opinionated design and framework approach was a much better choice for regularizing developer effort and making devs fungible. But by all…

> become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily Nope. Because they allow people to be easily replaced. Nothing to do with how easy or good the framework is. That's the whole point of the article.

Is that not one and the ame?

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#27

Post by pdonis »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #26
Draiken wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become popular because they allow more people to do more stuff more easily Nope. Because they allow people to be easily replaced. Nothing to do with how easy or good the framework is. That's the whole point of the article.

Is that not one and the ame?

No. The developer's interests (able to do more stuff more easily) and management's interests (making developers commodities instead of highly skilled workers) are emphatically not the same; that's a major part of the article's point. (Unless you're a developer that owns your own company so you are management--which is not the situation the article is talking about.)

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#28

Post by pdonis »

tevon wrote: post #13

This is wild. And somehow at the end of this he comes to the conclusion that software engineers need a union? We're on of the highest paid, most flexible professions ever. It seems like the thing missing here is the simple fact that engineers DO have significant bargaining power already, and have CHOSEN to use standardized solutions because they are good, well supported, and have wonderful communities of helpful peop…

> engineers DO have significant bargaining power already, and have CHOSEN to use standardized solutions because they are good, well supported, and have wonderful communities of helpful people

How much is this actually true, though? It's probably true in small companies where the engineers might also be the technical managers. But is it true in a large company where management might have little or no technical expertise at all, but still insist on making technical decisions?

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#29

Post by pdonis »

duxup wrote: post #17
tevon wrote: post #13

This is wild. And somehow at the end of this he comes to the conclusion that software engineers need a union? We're on of the highest paid, most flexible professions ever. It seems like the thing missing here is the simple fact that engineers DO have significant bargaining power already, and have CHOSEN to use standardized solutions because they are good, well supported, and have wonderful communities of helpful peop…

I don't even know what the writer thinks a union is going to do. "No react, that's too much labour arbitrage!" ?

> I don't even know what the writer thinks a union is going to do.

As I read it, the writer thinks that a union can somehow bargain with management to get different technical tools adopted that will not commoditize developers.

I don't agree with him because the incentives pushing management to commoditize developers are real business incentives. Management doesn't care about technical quality per se; it only cares about technical quality that makes a difference in how much customers will pay. And customers don't care what technologies you use for your app under the hood; they only care about whether it does what they want. If management can make the app do what customers want using interns pulling code from ChatGPT and tweaking it until it stops crashing, at a fraction of the cost of actual expert software developers, that's what management will do.

Developers having a union doesn't change any of that, and if the union succeeds in keeping management in that particular company from using interns and ChatGPT, that just means that company will be out-competed in the market by some other company that doesn't have a developers' union and can give the customer a lower price. The only way for developers to break that cycle is to take on the business risk themselves and start their own developer-owned company that succeeds in the market by leveraging the developers' expertise to provide cheaper solutions to the customers' needs.

Re: The labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity

#30

Post by cnelsenmilt »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #2

This is fascinating from the perspective of a strong inclination to agree with the general political thesis—that business benefits from commoditization or labor—and a strong disinclination to agree with the attribution of it to trends in software preferences. For instance, I don’t think the component model in UI frameworks is popular because it commoditizes UI developers, but rather because professional developers se…

This largely mirrors my thought. I was unpersuaded that non-technical management grasps the technical aspects well enough to leverage them as described.
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