[queenkjuul]

Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.

I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

[tptacek]

Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.

I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.

[phil21]

> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away.

I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.

I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.

I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.

This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.

Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.

I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.

[queenkjuul]

It's perfectly possible for software to enable people to do things they couldn't do before without putting anyone out of work. I'm sorry you're struggling to imagine such a thing.

[phil21]

As opposed to hiring someone to do it? Or rather, that software not competing with the wider market as a whole? Those areas are exceedingly small in the web-dev space. Or even technology as a whole.

I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.

My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.

Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.

There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.

As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.

As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.

[queenkjuul]

An example:

Retail investors largely didn't exist. Digital retail trading platforms greatly expanded the pool of retail traders, which actually increases the demand for brokers (as in, people trained for the purpose of facilitating financial transactions). Nobody using Robinhood would have hired a broker. Now, thousands of such people work servicing their accounts.

I have no love to for finance industry, much less fintech; i would accept practically any argument that the finance sector as a whole, or retail trading as an idea, is a bad thing for working class people. But i don't see how creating a whole new market for people that didn't previously exist, and which increases overall demand for the specific specialized labor in question, has removed jobs from the pool in aggregate.

I don't think this applies for example with "well former shop clerks are now Amazon delivery drivers" -- that may well be true (or less than true) but still materially worse for everyone involved, etc.

I just don't accept, as axiom, that every every single technology has had an exclusively negative effect on overall employment prospects.

For clarity, I'm very much a socialist, i have no issue with the idea fundamentally that technology in the hands of capitalists is detrimental to the working class writ large in basically all cases. I just take umbrage with the assumption that it's impossible to work in tech without facilitating such things. Much of my work, I'm happy to say, has been about helping people do their jobs better; it hasn't been directed at making them do more in less time, reduce headcount, or some abstract efficiency. It's been to help people do the jobs they already have to do, more effectively. A job a person still has to do, but can be done less stressfully with help from technology.

I wish every thing I've ever touched was such, admittedly it isn't. But i think there's lots of places where that might still be true: aircraft engineers? Pilots? (Fewer trains i guess but that's mostly a US phenomenon). There are administrative jobs working systems that couldn't exist without "automation" as in they would not have existed before the computer created the system.

Idk. I can be swayed, i just get sick of this implication that people working for a living have influence over their employers. They don't, by design, except for managers maybe (but I'm not and never will be one of those, either)