That said, the current situation is much better than the sweat shops and complete disregard for safety that existed here 100 years ago, and still exists in most of the world. Soon white collar jobs will outnumber blue collar jobs in this country. As this happens, and the free media of the Internet allows anyone to sell their personal products to the world, we have the ability to move the power currently concentrated in large companies to smaller, sometimes individual, companies. No longer must we wait for ethics and power to co-exist happily. When workers can manage themselves to success, companies will continue to be forced to clean up their act, or perish.

“Free Agent Nation” is a good read on this trend here in the United States. Micro-loans in devoting nations are having a significant effect there as well. As engineers it is likely that we can take the manure of our employers disregard and turn into a crop full of exciting change and products for the future. I think it is a pretty neat time to be an engineer in this country because of this. I plan to write more in some coming posts.

Thank you for your comment!
John

Great article, I have to add that nowadays loyalty is a one-way street when it comes to the employer. They can fire you at any moment, without any reason and still expect 100% loyalty from you. The problem is that during these difficult times they have the upper hand and they know it. They know if we don’t like the crap they give us we can’t go anywhere else due to the job market (buyers market) and we have to stick with it and if we are brave enough and decide to leave they know we can be easily replaced by someone in India or Shanghai for about half what we cost.
The other side of the coin is the apparent and obvious “greed” of those running corporate America today, it used to be that corporations used to cater to all “stake holders” and this included employees, customers, stockholders, the communities where they operated, but today they only cater to the “stock holders”, the CEO and executive council bonuses.

David tweeted this a while back:

Control = integrating w/reality w/directed intention (vs. attempting to manipulate what’s bigger than you).

Kinda interesting and useful…

Thank you for your comments!

Best,
John

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I have to agree. And the last book I read Stumbling on Happiness had a similar issue. My take was the books were interested in proving an unintuitive point rather than solving the identified issues so much. As an individual it leaves me hanging. “So I was born on Aug. 30th, do I jump off a cliff or join Toastmasters to get over my grade school failures.”

,John

There is no doubt that western society views its success as the pinnacle of achievement. This, in my opinion, is a human flaw which all societies in ascendancy seem to fall into. I think you are especially correct to point out that the world is fundamentally productive enough to offer basic services to all, yet that does not occur.

However, as a capitalist, my assessment is that entitlement is unproductive. The same lazy folks that claim themselves superior when in economic rise are the folks that would rarely show up to work if not compelled to. Unfortunately centrally organized economies do a lot of “compelling” of the hired help. I do not agree, that Egypt, Cuba, the Aztecs and China are examples of societies I would want to be a part of. Their totalitarian structure has not only organized their economies, but also large scale slavery, human sacrifice, imprisonment and torture etc.

You may jump to claim the United States has recently jumped on such a bandwagon. But I will not agree. I think you’re points are important. Especially when thinking about ideal society and economics. But as a practical thinker, I fear entitlement brings out the worst in us humans.

Thank you again for the comments. I feel enriched for you having made them. No doubt I will brood on them in the future as well.

Regards,
John

I think most geeks and euro centric thinking folk on our planet are so much within the box of this culture that we really do think that we live in the epitome of humanity, because we can use hand gestures to resize photos on the iphone. Antibiotics and amazing inventions in all fields of science and technology many of which will long outlast the creations of this civilization have flourished without capitalist, market economics and so called unmanaged economic structures for thousands of years. The wonders of Egypt, Central America and Asia were not built nor financed with any economic structure that is related to the mess we have been deceived into participating within today. The infrastructure, the technology, the science and resource development and management was incredible, and done without a substantial portion of the population disenfranchised no matter what stereotypes have been fostered on us by Hollywood movies. Communist nations did not really “fail”. Managed economies are the most successful on this planet whilst free market capitalist countries like Haiti, Pakistan, and many many others are the poorest and most desperate of nations and a font of human misery.
Cuba in comparison is the light of the Caribbean, compare its vital statistics and social, artistic, and technological achievements to, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic , etc etc and the clouding fog of unfair comparisons fades quickly. With regards to literacy, infant mortality, crime and percentage of population imprisoned it bests the USA.

