[efields]

Let's assume the point of technology is to automate routine labor and software engineers have been hard at work automating routine labor for 50ish years. Why are we still hiring software engineers? Shouldn't 50 years be enough time to automate most of what needs to get done in an office?

What happened during that time is that the gemini twins of technology and bureaucracy continued to layer their shit on top of each other, creating more problems in need of more solutions with more administration to satisfy with each new layer.

The software engineer is one example of a high paying bullshit jobs. No really. As much as you love the job of SWE it is a bullshit job. The problem you are solving is mostly in the hands of gravity, local politics, insane financial machinery, the hubris of a few powerful people. It doesn't mean you can't get good at your job and find it fulfilling along with the other aspects of your life. This is the architecture of your reality and you've basically mastered it, not unlike a level 60 MMO player. Good job!

Most people who read this website are doing bullshit jobs.

That's why, above all else, probably the most important thing you can do is look outside what you do for a living and do some good in the world.

[techdmn]

I don't understand this comment. If you picture a company with a few 100MM dollars in sales per year, that manufactures or retails physical products, without software how many people work in Accounting? Inventory control? Do you have paper order records, that you use to process returns? Switching to electronic systems for these and many other areas has resulted in huge efficiencies of labor (not always to the benefit of employees, I should be clear). Obviously not all change in hardware and software over the last 50 years has been improvement, and certainly some of the difficulty in these areas is due to inefficient policy (either by the business or by government), but claiming that the work should be complete seems to vastly underestimate the complexity of the problems being addressed - whether by software or through more manual solutions.

[PragmaticPulp]

> The software engineer is one example of a high paying bullshit jobs.

Of course, because software has never been useful to anyone.

[satisfice]

This argument holds no water at all. You've modeled the situation incorrectly.

The shape of labor is not the same, today, as it was 50 years ago, and the project of technology is not to automate things we were doing 50 years ago. Let's see. 50 years ago my family had a black and white television and a rotary phone. Has telecommunications and media changed at all in the last 50 years which might have created not just new work but dozens and dozens of new industries? Why, yes. Yes that has happened.

You must be pretty sad that the Unabomber is dead, because, like him, you don't see the value of new technology. Okay, that's fine. But it seems like your arugment falls apart for anyone who does appreciate the value of DNA testing, MRI scans (which identified my wife's life threatening condition), the Davinci robotic surgery system (which saved my wife's life), etc.

We are having this conversation on Hacker News. If you read Hacker News, then you are already undermining your back-to-nature street cred, pal.

Anyway, I've never been on a bullshit project. And the reason we hire engineers is because important work needs to be done. For instance, I'm working on a system that brings medical care to impoverished people in the middle of nowhere. No bullshit there. Another client is an insurance software company. You don't think people need insurance? You don't want them to be able to buy it online because "50 years ago" it was perfectly acceptable to use a telephone to call an insurance broker? Another client creates test tools. You think testing software is bullshit?

You have a fluid rhetorical style that speaks on some cleverness. Imagine if you put that cleverness to work on something other than bullshiting about this topic!

[efields]

I appreciate the compliment at the end. I like to deploy it especially when I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t want the replies to take me too seriously, but I gotta work on that obv.

The bullshit is not in the fact that we use a web form to buy insurance instead of a rotary phone or telegram or passenger pigeon (RIP), it’s that such a construct exists as insurance. Humans should just be making food, clothing and shelter and spending the rest of the time dancing and making babies.

[satisfice]

Okay, this might sound sarcastic or something, but I'm perfectly serious: thank you for making your position clear. There's a lot to be said for living like the First Peoples of Earth, eschewing technology. If humans hadn't adopted city living and other trappings of civilization there would be no global warming and we would have a world population of a couple hundred million.

Of course, that chariot has already left the barn, along with the plow, roads, underfloor heating, glassware, steel, explosives, medicine, computers, networks, etc., etc.

Relative to life as a Serengetti hunter, most of modernity is bullshit. But none of us come from that point of reference. My point of reference tonight is that I'm writing code to automatically create all combinations of symptoms to help me brute force test a system that diagnoses illnesses. Relative to the fact that we want to release next week and we want it to work, this testing needs to be done and so this code needs to be written.

[uzerfcwn]

Office labor is indeed 95% automated. Companies used to hire armies of human accountants and calculators, most of whom are now laid off because Excel does it better. The industry is currently going further and automating customer service, copywriters and other human jobs too.

Since then, most SWEs doing the automation have moved on to other jobs too, such as the gaming industry. Naturally, offices still need a couple of SWEs to adapt software to changing requirements, but only a fraction of the peak.