Automation a bigger deal than offshoring?

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In some sense I.T. has been about this

I entered software development because I loved it. I trained for it in school and all. There came a point, probably after working in the field for more than a year, when I realized that what I was engaged in was forcing people either out of jobs they held, or to change careers. That was a major revelation that I didn't expect when I first became inclined to train for the field.

Here's how it happened. I got a job as a software developer at a small company that created solutions for a particular industry. Over time I came to realize what the full solution was. It kept track of tasks done by workers in an industrial repair yard, and their costs, and it produced reports. I thought, "Okay. So this is what we're doing. Cool." It was later, after talking to some of our customer reps. that I realized that before they bought our system, they used to have their field workers fill out the same information on standard paper forms. Those forms were turned in at the end of their shift. Then the forms were turned over to data entry people who would key in what the field workers had written/marked on the forms, and then their mainframe would process the information. I realized then and there that our system was "cutting out the middle workers": the data entry folks. The data entry essentially got shifted to the the field workers. Their entries, the ones they used to make on paper, got transmitted to our server, which did some processing, and then submitted it directly to their mainframe.

I had experienced joblessness upon leaving college, earlier in the decade. Back then I did some political activism to try to "bring the jobs back to the U.S.A." In that moment of realization, on the job, I realized the very thing I loved to do was contributing to the force that I once protested. It didn't necessarily mean that the data entry people were left out to dry. They *could* train for something else, though I'd be hard pressed to say for what. All I could think was I hoped they found something else that would pay decently, and be something they enjoyed.

I think I've always appreciated efficiency. I like seeing others be more productive, as I like being more productive myself. Not in the sense of having more work than one can handle, but being able to get work done more easily. There is a flipside to this. People being more efficient can mean that there just isn't work for others to do in a particular area, as there used to be.

I think the most distressing part of these labor shifts is not that people need to retrain for new skills, it's that people feel that work that fits their natural competency is being taken away from them, and the work that takes its place does not fit their natural competency. So even if they were to be retrained, they might just be awful at it, simply because they lack some fundamental qualities that are necessary for them to be good at it.

Posted by: Mark Miller   Posted on: 03/12/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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