What the inter net, automation technology, and present day micro processor technology is showing us is the fact that there really are no scarcities. Little by little the real value of things we have to pay for should be in a spiral of deflation. Labour being chief amoung them.
There really is no need for everyone to work. In the 30’s, 40% of American families toiled on farms. Growing food doesn’t require that labour today as that work has been devalued. Now we have had to create other things for people to “do”. The rich who are alarmed by the implications of this have created the myth of scarcities and the need to manage them. In this fashion they have created a planned economy, planned by them for their benefit . Where in they manage the scarcities (read “jobs” or access to resources), which is in effect your’s and mine own access to an ability to partake of the bounty. They do this not with ideals of efficiency, otherwise , why is it that hundreds of millions of dollars are “spent” to dig gold up from a hole in the ground and then promptly seal it up in another hole in the ground, whilst those that manage this shell game, spin the “ownership wheel of fortune” ? They do it to control and maintain their access as well as their power. By causing a “scarcity in access to resources that are abundant and virual costless, a docile population becomes enslaved in this game of economic three card monty…Open source software , both within and without the computer science realm is the threat to this lie. It is the ultimate communist utopia.

Craigslist offers free local classified ads to basically anyone. If you are a recruiter or someone advertising for a job position, you will need to pay Craigslist. Since recruiters typically make 8% on the hire, Craigslist is just subsidizing everyone else’s ads with part of recruiter profits.

The classified ad industry has been dominated by newspapers for years. They printed, delivered and made newspapers useful, so to get access to their readers, you had to pay the paper. Basically the high cost of publishing created scarcity, and that made the price higher.

Now the Internet has a distribution model that is darn near free. In other words, Craigslist can publish ads for the whole country for .00001% of the cost of the newspaper establishment. Basically the scarcity of classified ads has been abolished. Anyone can get as many ads as they want for free.

The result is that the large number of workers in the printed classified ad industry and in newspapers distribution in general are going to loose their jobs, or make less doing it. But the economy as a whole is more efficient since now lots of people can buy and sell stuff they wouldn’t normally be able to online.

My point about inventions like electricity, light bulbs, antibiotics and airplanes is that technological progress produces more technological progress through this process of the economy becoming more efficient. Standard of living is also raised. If you look at the most liberal (unmanaged) economies, those countries are the most inventive, productive and have the highest standards of living.

To object to the abolition of scarcity using technology is to be a Luddite. Yes, there is a human cost to efficiency. However planned, communist, economies gave everyone equal access, but are so inefficient that it hardly mattered, everyone starved. Luddites were killed and sent to prison colonies. That is an abomination. Loosing one’s job in a wonderful country such as this is not like being executed. Newspaper workers will need to get new jobs. We should support their efforts to do so, and I hope the newspapers would try too.

My employer has let me go. I will have to get a new job. It isn’t easy. However, no one cries when the economy or an industry blooms and creates jobs, they just cry when it shrinks. We need to be human and help when an industry shrinks, but not give in to the temptation to artificially support it, except to support human needs. For instance, allowing Detroit auto makers to fail would likely be a human disaster for our country.

At the same time, no-one is better off with the government supporting businesses that can’t make money. Those auto companies, airlines, banks etc. who are not making money will have to stand on their feet, *soon*. It will be rough for a lot more people before this is over. If we get inventive and efficient, we can get back on our horse and ride it. The Luddites path is not the way we want to go….

I never saw Local Hero until recently. It was always on my list to see, but alas never made it to the top. I had thought just last night of letting you know I finally saw it. The movie seems somehow related. It seems that the hero is on the wrong side of this principal.

I can hear the soundtrack perfectly in my head…the sad guitar describes what it is to miss the gift of a lifetime because it arrived in the wrong package, place, time, whatever…and wasn’t recognized for what it was.

Cheers,
John

Thank you for you comments. I’ll be reading your blog going forward. It looks like an interesting site.

Cheers,
John

One should drive not for excitement, but rather for contentment. This does not mean to give up, it means to judiciously pick things of substance to go after which will result in contentment as opposed to running at the exciting which leaves a man empty at the end of the day.

BTW… My wife is a huge Ralph Marston fan too…

I think your first point is very valid. Developers in IT environments need to be very astute about limiting what they do to precisely use resources. I.e. implementing as fast-followers, or people re-implementing an idea that has already been developed and proven elsewhere. IT is very cost sensitive and wants a deterministic planning/execution model.

However, I think you may have lost me after that. Relating software architecture, software complexity, agility and revenue premium seems like a bunch of buzzwords. Can you flesh this out a bit for those of us outside the management consulting world?

Cheers,
John

But, it can be reframed as minimizing the work done by fast followers, so the duration of one’s revenue premium is minimized. This reframing points out the problem with Agile in a software vendor’s environment.

A layered architecture with slower more complex layers enable the lengthening of the revenue premium period in a vendor’s Agile environment.